Trips, Gadgets and Upgrades

Come to think of it, I’ll tackle these three items in the title in reverse order:

The rea­son that it has been so long since I’ve posted any­thing to this blog was because of the new-and-improved release of Word­Press, ver­sion 2.1 (referred to as Ella, as in Fitzger­ald), which is the soft­ware that I use to pub­lish this blog. I needed a block of time of about 3 hours, I thought. The first step to doing the upgrade was to down­load both a backup of the data­base that Word­Press uses (SQL), as well as all of the files that made up the ini­tial blog, tak­ing care to insure that if any­thing went wrong, I could par­tially or even com­pletely recon­sti­tute the roughly 200 post­ings from just the text. I did this once, but then saw some com­ments. So I put off the upgrade, and there­fore, put off any new posts. Finally, yes­ter­day evening I had enough time to very care­fully back every­thing up, delete all of the old blog files (except for the con­tent), and then upload the new ver­sion and run the upgrade script. To my sur­prise, every­thing worked per­fectly. Either I’m bet­ter at this than I thought, or the many peo­ple who have reported going through an ordeal mov­ing to the new ver­sion had more com­plex sites than I did; I really can’t say.

At any rate, the blog is back, upgraded and improved, and despite delet­ing and upload­ing all of those files and per­form­ing a few other tasks extremely slowly and care­fully, it didn’t take 3 hours; More like 90 min­utes. The changes to Loud Mur­murs are invis­i­ble to you, dear reader. It does serve the pages far faster, and the edi­tor for doing posts has been dra­mat­i­cally improved. There are a few other admin­is­tra­tive screens and secu­rity rewrites, etc., but again, it’s all behind the scenes. Take it from me, on the other side of the site, we’ve all got new fur­ni­ture. So wel­come to Loud Mur­murs 2.1. Long time, no see.

One rea­son (among many) that I wasn’t able to find time for the upgrade (or post­ing) was a new gad­get. Our newest piece of tech­nol­ogy is a gift from my brother and his fam­ily, a TiVo. After a long wait, we’ve finally got­ten it set up and record­ing away. It was no small task, because get­ting Cana­dian list­ings require a net­work con­nec­tion if you don’t want the box mak­ing weekly long-distance phone calls to the states, because the set­ting for retriev­ing Cana­dian list­ings is — and I swear I’m not mak­ing this up — Leo, Wyoming. So, after get­ting a wire­less adapter so that we can use the TiVo with our home net­work, and after a few other elec­tronic, hard­ware and soft­ware hoops, I’m pleased that I no longer have to choose between catch­ing an episode of Heroes or writ­ing an entry here. Let’s hear it for time-shifting! I should men­tion that the other advan­tage to hav­ing this PVR (Per­sonal Video Recorder) on the home net­work is that I can copy any recorded show from the TiVo to my com­puter, and after some com­pres­sion and con­ver­sion, to my iPod. Too cool.

After my trips to Buf­falo and San Fran­cisco, our lit­tle drive down to Seat­tle felt quite short. We vis­ited for a brunch and after­noon with my brother and his fam­ily. We had a ter­rific meal at Mon­soon, an upscale Viet­namese restau­rant where you can not only get that won­der­ful clas­sic, Banh Xeo (pro­nounced Bann-show, it’s a sort of crepe/omelette that actu­ally con­tains no eggs; the ‘crepe bat­ter’ is a mix­ture of water, coconut milk and rice flour with a trace of tumeric and folded around hand­fuls of beansprouts, shrimp and lean pork), but also a ter­rific Vanilla French Toast made with brioche (which my niece ordered and many of us tasted). We only vis­ited for a short time, but man­aged to fit in a chilly walk on Seattle’s new Olympic Sculp­ture Park. We also picked up that affor­men­tioned wire­less adap­tor for the TiVo, and were back in Van­cou­ver before mid­night (but not that much before, due to a stop in Belling­ham to do some minor shop­ping at Target).

There’s lots more to add; when you don’t take note of things right away they pile up. I’ll try and catch up in future posts.