Jason and I headed in to downtown early this afternoon so I could finish up the project that was started yesterday. I couldn’t send out the documents that I had with pages missing, and I didn’t discover that they were missing until noon, when I got the project in the first place. I didn’t find where the missing pages were at until after 3:30 when I thought to ask the secretary if she had seen them. So I had to have the copy guy bring me my documents, then I sorted them out and put them in order with the other documents he copied yesterday afternoon. Then I boxed them all up, got the FedEx info together and sent them off. It didn’t take as long as I was afraid it might, but the offices were hot because the air conditioning was off, and I didn’t know how to get it turned on. (Note to self: get A/C info on Monday!) Whew! It was like a sauna in there!

There were several of the attorneys up at the office, including the one that gave me the project in the first place. He told me several times that he was sorry that I had to come in on a Saturday, and he was there almost the whole time that I was (he left before I taped up the boxes, but he got there before I did.) That helped make it better for some reason - I guess the fact that he was working too? Because nothing bugs me more than when someone gives you a huge project that requires overtime and then goes home, leaving you working late all alone. I’m all about teamwork.

Now it’s off to a baby shower / dinner party for another legal assistant at work - she’s pregnant with twins and the firm is throwing a party for her. Catered dinner and wine … it should be fun!

I said last month that I would rather be a part of the solution then part of the problem when it came to BlogShares. When I saw that the nominations were open for the BSEC, I submitted my name. Now is your chance to select the first BSEC for June 2003. So rock the vote! There are a lot of good candidates to pick from - go click one!

It was supposed to be a good day at work today. As a matter of fact, the morning was pretty good - until 11:45 or so, when I suddenly had a ton of work dumped on me out of nowhere. Normally, not a problem - except I was already working (at a nice pace) on a project with a deadline of today - and the sudden dump one had to be done right away too. Out of nowhere, no warning, nothing. And it didn’t have to be that way. People, we must remember the Five P’s*! They are very important!

I left work a zombie. The drive home helped me unwind, and then a lovely phone call from Sydney gave me a chance to chill out even more, and then it was time for a movie. I finally - finally! - watched “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.” I know! Can you believe it? That movie came out like the year of my ten year reunion, so it’s like so special! I mean, duh! Ok, seriously - I thought it was pretty cute. To cap off a day like today, it was perfect.

* Pre-planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Live it, learn it, love it!

Have you looked through the List of Bests? Wow! It’s fun to check out what all you have read, seen or heard. I’m nowhere near done, but you can check out my Consumed Media list now. Be careful though - you can get sucked in to this site for a long time! [via Karen]

Matt wrote yesterday about phone numbers in movies and songs and said he never called the Tommy Tutone number, 867-5309. He figured it would be fake and wouldn’t work.

Funny thing is, if I remember correctly, in the Chicago area, WLS got the number and you could call it. They either set it up so you could win prizes while the song was out or maybe you could just call it and hear a message from “Jenny”? The details are sketchy, but I know it worked.

Have you ever called a number from a movie, song or TV show?

Tonight is the first leg of The Amazing Race 4! Whoo hoo! Following is my random commentary on the show - I’ll post the opening comments so they are visible to everyone, and the rest I’ll “hide” in the extended entry portion to prevent any spoilers. Consider this your warning - there might be spoilers ahead.

:: Phil opens they show in Los Angeles, the “Gateway to the Western United States”. Call me crazy, but how can it be the gateway if it’s on the far edge of the West Coast? I would consider Denver the gateway, or some place other than LA.

:: The teams show up in stretch Hummers. Hummers are goofy looking to begin with, and should be left on the Army base. I really don’t like them “stretched” and in white. Very odd looking indeed.

:: Tian & Jaree: “Friends, models and thrill seekers.” They share the thought that “girls have it easier than men in a lot of situations … you know, thank God we’re good looking!” Oy.

:: Steve & Dave: Air traffic controllers from Chicago. Plan to run the whole race “without breaking a sweat.”

:: Reichen & Chip: The married gay couple this leg of the race. (Team Guido from the first race never said that they were married.) Was there a gay team on TAR3?

:: Millie & Chuck: Dating TWELVE years, and virgins. Chuck admits that he’s scared of commitment, and Millie says it’s time to either commit or move on. I predict that they end up engaged when it’s all said and done. That or Chuck ends up having a torrid affair with Reichen and Chip.

