From a trip I made to Barre, VT last year to take care of some family business. There’s no highway to take you from Newport, VT to Barre so it’s scenic back roads the whole way and I always take my old Kodak digital "point and shoot" with me since it’s best at landscape shots. Besides, I might forget what it looks like. 
Thought I’d share a bit of warm weather with you. Can’t get here to soon for me that’s for sure.
If your wondering why I haven’t really been posting much or bothering my favorite sites like I usually do, I’ve been dealing with a rather huge leap in my blood sugar level (like off the scale) over the past week or so. This of course messed me up pretty bad and came as a complete surprise since we’ve been satisfactorily controlling my blood sugar through diet for so long now I’ve only had to monitor my levels once in awhile. I’ve finally got it down below 300 using the medication they first prescribed for me when I was first diagnosed with diabetes and I’m really hoping I can drive it down to normal levels within the next couple of days.
Hopefully my eyesight will return to normal while it’s at it.
So what’s this have to do with a cake you ask? Well, I’ll tell you.
My birthday was the 27th and I have this wonderful birthday cake that Laurie made me (German chocolate with coconut pecan frosting) and now all I can do is look at it. I only get cake once a year and now I can’t have any!
I’ll say no more since I tend to keep the swearing and cursing down to a minimum here.
We have to spend an hour today with our lights out? Hell, I’ve been been doing that my whole life, not just for an hour either. Those that know me keep saying that I’m always running with the lights out.
That’s not what they mean? Oh…sorry about that.
Check out Earth Hour. Sure it’s half over already but not for the folks here in the USA and Canada and South America and…well, you know what I mean. Funny thing though, Laurie and I have been using those compact fluorescent bulbs for so long now I can’t remember when we didn’t and now we don’t have an incandescent in the house with the exception of those little 7 watt "night light" bulbs. Guess we won’t be saving as much as other folks.
Wonder what would happen if the world did this on a regular basis for instance, once a week? Wonder how many things we’d end up saving besides electricity? How much might we save in the long run? Only time would tell.
Meanwhile, I’ll just keep on running with my lights out.
Today’s the day folks. The long awaited WordPress 2.5 had the final stamp of approval slapped onto by Matt M. earlier this morning and the final release has just been let out into the daylight. I’m not going to try to go over everything at the moment since this new version has been rebuilt from the ground up and time is short for me but I can definitely say that this new version is more than worth the upgrade.
Along with the new rebuild of WordPress I actually had to waggle my eyebrows at the new look of WordPress.org. Didn’t know they rebuilt (most of) the site as well. Fancy that will ya’.
Okay, this is important! There’s two very popular plugins that will cause problems with 2.5 that everyone needs to be aware of. The first is the Bad Behavior anti spam plugin. The new TinyMCE editor in 2.5 sports a new "Add Media" bar above the write field and the uploader is powered by Shockwave Flash. Unfortunately, Bad Behavior in it’s latest form blocks Shockwave Flash so here’s what you have to do:
Using your FTP client navigate your way to "bad-behavior/bad-behavior/blacklist.inc.php". Download and open "blacklist.inc.php" in a text editor and look for the following line:
"Shockwave Flash", // spam harvester
And change it to:
// "Shockwave Flash", // spam harvester
or just delete it. Your choice. Problem solved.
The second one is the current version of Simple Tags (3.9.1). At the moment, this plugin causes a fatal error when upgrading to 2.5. Once activated you won’t have any access to your site, front end or back end until the plugin is manually removed via FTP. Keep this plugin deactivated until the author provides and update (he’s working on it). If you really need the features of Simple Tags, there’s a fix submitted by Dougal Campbell at Google Code.
I’m sure there’s going to be some "old timers" like myself that might be taken aback by the new Admin UI and new functions/features but for me, the more I used it the better I liked it and I’d never go back. There’s still some things I don’t like but that was true with the old UI. Nothing’s ever perfect.
It’s faster, leaner, easier on the server and for the new WP blogger, easier to learn. Personally, I’ve never seen the developers and testers work so hard at any version of WordPress since I began blogging. I’m looking forward to see what folks think of it.
The fifth beta of Firefox is nearly here by what my nightly trunk builds tell me. Why is that you ask? Well, take a look at this:
What that boring little image above tells you, if you follow the blue arrow, that there is no longer any "b5pre" tacked onto the end of "3.0". Also, by what the schedule says on the Releases/Firefox 3.0b5 page, they’re already baking up the first of the release candidates so my prediction is that we’ll see Firefox 3 beta 5 within the next 4 to 5 days.
I can tell by my experience with the nightly builds over the last few months that the developers are pouring all their effort and experience into this browser and the results so far have been nothing short of amazing.
By the way, unless they change it at the last minute, "Home" now has a yellow roof.
Four nose cone fuses for intercontinental ballistic missiles were mistakenly shipped to Taiwan supposedly in the Fall of 2006. A mistake that wasn’t found until just very recently so the officials say.
Okay…I believe it. And it’s obviously a complete and utter coincidence that it happened right in the middle of China having such a problem with all those horrible, armed and violent Tibetan monks that were marching towards Beijing.
Of course we wouldn’t do anything like that on purpose and then lie about it later by calling it an overlooked mistake now would we?
No…of course we wouldn’t.
For those brave souls who have been running the "bleeding edge" builds or WordPress 2.5 RC1, WordPress RC2 has been released and is ready to be downloaded. I’m not going to provide a download link for those who haven’t already seen this in their Dashboard’s for the following reason:
Warning: If your using the Simple Tags plugin 1.3.9.1 or previous, make sure you deactivate it and leave it deactivated before and after upgrading to RC2. It is no longer compatible and will cause a fatal error that will stop your blog cold until it’s removed manually via FTP. Amaury Balmer, the author, is currently working on an update for this. If you want to keep up with what’s going on you can visit the new home of the plugin at Google Code.
I’m currently running RC2 and I can actually state that I like the new admin more and more with a couple of minor exceptions. This involves when you’re editing Tags and Media (under the "Manage" menu) and not being returned to the original page the tag/media was on in the first place (like page 8 and being returned to page 1 after the edit). Other than that I can’t really complain. However, it ain’t over yet and I’ve put in my 2 cents worth in over at wp-testers. I’m sure they hate me by now.
I’ve also been playing around with the new automatic updates feature for plugins and I’m happy to say that it’s been working flawlessly so far. Don’t take this feature lightly folks, more hard work than you know has gone into the new built-in automatic upgrades feature in order to cover as many of the myriad possible setups a WP blogger could possibly have which is more than you or I would want to count. I’m sure there will be those server setups that will simply not allow this new feature to work properly but hopefully they will be few and far between.
A lot of work has been put into this release, probably significantly more work than in any other previous release. The developers have obviously learned from the previous milestones and have poured that experience into this release. Like Firefox 3, it ain’t ready until it’s ready. Considering that RC2 has now been released and by what I see at wp-testers, the wait won’t be long.
I’m headed to the Quilt Shop this morning while Laurie is on her bi-monthly business run down south (central Vermont that is). Some big changes coming up for shop in the next couple months or so, changes for the better we hope. In the meantime I’ll be gone for a good part of the day “minding the store”.
Have a fine day all.