I’m going to New Jersey for the first time for work, and I’ll be up there about two and a half weeks. I was asked last week if I’d come along to help with the requirements gathering process for a new project, and I agreed, though I may freeze my tail off. There’s a lot of flying involved because we’ll be coming back to Lexington over the weekends, and we’ll be flying out of Cincinnati instead of Lexington. I’m borrowing a huge suitcase from a coworker since my one medium-sized suitcase won’t cut it for a week-long stay–you can tell I don’t travel much. I doubt I’ll have much time for sight-seeing since we’re doing eight-hour work days, but we’ll probably get to try some good Jersey food: we’ll do lunches with the client and I’ll get dinner with my coworkers.

I started a WordPress plugin last night that I thought would be easy: display your WordPress links, using a shortcode, with an optional Google +1 button for each link. I was inspired by the Links Shortcode plugin by Maarten Swemmer, which allows an optional Facebook ‘like’ button per link. Displaying links with +1 buttons wasn’t hard, though the +1 buttons–the crux of the plugin–don’t work. :/ They show up, they even report something like x people +1’ed this link, but clicking them doesn’t work. You click one, it opens an empty popup window that shortly goes away, and the +1 button remains the same, not indicating that you pressed it. It doesn’t say “you +1’ed this link” or anything. I tried searching for this problem and found a couple threads where people were having the same issue, but no luck. If anyone wants to check out my code and tell me if I’m doing something stupid, it’s available on Github. I wonder if it’s not some Chrome extension I have installed that’s getting in the way, or perhaps another WordPress plugin. Maybe one of my WordPress plugins is sticking some JavaScript in the page that the +1 button doesn’t like.

My car decided to flake out on me the other day, and I got it back from the shop today: they couldn’t reproduce the issue. :( Saturday evening, I drove the car with no problems. Monday morning, it wouldn’t start. The interior lights and dash lit up, but the car wouldn’t turn over; it just clicked when I turned the key. I left the car alone for the rest of the day, and tried to start it again Monday evening. At this point, the key fob wouldn’t even unlock the doors–I had to manually unlock them. Turning the key did nothing then, not even lighting up the dash. Jon got the battery out for me and we took it to AutoZone. They tested it and it had 4% charge, but they were able to recharge it. They concluded the battery was fine. We took the battery home and Jon put it back in, then the car started fine. Since the car is only a 2010, certified pre-owned and still very much under warranty, I went ahead and drove it to the dealer to have it checked out. They tested it and couldn’t find any problems, kept it overnight, and it was still fine. The battery is fine, the car’s charging system consistently puts out the right voltage, and the parasitic drain when the car is off is within the allowed number of milliamps. The mechanic told me he doesn’t expect me to have any problems, and that I should drive it. He was very nice, and the whole thing was free, which is great. Hopefully it was a one-time fluke and I won’t experience it again. A big motivator for getting a newer car was increased reliability. :P