Categories
life

Personal Challenges

We had a neighborhood party last Saturday and as we were driving home we got talking with the kids about one of our neighbors and his son who is autistic. As we explained some basics about autism we did so in the context of the fact that everybody has different challenges in life, that the challenges we face may change at different periods of our lives, and that autism is one of those challenges that some people have to deal with.

This got the kids talking about their individual challenges and then they started asking Laura and I what our challenges were right now. When they asked me what my life challenge was right now I told them that my challenge right now is that my life is not always perfect, that sometimes things do not go as smoothly as I might wish.

As I thought about it, that’s a pretty good challenge to have (and I’m sure it can’t last forever). Everything in my life is going pretty well right now. It’s not that I’m in total control and the world bends to my will, but when things do not go as planned there are no devastating consequences. I do not get distraught when something I want remains out of reach because nothing that I need has been denied me, and nothing that I want right now is time sensitive so I can afford to wait when necessary.

Categories
life technology

WordPress, the OpenID Plugin, and Blogger Comments

I’m a fan of the idea of OpenID which is why I use the OpenID plugin accept OpenID authentication for comments on this site and others that I run. I am under no illusions that it serves as an anti-spam measure which is why OpenID authenticated comments undergo all the same spam filtering that any other comment receives. One of the reasons that I use the OpenID plugin is that it allows me to use my blog as an OpenID identity server so I can use my own domain to authenticate me on other sites that accept OpenID – including (especially) Blogger. When I leave comments I  like to be able to leave general comments that are authenticated by this site and have political comments authenticated by my political blog, Pursuit of Liberty (so that the comments point back to the most applicable site for the content of the comment). That worked for quite a while, but a few weeks ago I began getting an error when trying to use my OpenID’s on Blogger blogs.

I did a lot of searching but got no answers for the bug (I would leave the bug here so that others can find it, but Google changed the error code in that time to read “Your OpenID could not be verified”). Eventually I figured out that it was only happening when trying to leave comments authenticated through Pursuit of Liberty, but since the setup there is identical to the setup here that was not very helpful. Finally today I figured out the solution – I was authenticating through www.davidjmiller.org and pursuit-of-liberty.com – both are set up as www.{domain-name} and Google apparently decided to get strict on their authentication. When I leave comments from www.pursuit-of-liberty.com it worked fine. If anyone else finds this problem with Blogger and the OpenID plugin just remember to authenticate with or without the “www.” depending on how your site is set up (in other words make it match exactly).