This has been quite a day. It's just your luck that you kind, warm, loving, and oh-so-good-looking audience get to hear about it. Aren't you the lucky ones.

• This morning I decided it was time to try to update the blog to the newest version of Wordpress. Actually, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the newest version was available via Fantastico, so I decided to bite the bullet and update all of the Wordpress blogs I run. The first (not this blog) ran fine, but when it came time to do my blog, the update script hung for a long time. Being the impatient sort, I killed the process, and tried to restart it. Unfortunately, I tried this in the morning hours before work (something I've regretted every time I do it, but who am I to stand in the way of making the same mistakes repeatedly), so I didn't have time to diagnose why I was getting all sorts of PHP errors the next go-around. I thought I had screwed something up royally. More later.
• Coincidentally, my e-mail to this site stopped working as well. Wondering if it might have been related to the instance of mongrel_rails I have running for tracks suddenly going tits-up, I asked JoDee to restart Lister (my main machine) to try to restart the mail. It didn't help. More on this later.
• Did I mention it took me a whole two-and-a-half hours to drive home today through the snow? Oh, I guess not. Well, seems as good a time as any. Yes, it took me two-and-a-half hours to drive home from work. One of the annoyances I found was the idiots who decided that because we weren't moving fast enough (because we were stopped solid for about ten minutes), they would sound their horns. That was so wonderful of them to add their unique notification of their annoyance of the situation, as though nobody else would be annoyed at being stopped for no reason.
• I don't know if you remember when I ran EZ Scrobbler. Heck, I don't even remember when the last time I had it enabled. That doesn't mean, though, that it didn't create a table OVER 300MB IN SIZE FOR CACHE! WTF?!?!?! So, the reason things weren't working was because Fantastico was dutifully trying to save my bacon by backing up my database, but couldn't finish because it was running into quota limits for my account. Coincidentally, it also caused my e-mail to not be delivered, and didn't allow the PHP scripts to run. I logged onto my account and checked my files. I couldn't believe there was a large SQL file in my directory. So, after deleting those tables, suddenly things started working again. Why this stupid plugin was taking up so much space, and why it couldn't clear out the table after a while is is beyond me.

So, there you have it... because of some stupid coding decisions by a plugin author combined with an upgrade on a quota-restriced server, my e-mail for the day is now trickling in as servers retry sending to me.

(Oh, and the author is aware of the bug: "There is a known bug with this software on certain MySQL installations where the cache table does not get cleared. This can easily cause your WordPress database to balloon in size (one user has reported 3G over the course of a few years.) As it is, I do not have time to maintain this, any longer." Brillant).