I’ve upgraded my WordPress from 2.x to 3.8.1, finally.

Looks good.

Switched all the Ireland videos (so far) from YouTube to Vimeo. Dawn says they look a lot better. I agree.

But now they’ve all gone down. Damn.

I’m working on it.

Update: Looks like the embed links have changed. Re-pasted the link in the July 3 video. That one works again. Vimeo had some sort of big update yesterday, where you couldn’t even sign in. All day. Way to go, guys. And now embed links are changed? Oh, yeah, way way way to go, guys.

Update 2: Hacking through the embed HTML, looks like all of the href tags that refer to vimeo.com have change from http://www.vimeo.com to simply http://vimeo.com. That’s it? That’s what caused all my imbeds to break? Suddenly I’m liking Vimeo a whole lot less. But I’m changing the links in the posts anyway. Again, damn.

Update 3: All fixed. But still. Why should I have had to do that, Vimeo?

Had the best URL I’ve ever seen, in a spam comment on the blog the other day:

worm-remover[dot]airconditionerwindowunit[dot]com

Whoa! That sounded pretty damn cool. A worm remover for air conditioner window units. Worms get into air conditioners?

Okay, I thought, maybe like air conditioner units in like Pacific Asian islands get worms in them. I imagined either one huge worm, almost like a snake, or a wriggly mass of smaller worms. Pretty gross either way.

So I actually clicked through, and then I was sorely disappointed. It redirected to scanner[dot]power-antivirus-2009[dot]com/?aff=1064. So the worm refers to computer virus type deals. Yeah, that’s right, I’ve heard of viruses, trojan horses, and worms. One of those. Not real worms.

And the domain was just a dummy one anyway. And it tried to attack my computer, according to the Norton message that popped up saying that whatever attack was thwarted.

Like I said, very disappointing. Similarly disappointing was a comment spam with a link to Gemini Inflatable Asia. Again, that would be pretty cool, an inflatable Asia. Like a plush toy kinda thing, but inflatable, in the shape of Asia, with country borders and capitals marked, and each country a different color. But, sadly, it turned out to be a link to a company in Asia named Gemini that manufactures inflatable boats. Boats that inflate, not continents.

Whew. An event. I ain’t afraid of no ghost.

Don’t think you’ll notice anything different out here in the front row, but boy in the back things sure are different. Cleaner. Lots more blue. Lighter.

See below or click here for the Saturday night recap of our trip to the Washington Ballet Studios.

See below or click here for the Friday night recap of our trip to the Kennedy Center.

That Star Wars credits post was in fact upgrade related. A post-upgrade test. Now can bypass the WYSIWYG editor and embed objects without TinyMCE stripping out tags and stuff. Very pleased.

Hey, everybody. It’s lunchtime, Monday 3/3/8. You may or may not notice some changes at the blog here. Let me know if things don’t work.

I’ve upgraded the WordPress, from 2.0.4 or so to the latest 2.3.3. Latest as of today anyway.

And search now works, I think. I thought maybe upgrading would fix it, but it didn’t. So then I dared changing

<?php require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’); ?>

to

<?php require(‘./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php’); ?>

in line 1 of the search.php file in the Connections theme. That did the trick. Whew.

There are some posts in draft from over the weekend, for New York City Ballet on Friday and Washington Ballet on Saturday. And there’ll be the Laetare Sunday post for Mass for yesterday as well.

But for now, heads up. Things may be a little wacky while we work out any upgrade issues.

Weird. For some reason, maybe since Google took over Blogger/BlogSpot, I’m again able to access ebohls.blogspot.com. Somehow trying to move from there to my own hosting or domain or something, the thing got lost. I could see it, find it, just couldn’t edit it.

But now I can. But now I don’t need to do so, but still it’s nice to be able to do so.

Final Word Counts for 2006

December – 9,433
November – 2,674
October – 1,616
September – 4,536
August – 10,405
July – 11,304
June – 18,027
May – 20,583
April – 23,614
March – 12,940
February – 8,210
January – 8,059

Total for the year: 131,401

That’s a lot of words. Coulda been more, though.

Word counts, by month:

August – 10,405
July – 11,304
June – 18,027
May – 20,583
April – 23,614
March – 12,940
February – 8,210
January – 8,059

Making the switch to hosting and self-publishing.

I started this blog this year on Yahoo 360, thinking I would try posting at least once a day, not thinking that I’d actually do it. But it seemed to take off. Don’t know how long it’ll last, mind you, but it’s humming along.

At first I had the blog hidden. Big secret. Then I mentioned it in casual conversation, and Dawn was surprised and frankly not pleased that I had a blog and wasn’t letting her read it. I explained that nobody could read it. Oh, that was okay then.

But then I let her read it. And she didn’t hate me or think it sucked. She was quite nice about it. So that was a big confidence booster.

So then I went public with it, on Blogger. And Paul started reading too. And some other folks, family members sometimes, Gordon every so often. Random folks around the world, according to the stat meters that I hooked up, but not like regular die-hard readers or anything.

