September arrived, and it should have been that crisp early-autumn stretch. Instead the thermometer has been parked at 37 or 38°C every single day, which is hard to put up with.
Back to school
School started this month, and Guoguo moved up into third grade. In more than twenty years of working, I have never seen heat like this. The school decided that for the next two weeks classes would run half days only, with afternoons off — sitting still in a classroom was enough to leave you drenched in sweat, so there was nothing for it but to send everyone home.
The traffic accident case wraps up
Last year, over the National Day holiday, I had a traffic accident. The court has now ruled, and the whole thing is finally settled: the insurance company transferred the compensation in full to the court's account, and the court returned the money I had advanced to my bank card.
One thing in the judgment still puzzles me. The plaintiff applied for a disability assessment, and as expected, no disability grade was found. When the court ruled, that assessment fee — 1,000 yuan — was assigned to me. I have no idea what the basis for that is. The hearing fee, at least, I did not have to cover. I couldn't be bothered to appeal; that time is better spent playing with my kid.
Switching blog themes
For several years I used a theme I had modeled on Lin San's, and it worked reasonably well, except that it was not fully compatible with newer PHP versions. The symptom was comments that needed to be submitted several times before they went through, and I never managed to fix it. I also tried a single-column theme, but it felt a bit thin to me and did not read well on mobile. After searching around I came across a theme by Mr. Ma, which suited me better, so I switched to it. The changes I made to fit my own preferences:
- Moved where comments appear on the homepage.
- Fine-tuned the font sizes — homepage post titles set to 20px, other standard text to 14px.
- Adjusted the color scheme, bringing the main color back to
#467b96. - Set the homepage to no-image mode in the admin panel to speed up loading.
- Various other small tweaks.
September 12 update:
- Removed the sidebar
- Main font size changed to 16px, post text to 17px
- Added EXIF display for images
- Trimmed unnecessary scripts and plugins
- Added a Read More link at the end of posts
The last image is a test of the EXIF display. In practice, WeChat's file transfer assistant strips EXIF data, while QQ does not.
