Today, April 24th, is a day of remembrance for the 1.5 million lives lost during the Armenian Genocide, which took place beginning April 24, 1915. Please take a moment to remember…

Previously, I wrote a series of posts on the topic that you can see here:

Part 1 – The Armenian Genocide
Part 2 – What Transpired
Part 3 – Recognition of the Armenian Genocide
Part 4 – A Survivor’s Account of the Armenian Genocide – My Great Grandmother.

For additional information on the Armenian Genocide check out these sites:

• The Armenian National Institute – The Armenian Genocide
• Armenian Genocide Information and Recognition

Thank you for taking a moment to remember.

I’ve been neglecting the blog for many months now, but to start things up again, I’d like to start with a new theme.  Keep an eye out. 

I’m always hearing from people about how cruise lines are very good about accommodating food allergies.  What about food allergies which require consumption of organic foods, such as those people who cannot have the compounds in preservatives and pesticides?  Well, turns out the cruise lines will not accommodate these people.  I contacted Carnival, Royal Carribean (RCCL), Disney Cruise lines, and a couple others and got the same answer, “we cannot accommodate organic foods.” 

So, not only are they irresponsible in terms of caring for those with particular food allergies, but in addition these cruise lines are clearly very much not on board with the organic movement. 

They’ve lost my business, have they lost yours?

I think for the first time in years I have no actual Halloween related plans this Halloween weekend.  Pretty odd.  I will, however, be intently watching the USC v. Stanford game. 

In more professional related news, I’m keeping an eye on the VS Tech v. Twitter case.  Wondering how it will impact Twitter, it at all… (read more about it here).

Well I might just consider this
If you don’t let me down
If you can keep me happy
Well you can stick around
Now I don’t care for sycofants
They drive me round the bend
But if you can’t control yourself
Then let’s just keep good friends

I just experienced my first WordPress update error. I have to say, I was a little freaked out.
I tried to auto update 5 of my plugins. The update page came back and said there was an error, when I tried to navigate to the updates page to try it again the page went blank and I got this lovely message:
“Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

This message appeared on any page associated with the admin/dashboard area. I believe some refer to this as the website being stuck in maintenance mode. Luckily the front end of my blog/website was still running fine.

Here is how I fixed it:

1. Logged into my blogs root folder via ftp
2. Opened my wp-content folder which houses the plugins folder. 
3. Renamed plugins to plugins.old
4. Made a new folder called plugin

Tada! Everything works again. Now you can either reinstall all your plugins or do what I did. I deleted the plugins directory, renamed plugins.old to plugins and tried that. I was able to get back into my admin area and just had to manually update those plugins that were not updated and probably caused the error to begin with.

Have you ever been browsing on your phone and you come across the warning/error message “This content is not available on mobile devices”? It might be a picture, a website, a file, or a youtube video.
This annoys me. You have provided the content on the internet, what do you care what device I’m using to view it? This is equivalent to telling me I can only read my newspaper in my kitchen, not my bedroom, and definitely not in the office. That would be absurd right? Because once you have te newspaper you should be able to read it anywhere, right?
Well, this is absurd. Content on the internet should not be censored this way. I thought it was the information highway, free exchange of information, etc. If this was the case, let me view what you have already made available online using any web capable electronic I own.
Internet content providers should not be able to block phones, googleTV, netbooks, laptops, tablets, or whatever else may be invented in the future.
I understand that some content providers are trying to protect their content for misuse, however, a different way of implementing that has to be found. A better method.

I’m serious… take the stairs.
I constantly hear that 1) we should be saving energy, and 2) we should be more active to improve our health. Well, I have a pretty easy solution, take the stairs rather than the elevator. You get where you want to go, avoid using the elevator (and associated energy usage), and get in a little exercise.

It seems simple but so many buildings, in LA at least, are built so that it is actually inconvenient to use the stairs. I’m not sure why those who design and build these structures construct layouts which discourage the use of stairs, but it is a shame. Running errands recently, I was in a 6 story building which also had a basement. I needed to get to the basement and planned to take the stairs, especially after I noticed the crowd at the elevator bank. Turns out the stairwells are way in the back of the building, totally out of the weigh. This definitely discourages people from taking the stairs.

Anyway, take the stairs. If you want to figure out exactly how many extra calories you’re burning check out this website.

I saw Horrible Bosses tonight. After hearing how funny it was from my friends, I was worried I would be disappointed. Not the case. It was hilarious. The jokes were funny and the terrible bosses made me laugh about one of my own ex-bosses.

It was worth the watch, check it out.

I upgraded my social bookmarking plugin from Sociable to Share This! I think it looks sleeker and should be easier to use. At least I hope.

I was really hoping they had the google+ button already but it looks like you need to do that manually. You can see the instructions here.