How long does food stay good?

I volunteer at the AIO food pantry in Rockland Maine. We, and other food-distribution programs, accept donations from supermarkets and food distribution companies, not to mention many generous people. Packaged groceries — cans, bottles, bags — have a code date on them. This often says something like “Sell by 9/2027” or “Best if used by … Read more

php composer, WordPress, and plugins

This entry is part 5 of 6 in the series php features

At the request of a user I configured the Index WP MySQL For Speed plugin to use php’s composer package manager for installation. That plugin has a mu-plugins component because it sometimes needs to intervene in core and plugin updates. Ordinarily, activating it puts the the code into the mu-plugins/ directory. But some WordPress installations … Read more

Barroom Messiah 2025

Every December, midcoast-Maine impresario and musician Charles Brown Jr organizes an event called the Barroom Messiah. Musicians professional and amateur take over a local taven or other venue for a Saturday afternoon and sing a good part of the Messiah oratorio by G.F. Handel. That’s the one with the famous Hallelujah Chorus and many other … Read more

In php, empty arrays are falsey, not truthy

This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series php features

Maybe I should have known this. But I didn’t, to my detriment. Empty arrays are falsey. Like so. The rule that an empty array is falsey bit me when doing this sort of thing. Many SQL queries can return an empty result set, that is, a result set with zero rows in it. That’s a … Read more

Randall Thompson’s Alleluia

Our choir director, Charles Brown Jr., has programmed Randall Thompson’s Alleluia for early November. I guess I need to learn to count. A performance. Here are some YouTube practice tracks. This track has a female singing the TENOR line, and sometimes she makes a couple of rhythmic mistakes.  So…just remember to be in the same … Read more