Catching up with the Koto at the 2013 Calgary Omatsuri

The koto is a traditional Japanese instrument. This stringed instrument actually came originally from China. At the 2013 Calgary Japanese Festival,  Mizue Asai-Kaufmann and Kaori Akiyama performed several numbers after the short drizzle:

I had an opportunity to chat with them afterwards about learning to play the koto. How interesting that they both learned the koto at the same age!

Midnight Taiko Drummers at the Calgary Japanese Festival

The Midnight Taiko Drummers are always a treat to listen to. I've heard them perform at Otafest as well as at the Calgary Japanese Festival. I didn't realize until I spoke with Jenny Zhao that taiko drumming is a relatively young art:

And here's their performance clips:

Midnight Taiko website

History of the Taiko

Calgary Japanese Festival

Interview with Calgary Omatsuri Talent Show Performers

Minna-san, gomennasai! All of my sites were down for the week because of a glitch with my WordPress 3.6 upgrade (wasn't playing nicely with WP MU and my primary WP theme). At last, here is my interview with Colton and Bryan from the Calgary Omatsuri:

Playing a Game of Patience with WordPress Multisite

Last week, I finally got around to upgrading my WordPress framework to version 3.6. I dutifully disabled my plug-ins, backed up my main site and all seven blogs and then clicked on the "Upgrade Now" link. That's when ALL sites broke. For a while, I couldn't even get in to the administrative panel. All I got was a 500 internal server error message. The support team at Tera-Byte (my webhost provider) finagled it so I could get back in. They also informed me that my WordPress theme was broken. Great.

I thought I had kept up with updating all my WP themes. I thought it would be as simple as all the previous WP framework upgrades. I thought that I was doing all right with managing all my sites on WordPress Multisite.

How wrong I was.

My first instinct was to drop everything that I was doing to rectify this - pull an all-nighter or two if need be. Rewind to a few years ago, and I would have.

However, one look at the calendar that fateful day (September 5), told me that I only had three days remaining to prepare for the teaching year. Writing, designing and printing handouts, shopping, planning and cleaning took precedence.

I had to put ALL sites into Maintenance Mode for one week. In a world where articles are shared, reviews are searched and tweets are sent by the second, every minute that you're offline is costly. Google kept sending me messages to say that the Googlebots couldn't access my site. Page rank probably dropped a bit. Unless you had my affiliate links bookmarked, you couldn't shop for sheet music or geeky cool items.

Maintenance Mode was necessary though. I needed the time to research and troubleshoot. Believe me, I needed that time. I couldn't dedicate the time to repairing my websites until I was done teaching for the night.  However, because of all the research and digging I had to do - on an already fatigued brain - I could only do so much each night.

I had to exercise patience. I had to continually remind myself that so long as the social networks were all working, Musespeak™ was still busy online through my YouTube, Soundcloud, LinkedIn, Flickr, Google+ and FB business Pages.

There were some design issues I wanted to improve upon on the main site. That meant playing around with those hex colour codes. Then, I had to research a calendar plugin use. That's been on my To Do List for months.

That went fairly well. Then, WordPress told me that it was time to upgrade to version 3.6.1. That went smoothly, until I realized that my media files on all blogs contained broken links after the upgrade. It wasn't until last last night (or early this morning), that I found the solution (if in doubt, replace the .htaccess file).

I also wanted to explore other premium WordPress themes and plug-ins that would perhaps be more compatible with WP MU. All of that takes time. As a result, I was lurking on ThemeForest and WordPress.org's Support Forums quite a bit.

In the end, I went back to my original themes - after upgrading the primary one - Pendulum. I will get around to tweaking each of my sites in turn. However, the important task is done: everything is functional. Everything is searchable. I can leave things be for now and focus on what I should be doing now: teaching, writing and practicing my music instruments.

Pet Selector Quizzes

So you've made a decision to get a pet. Congratulations! Now, before you race off to the pet store or certified pet breeder, try out some of these pet selector quizzes to help you decide which is the best pet for you and your family:

Dog Breed Info Center® Search

Dog Breed Selector

Is Your Child Ready for a Pet?

Pet Selector Quiz

What's Your Ideal Pet?

Which Pet is Right For You?

It's not cool to return a pet after a couple of weeks because you don't have the time or money to care for the little guy. Or because your dog's breed is too high energy for you. That's why it is important to choose a pet that is a good fit for your lifestyle and your commitment level.