Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

Rottweilers. Computers. Cameras. World Domination. Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers.
Computers. Cameras.
World Domination.
Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers under the weather

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Computer and blogging posts have filled up most of the last couple of weeks. The Rottweilers have not gone anywhere, but are wondering why I’m preoccupied with technology instead of their fascinating lives.

They (and I) finally got a sunny day to enjoy today, and sadly, they are both a bit under the weather. How ironic is that?

Freya has a mild case of IBS, and today was a day for one of her infrequent bouts with stomach upset and diarrhea. The warm temperature (which sadly none of us have become acclimated to yet, because we have barely had any warm days) and a bit of overenthusiastic activity might have contributed. She wasn’t too happy about skipping dinner, but it’s the best thing to do right now to help her feel better, along with three to five days of metronidazole.

I’m also feeling like a bad dog mom because her right ear was very gunky and I’m just hoping it’s not also infected. All four dog ears on the premises got a good cleaning and drying, and we’ll see tomorrow whether a vet visit might be needed.

I’m wondering if Axel has some undiagnosed plant allergies. He was sneezing quite a bit and his eyes were a little goopy. Oscar used to have summer allergies with runny eyes and loss of eyelid hair, but no problems in the winter, and I wonder if this is what’s going on with Axel. He really can’t afford to lose eyelid hair before he goes out again to be shown so hopefully it doesn’t get as bad Oscar’s allergies were.

I hope my sweet puppies are feeling better tomorrow after a good night’s rest.

(NaBloPoMo | June ‘09: 12 of 30 | 75% Challenge: 139 of 274)

Upgrades: one down, one to go.

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If you don’t follow me on Twitter or didn’t catch my update yesterday (might still be over to the right, there): all went very well with the update to WordPress 2.8. Of course, you are thinking I am restating the obvious since you are reading it here. Just like with the server move over the last couple of weeks, I was almost psyched out by the people who had bad upgrade experiences to report. I am now in the group reporting good upgrade experiences. It was truly almost “just one click.”

The Movable Type update went better than I expected. It was a big shock being back in the land of Perl, though. Pretty much every script I’ve had to implement for my own sites, work sites, or sites belonging to my friends or clubs and organizations I volunteer for has been PHP over the last few years. Movable Type has always been written in Perl and has stayed that way even to the present day. Talk about bucking a trend.

Right now I have all of my old designs and templates backed up (in a couple of different locations) and the blog itself is running on default templates of the current version. It will take me a little while to change the look back. I’m a bit lost after having not edited Movable Type templates for literally years!

(NaBloPoMo | June ‘09: 11 of 30 | 75% Challenge: 138 of 274)

Upgrades ahead!

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I peeked in on WordPress.org a couple of times during the day, but the final release of 2.8 hadn’t gone live by the time I left work. I just looked again and it’s live now. I’m debating whether to “relax” until bedtime by installing it here.

You probably think that is a strange definition of “relax.” Especially since I’m already knee-deep in the “relaxing” activity of resurrecting my old blogs, which were running on Movable Type 3.17 when I left them. Movable Type is now up to version 4.26 so I don’t expect a particularly smooth move. I’m debating whether to move these blogs from Movable Type to WordPress as well.

Speaking of blogs, look down there at my count… I’m halfway there for the 75% Challenge! We’re a NaBloPoMo group who knew from the get-go that we were not going to blog every day in 2009, but we were willing to commit to 75% or 274 days. So far, so good!

UPDATE 6/11/09 11:00 AM: My auto-update bar didn’t show up until sometime after I left the house and before I arrived at work today. I was too lazy to do a non-auto-update last night (although I did spend some time getting the MT blogs ready to update) so I’m changing the time frame for the last paragraph below!

If I am still here in the morning later today, you know that my “relaxation” was successful. If not… I will be back sometime tomorrow with a technology fail story. Still Ssounds like a win-win, huh?

(NaBloPoMo | June ‘09: 10 of 30 | 75% Challenge: 137 of 274)

Observations, more tech-y than not

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  • New iPhone 3GS is really tempting, until I come back to the part of having to switch to AT&T. Cut-copy-paste will finally be enabled, as will MMS. Oh, wait. Back to that AT&T thing again. No MMS right away for AT&T customers. Plus, less bars in more places. I will be fair and say that AT&T has less bars in more of the places that I have to or want to be. I’m sure coverage is fine for many people who are not me. Still, no deal, yet again.
  • Also not making the cut for me, even though as a longtime Palm PDA user I would have loved it to: Palm Pre. I would so love a smartphone like this with touchscreen and “real” keyboard both, and an included navigation app, too. No SD card is a minus, and having to switch to Sprint would be a bigger minus. See above about coverage in the places that I have to or want to be.
  • This Facebook user name thing is probably going to bite me in the ass. Hopefully the other 30-something people with my same first and last name will be asleep at the switch, so I don’t get the lame versions of the user name.
  • And I’ve said it before and will probably say it again: does every damn thing have to be a freaking video? I don’t always want to sit through even a few minutes of video. Sometimes I just want bullet points that I can skim in a few seconds. Can’t you give me both?

(NaBloPoMo | June ‘09: 9 of 30 | 75% Challenge: 136 of 274)

WordPress 2.8 is almost here

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I should actually say that the stable release version of WordPress 2.8 is almost here. The beta version has been out since mid-May, and Release Candidate 1 is out now.

Much of what I’ve read about 2.8 seems to be about incremental improvements rather than major innovation (not that there are no innovations as it seems that Widgets have gotten a complete overhaul). And of course, with every update comes the fear that my favorite theme or plugins will break.

My big hope was for improved performance, as in speed. The only reference I see to that is something about faster loading of admin pages. Obviously I won’t complain if that is true, but not quite the performance overhaul I’d really like.

I will probably do the update sooner rather than later. I feel pretty brave following the server move. What could go wrong? Heh, don’t answer that yet!

(NaBloPoMo | June ‘09: 8 of 30 | 75% Challenge: 135 of 274)