Mostly just Paul would add comments. A few flame wars with and between Paul and Rob, with my own nasty remarks sometimes added. But I hope that’s all over.

So in the last week or so I’ve fired up web hosting with GoDaddy for www.bohls.org, and I’ve been playing with moving the blog there. I had a rather disastrous attempt at trying to just publish the Blogger blog, ebohls.blogspot.com, there. So then I’ve downloaded WordPress, and I’ve been playing with that for a week or so.

And so here it is. My blog at Bohls.org. I’ll be trying to use WordPress as a sort of CMS as well. We’ll see how that goes.

So I had noted, in a post in June, the number of words per month that I’d been producing. Here’s a little update.

Word counts, by month:

January – 8,059
February – 8,210
March – 12,940
April – 23,614
May – 20,583
June – 18,027
July – 11,304

Clearly I peaked in April.

Dear Sir or Madam,

We have closed the Palestine and Lebanon post from Monday 17 July 2006 1301 until further notice.

Mgmt.

I wonder how much I’ve written here, in this thing, this blog. Then I think of a quick way to count the words, thanks to Microsoft Word.

Over there to the right, Blogger automatically aggregates posts into the archives. You can set it daily or weekly or whatever, but Blogger defaults to monthly and that’s what I use. So I go to each of the monthly archive pages and do a CTRL-A (Select All). Then I switch over to Word and do an ALT-E-S (Paste Special). I choose Unformatted Unicode Text and click OK. So nowI’ve got an entire month of blog entries in a Word document, without pictures or formatting or tables or extraneous stuff like that.

Then I need to delete a few things. After the Paste Special, the cursor is down at the end of the document, so I start there. I go up a few lines until I find “About Me.” That’s where the blog entries end and the right-hand side profile, links, previous posts, and archives listings are. I delete from “About Me” to the end of the document. I go up to the top of the document and delete from the beginning “Notify Blogger about objectionable content” down through the name (EBOHLS) and description (the Tony Kushner quote) of the blog. So now all that’s left are actual blog entries.

But still need to delete a couple more things. There’s a line for the date of each entry at the beginning of each post, as well as a line noting the poster, time, comments and links at the end of each post. So I do a global search and replace in Word, CTRL-H, first finding “, 2006^p” and replacing that, clicking Replace All, but not with other text but with header formatting. I arbitrarily chose Heading 5. And then finding “Posted by Edward at” and replacing that with the same header formatting. Finally, finding “^p^p” and replacing that with “^p” as many times as Replace All needs until the replaced count is zero.

Then I choose Styles and Formatting from the Format menu. I click anywhere in the document in a Heading 5 formatted paragraph and choose Select All from the formatting pane. Then I hit Delete. All the extra stuff is gone. All that’s left is the meat of the blog entries themselves. When I choose Word Count from the Tools menu, Word tells me how many pages, words, characters, paragraphs, and lines are in the document.

Here are the word counts, by month:

January – 8,059
February – 8,210
March – 12,940
April – 23,614
May – 20,583

I’m pretty wordy, ain’t I?

At home, Dawn uses Internet Explorer and I use Netscape. Not because I’m like this huge fan of Netscape or anything, but more because we share the same desktop at home and we both use Yahoo mail. And I’m too lazy to sign out of Yahoo ever. So Dawn was forever having to sign me out and sign herself in whenever she wanted to check her mail.

So then I started using Netscape, so that I would never have to sign out and she would never have to sign out. But now seems like Netscape is freezing when I go to save a Blogger entry. And it’s crushingly disappointing to have written something and been satisfied with it and then hit SAVE and have the thing crash and eat my entry. I was using Netscape Browser version seven something, and I upgraded to eight, but it didn’t help any.

And so I’ve decided that Netscape has eaten my writing for the last fucking time.

I go searching for something else. I seem to think that’s there’s something called “Mozilla.” So I go to download.com and look for browsers and there are any number of them. The most popular, measured by total downloads, is something called Avant Browser. Netscape is number two, IE is number three, and Mozilla Firefox is number four.

For some reason, something about Avant bugs me. I’m not even sure what or why. It may be that I’ve used AvantGo on my Palm and not been totally thrilled with it. I think that’s more a function of just the PDA-ness of the application itself, not anything to do with Avant, if that’s even the name of the company. But something puts me off Avant.

So then next is Firefox. It says that it’s open source, so that makes me all warm and fuzzy. The CNET reviewer seems to think the world of it. So what the hell. I give it a try.

And so far so good. It doesn’t eat blog entries. And it has that handy ctrl-Enter feature that IE has, that my brother showed me, where you just type like just “yahoo” in the address bar and then hit ctrl-Enter and it automatically fills in the “http://www.” before and the “.com/” after, making it “http://www.yahoo.com/” without hardly having to type nothin’.

And it imported all my bookmarks from Netscape, which I suppose is standard but I totally wasn’t expecting, so it’s like a real treat.

Is this thing on?

Can you hear me in the back?