:: Steve & Josh: Father and son with struggles to work out.

:: Russell & Cindy: Close friends that *she* hopes will take the next step. Uh oh, this sounds familiar. He’s not ready for a relationship - it will never work.

:: Monica & Sheree: Friends and NFL wives. I think they should be booted by default - with their husbands in the NFL, do they really need the million dollar prize? Ok, ok, that’s probably not fair.

:: David & Jeff: Friends from California. Confident that they can win the race.

:: Amanda & Chris: Dating for five years, from Souix Falls, South Dakota. They’ve never left the US. Hmmm…

:: Kelly & John: Recently engaged. “No matter what, we’ll still love each other. And hopefully still getting married!”

:: Debra & Steve: Phil says they are from Indiana. The website says they are from Kentucky. Which is it?

:: Jon & Al: Circus clowns. Interesting…

:: 13 legs in the race, 12 teams, 3 in the final round, so 9 pit stops are elimination points. Last team is eliminated. And they are OFF!
(more…)

As I mentioned earlier this week, WordPress is now available - have you checked out this features list? Many, many cool things built in - including the ability to manage your blogroll within the software and still have it display the recently updated blogs.

Has anyone downloaded it and tested it yet? What did you think? I’m going to try setting up a test blog using all of my posts from this site to see how it handles a huge blog with a ton of archived posts. I would love to hear what other people think about it.

More importantly - if you haven’t tried it out, why not? What would it take to get you to look at a different blog system? What features is WordPress lacking that you must, must, must have? What keeps you tied to the blog system you currently use?

Get the latest release! MovableType has released version 2.64, with many good things:

This is a maintenance release, fixing various CSS, XML-RPC, UI, and Creative Commons errors. This release also plugs a number of cross-site-scripting (script injection) holes for search queries, comments, TrackBacks, and notifications, and is recommended for anyone using any of these features. We have also improved the options for available RSS templates–in addition to the RSS 1.0 template that we have always provided, the default templates now include an RSS 2.0 template instead of a 0.91 template. Also in the default templates, this release fixes the rendering of the default stylesheet (”Clean”) on Windows Internet Explorer.

First of all, I should note that if you’re using an older version of MT, you are at risk to security holes. There is a reason that updates come out - and why it’s important that you do them.

Now on to the most important thing for me… Whoo hoo! RSS 2.0 is now a default template! Yum, yum! Tasty RSS feeds for everyone! You do have an RSS feed, right? You know why you want RSS, don’t you?

I’ve been thinking about this recently - how many people read this site through RSS feeds instead of online? If you’re one of them, could you drop by and leave me a comment so I know? There isn’t a good way to track who is feed reading a site, so I thought I should just ask!

Hmmm… something is going down here in downtown Houston - there are at least six news helicopters hovering overhead. Unfortunately, there isn’t any information on the Houston Chronicle or KHOU or KPRC sites yet to clue me in.

It’s a bit unsettling to see all of these helicopters just sitting there. What do I do? I grab my camera, of course! (I’ll post the photo tonight.)

Update: It was a high-speed chase of a stolen car that ended in downtown when they slammed into another car at McKinney and Smith. They tried to flee on foot, but they were caught, in part thanks to a bystander that helped. “He threw a forearm to the suspect as the suspect ran by him,” said HPD Officer James Price. “He fell into the scaffolding and that’s when I was able to catch him. He helped out tremendously.” (from the KHOU website.)

I was talking with Mike on the phone last night, and he told me all about this cool animated desktop background that he found which displays streaming letters - just like when they are watching the Matrix in the movie. I thought it sounded really cool and I wanted to check it out, so…
Me: Cool! Where did you find it at?
Him: (as I heard it) TheMatrix dot SourceForge dot Net.
Me: THE Matrix?
Him: No, THE Matrix.
Me: Huh? THE? Or Z as in zebra?
Him: Z as in Zebra. ZedMatrix dot SourceForge dot Net.
Me: What? Wait? Zed or Z? I’m so confused!
Him: Zed.
Me: But I thought you said Z?
Him: I did. But they call it Zed in Europe. Well, in England at least. But it’s Z. ZMatrix dot SourceForge dot Net.

Is that true? Do they really pronounce “Z” as “Zed” in England? And if they do - what’s up with that? Why? Why do we say “Zee” instead of “Zed” over here on this side of the pond? I’m determined to get to the bottom of this…

And I still think he was just making it up to mess with me. What is real?

