Sundry misery...

Nearly three weeks ago I had a new crown put on a tooth. The idea was to close a gap the old crown had left; but the old one was otherwise functional. In removing the old crown, the dentist found decay (I'm still trying to figure how you get decay under a crown). In removing that, he exposed the pulp of the tooth. He did a repair, and fitted the crown (this was the all-in-one clever milling machine process - which turned out to take over two hours!). He sent me home with pain pills and said it should get better in a week. Well it did improve, and by last Friday I was hoping it would settle down completely. Then Saturday night, it started to get sore... By Sunday evening, the pain was raging, and the pain pills weren't effective. I saw the dentist first thing yesterday, and he suggested a root canal would be needed; which the endodontist endorsed this morning. I have a root canal booked for 10:15 tomorrow. Not naturally suspicious, I do wonder how I went from a functional (if gappy) crown to a root canal... did the dentist screw up when he removed the old one? No way to tell, and I can't go back - I have to stop the pain, and the root canal is now the only option.

Meanwhile, on Friday, our service provider for the IAGSDC and Bradley Bell websites decided to 'increase security' by turning off some PHP options. It apparently didn't occur to anyone that these functions (which are no longer considered safe) might actually be USED by some of their customers. Having figured out the problem, I got them to reverse the change 'temporarily' to allow me time to re-engineer well over 100 PHP scripts. Only at midnight on Saturday, some automatic script re-implemented the changes at their end, and the IAGSDC site crashed - again. My only option early Sunday morning was to take the whole site down, search for the affected scripts, amend them, retest them and republish.

The fact is, the fix isn't difficult, but finding the affected parts of the scripts and re-testing them (with multiple branches in the validation code for most of them) was detailed and time-consuming; and I had a raging toothache. I don't argue with the company's decision to implement the change either; I knew it needed doing, but it wasn't on my list for last Sunday! This is the THIRD time the company (Servernet) have done this in as many years. I'd change to another provider, but moving not only the Bradley Bell and IAGSDC sites, but all the club sites we host, is daunting. And generally they are reliable and responsive to technical issues.

I'm still not sure I got every instance of the problem; but I'm pretty confident that the Events Management and Personal Profile sections are now working properly.

And the beat goes on...