I’m finally back up and running here at work, on a new machine. It was quite depressing to have the HD fail for Monday morning, and in fact I had “broken” a web server on Friday that I only managed to get fixed today. By “broken” I mean that I’d locked it down a little too tightly, and the developers couldn’t update the site. That’s all resolved now though fortunately. Now I just have to figure out some way of fixing the stupid IE5.5 IIS4 VPN Dialup Win95 sessioning issue, and things will be back to where they were at the start of December.

I did lose a significant chunk of work that I was testing locally before adding to Source Safe / the server. All in all it should take a couple of days to get that restored to “good as new” status. Man I use a lot of different software products in the course of a day at work. I spent most of yesterday either tracking down CD’s or installing. I’m just glad that it’s finally done (well mostly)

This week was going to be Professor Frink week - I had a bunch of quotes all lined up and ready to go, but I lost them. That’s ok though, I’ll get them back…

Simpsons quote of the day:
Frink: “Ohhh, sorry I’m late, there was trouble at the lab with the running and the exploding and the crying when the monkeys stole the glasses off my head! (screen fades to black) Oh, no, please no… I have a funny story, if you listen. I even wrote theme music, listen!

Ahh-ha, hey hey
Professor Frink, Professor Frink
He’ll make you laugh, he’ll make you think
He likes to run
And then the thing with the.. person..

Oh boy, that monkey is going to pay.

That means that until I get around to putting all the old entries back in by hand, I’m stuck starting from scratch.

I’ve spent most of today’s lunch hour working on getting my templates fixed up - the archives will almost work still (ie. the files are still there, it’s just a matter of linking them in.

As a result, you don’t get to hear about my weekend.

Let me know if there’s something wrong with the page (that wasn’t wrong before) I’ll do a bit of testing to see if I can get it working, but I’m kinda short on time.

No simpson’s quote today, I don’t have time to come up with one.

Had to post this little mpg that got sent to me…

You can never trust a penguin.

Apparently the change to inline-comment counts has spurred an upsurge in commenting - in the past days, I’ve almost approached double digit comments :P I guess it’s true what they say - if you increase usability by 10% you’ll double your potential market…

I bet nobody noticed the fact that I put user selectable styles onto this page… See if you can find out where (I guess for those of you using Mozilla it won’t be that tough) Currently there are 2 (yes thats right, 2) different styles that you can choose from. Of course one of them is the one you’re seeing right now, the other is the halloween one. I’ll come up with a couple of other ones, then move the link to change styles to somewhere more accessible. Not right now though, cause I don’t feel like it.

Future plans for that are to have the colours selectable separately from the fonts, so I can claim that there are thousands of different possibilities or something like that (ok, maybe not thousands - dozens anyways)

I got my Christmas shopping done last night. Erin and I went to Market Mall, which was a good decision, cause the crowds were not there (big surprise there) Nothing much has changed in that mall since I last worked there like 3 years ago. HMV has closed up shop, a lewiscraft moved in, the Company’s Coming changed to some kind of “Healthy Food For You” place, and the only people in the mall are senior citizens. We had pretty decent luck at finding stuff at any rate. After shopping, I took Erin home, then headed out to Mom & Dad’s for a bit. Didn’t do much over there, but I did pick up my “Gauntlet Dark Legacy” I’ll have to give it a bit of play time at some point this weekend - maybe when Erin’s out shopping with her Mom.

How many of you noticed that I trashed the forums links from the side? Show of hands? That’s what I thought… Didn’t seem to be worth the trouble, especially since the comments system seems to do everything that’s needed. I think the forums are still available if you can figure out how to get to them, but they’ll be gone in a couple of weeks, cause f2s.com is closing it’s free PHP hosting service at that point.

I don’t know if there’s much more in the way of features that I want to add to this site (other than the “daily link” thing where comments will appear below the article, but that’s kind of out of my hands at this point.)

Simpsons quote of the day: “Aren’t we forgeting the true meaning of Christmas? You know, the birth of Santa.” - Bart

I just went back and read the last entry - I noticed that I promised that the changes would make a couple of new features available, then started listing them and crapped out at one. Well, the second one is already there - the comment count is displayed automatically for everyone now, no need to be using a DOM compliant browser or anything like that.

Let me know if anything screwy happens - other than the broken archives, which I’m going to get put back up any day now :)

FTP works properly for me with Blog now, so I can make a couple of changes to the way this site works for those of you who use crap browsers :P

The ‘mirror’ at http://members.home.net/greg-mitchell/ will continue to operate in the current way, but since I can now publish both a PHP and an HTML version of the page with no incremental effort (ie, I just have to create a template for PHP, but after that, it should all work the same for me as now) This offers a couple of advantages for you, the reader. 1) I will make the possibility of “themes” available - this will let you view the page in whatever ugly way you want. It’s all css right now, so all I’ll have to do is make up some more stylesheets for you to choose from or something. I’m not sure how I’m going to manage persistence (ie, so you have the same style every time you come back) but I’ll come up with something.

I might even come up with an RSS feed template or something. I haven’t really decided what I’m going to do now that I have nearly full control over Blog’s features.

Speaking of features - I downloaded CityDesk which is Joel Spolsky’s company’s project. It appears to be a similar product to Blog, but it isn’t as easy to use as Blog (IMHO) I think Joel needs to go back to Usability Guru School and spot some of his mistakes. I like the fact that I can start up Blog, and instantly be typing in a new entry, then press one button, and the page is deployed. Yes, CityDesk has some nice features, and it appears to be a well polished program (at $400/licence for the pro version it had better be) but it’s somewhat lacking in the ease of use department when compared to Blog (Thanks again Fahim)

Anyways, enough meta-weblog talk.

I have to get my Christmas shopping done at some point here - I’ve bought all of one gift thus far (though it’s Erin’s gift, so it’s the most important/difficult of them all :) I don’t know why, I just can’t get into Christmas shopping this year. Not like years past - maybe it’s because I don’t work retail anymore, though I’d have thought that would have the opposite effect on me. Oh well, I just have to get my butt in gear and do the shopping. I think I’ll go shopping tonight.

With the time I’ve got left this lunch hour, I’m going to work on the PHP conversion for this site, so wish me luck. If I break things too much, you can always visit the “old” version of this site at http://members.home.net/greg-mitchell though, if you don’t remember that, you won’t be able to come here to find the address anyways, and thus it might as well not exist…Not sure what the point of making that a link was :)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Who needs a Quik-E-Mart?” - one of the lame-o song and dance numbers.

Apparently Google has extended their Usenet archive back to 1981 - 700 million messages archived. When I heard this, I went to check it out, and see when the earliest appearance of me was. Turns out it was Feb 8, 1994. Anyways, the purpose of mentioning it is that I came across another post with my name in it: This guy knows what he’s talking about.

Simpsons quote of the day: “I know those words, but that sign doesn’t make sense.” - Lisa commenting on a “Yahoo Serious Festival” sign