On a side note, if your site has to be down, at least go down with the best, right? InstaPundit (hosted with Hosting Matters) was offline too, and according to Kathy K, he was posting on his backup Blogspot site. Solonor (hosted with Bloggerzone) was kind enough to share visual evidence of how long the site was down. Meanwhile, Michele claims it was really her doing - a powerful Jedi Mind Trick gone wrong.

At least it wasn’t as stressful for me as the Great Blogout of 2002 (see the April 4th post). We were so desparate then that we had to set up a Blogaholics site. This hit more people, but at least I knew what was going on and it was just a matter of waiting it out!

Have details to share from the Great Blogout of 2003? What did you do with all of the spare time you suddenly found yourself with today?

From about 9:30am this morning until an hour or so ago, Blogomania, a lot of the Blogomania client sites (five out of seven servers), and all of my personal sites were offline. No e-mail, no blogs, nothing. At first I thought it was my wonky connection through my ISP, but it wasn’t. Oh no, it was much bigger than that. It seems that NAC, the huge data center that stores servers for a number of hosting companies had a rather unusual situation on their hands today. Here’s the full scoop:

At 10:20 am EST this morning, we had a component failure in the UPS at our Site B co-location facility in Parsippany, NJ. We had no warning of this failure, and we are currently investigating the cause. This failure triggered the fire alarms and the fire suppression system, and caused the UPS unit to drop all power to Site B. In addition, because this failure caused the fire alarms to be set off, the entire building had to be evacuated while the fire department investigated. NAC personnel worked with the fire department to ensure the building environment was safe to re-enter.

Some of the core switching equipment in Parsippany was affected by this UPS failure and power outage and had to be moved to a backup power system. At approximately 12:00pm EST the fire department allowed all personal to re-enter the building. … We are currently assessing any on-going issues, but most services have been restored. We will post an additional update as more information becomes available.

Blogomania has clients on five servers - Themis, Zephyros, Clio, Calliope and Artemis - at this location. Clients on the other two servers - Iris and Selene - are in Florida, where all of the servers are eventually migrating. Sort of like birds, heading South!

Thanks to Jennifer and Erika for helping me to spread the word about the situation. It is a rather helpless feeling when you are dealing with a situation like this that is so absolutely out of your control, and I’m so thankful to finally be back online!

Ok, more like an old kid with a new name and a new look - for the PHP lovers out there, WordPress, the new official branch of b2, is now available for download.

Kudos to Matt for a job well done. I can’t wait to test the latest version, and I’m proud of my very minor role in all of it.

Trust me, this one is going places. Keep an eye on it!

(In case you wondered, it will run at Blogomania and has already been tested on our servers.)

How on earth did I end up with so much stuff? When I moved in to my current apartment back in 2000, I didn’t have time to go through everything I wanted to toss out before I moved. Unfortunately, most of it was packed up in boxes then and moved along with me, stuck in the back of Jason’s closet and left to sit for two and a half years.

Until this weekend. This weekend, I cleaned. I cleaned, and cleaned some more. I ignored the computer, neglected my e-mail, didn’t read a single blog after noon on Saturday. (Thank you to Mike for all of his incredible help!) I cleaned. I still had to go through the boxes slowly though, as some had photos randomly stuck in the middle, or old paycheck stubs and bank statements. I have moved out over eight boxes worth of stuff so far, and kept one consolidated box. From some boxes I only kept a small stack of papers. Others, more. But everything was thoroughly purged and sent off to be recycled.

Old school papers from Jason’s days in Kindergarten were probably the hardest thing to throw away. I saved a few, but most of them are gone now. I can’t save everything he ever did - if I did, my house would be overflowing. The special things are worth holding on to for now.

The easist thing to throw out were the old papers I had printed. It seems that at one point in time back in 1998-1999 I was convinced that I had to print the entire Internet. I found articles from WebReview and other sites in the boxes, things that are still online today. Tips to do things like how to create websites in frames (*shiver*) and CSS tutorials that I never read because they made my eyes bleed. Amazing amounts of stuff, all off to the paper recycling bin now because I can find it all online if I need it. Funny how the Internet has changed things like that, isn’t it?

It’s incredible how much stuff we can end up with if we try to hold on to everything. It is very liberating when you let it go.