Articles by Doug Nienhuis
I am a Canadian, and I am currently traveling through Asia with a touring bicycle. These are stories and pictures from my trip.
Thoughts from a 7-11 in Cebu
It’s 7 in the morning and I’m sitting at one of many neighborhood 7-11’s in Cebu City. It’s like I’m back in Taiwan. But not really. In fact, being at a 7-11 tends to heighten some local characteristics, as I can compare it to the 7-11s in Taiwan. As you can probably guess, in every comparison, the Filipino version comes up short.
My biggest complaint (as …
Double Vision and a Trip to the Hospital
Seemingly out of nowhere, I’ve started to have trouble with my eyes. It was probably a gradual process that I just didn’t notice, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I woke up one morning and suddenly couldn’t see very well. The problem was mainly in my left eye, where I was experiencing double vision or ghost images. It was pretty bad and …
Fire Sweeps Through Neighborhood in Cebu City
A fire broke out on Tuesday evening (March 18, 2014) in a tightly-packed residential area in Barangay Lorega in Cebu City in the Philippines. According to newspaper reports, 500 homes were destroyed, leaving as many as 7,000 people homeless. Not surprisingly, despite staying just a few blocks from this area, I was completely unaware of the calamity until a couple of days later. Disasters seem …
“WordPress Popular Posts” Plugin Returning Unrealistically High Numbers
(Note: I found a solution to this problem. Skip to the update at the bottom of this post to see what I did to fix it.)
A long time ago, I installed the plugin WordPress Popular Posts on this blog. Then I totally forgot it was there. But over the last few days, I’ve been going over the tech side of this blog (with varying rates …
Time to Rant: WordPress
In my WordPress theme, there is a Widget that allows me to put posts from certain categories into the sidebar. I decided I had a use for this widget, and I installed it. The result? The darn thing doesn’t work properly. Of course it doesn’t. Nothing I do ever seems to work when it comes to WordPress.
The intriguing and maddening aspect to this trend is …
“Hosting Account Suspended” and Other Tech Troubles
Lesson learned: When downloading podcasts in an Internet café, save the downloads directly to a memory card or flash drive. Otherwise – disaster.
Yesterday morning, I spent three hours in an Internet café in Cebu updating my favorite podcasts. I saved the files to the computer’s desktop, intending to copy them all to my MP3 player when I was finished. Unfortunately, the computer crashed. In the …
Syncing Google Chrome with My Google Account
Should I sync up the Google Chrome browser with my Google account?
Every time I log in to my Google account, I am asked to do this. One advantage is that I would only have to sign in once to have access to all the Google services: Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, Google+, and all the others. Another advantage is to have my bookmarks follow me from …
Custom Item Limit in WordPress Menu
As anyone who knows me is aware, I encounter a lot of computer problems in my day-to-day life. Things rarely seem to work out, and no matter how much time and effort I put in to mastering WordPress and WordPress-related things, I never seem to learn anything helpful. It’s as if my brain has reached a technical memory limit. It simply refuses to process or …