very simple

Looks like I was able to upgrade to 2.3.3 without any major problems, of course now it’s not publishing content to any of my new posts.  I deactivated FCKEditor to see if that was the source of the problem (I hope!).  More potential broken-ness to come as I start mucking around with themes in the next few weeks.

I’m attempting to upgrade to the latest version of wordpress.  I fully expect this to screw up my blog for some amount of time.

Back from my around the world trip.  Real blogging to commence once I download and weed through the 1000+ photos that I took while away, and wade through the 15,000+ new headlines in my RSS reader.  Looks like I won’t be getting up from the computer any time soon.

(oh, and while I only actually went to two countries – India and Singapore, I say "around the world" because, apparently, the best route to fly to and from Singapore involves continually flying east – direct flights to Singapore fly over Europe and Asia, while direct flights home fly over Alaska). 

Maybe I shouldn’t have had that double espresso at 4 in the afternoon yesterday.  I’ve been waking up every 2-3 hours all night (1am, 3am, and 5am), freaking out that I’ve somehow slept through my alarm and am going to miss my appointment with my personal trainer this morning.  Now I’m worried that if I try to go back to sleep for another hour until my alarm is actually set to go off, I will definitely sleep through it…

Ah, insomnia…at least you give me the extra time in my day to write inane blog posts for NaNoBloMo.

update: or, you know, NaBloPoMo, which is the actual name, which I can actually remember when I don’t wake up every two freaking hours!

So, thanks to a reminder posted over at 50 books, I remembered that this is actually National Blog Posting Month (or NaBloPoMo).  The goal is to write a blog post every day.  So.  Day 1.  This is my post.  I’m glad I figured this out before midnight – otherwise I’d end up having to wait yet another year to get on the bandwagon. 

And check out some of the other blogs too.  I’m sure they’re more interesting than mine…

Visit NaBloPoMo

My brother, who has made fun of me for years for having a blog, has now started one of his own over on blogger.  He hasn’t quite gotten the hang of things like resizing photos to actually fit on the page, but the content is significantly more interesting than the drivel that I write over here:

Let’s look, for instance, at the Democratic Republic of Congo (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cg.html).

This is a land the size of Western Europe, with only 300 miles of paved roads, no electricity outside of the capital city of Kinshasa, a place where the deadliest war in the world since WW2 has raged for over a decade, with more than 5 million people killed and countless displaced. Most Americans could not locate this country on a world map. Why the indifference? When people begin to care, major things can happen. Where is the DRC’s George Clooney? I did notice press lately (worthy press, I might add) on the conflict that has been renewed in the east of the country, detailing a recent spate of killings. However, those killed were a group of mountain gorillas. Where is the press detailing the human suffering? People need to be informed to begin to care. And people need to care to enact any kind of change. We need to remember that we are all born with the same heart, the same lungs, eyes, ears. Yet some struggle even for the most basic level of survival. A great program that has been getting a lot of press lately, which is a worthy capitalist model, if you have a minute….. (www.joinred.com)

Yeah.  Much better than my obsessing over ipods. 

I got my wifi enabled iPod touch today, and it just might be the coolest toy I’ve gotten on a long time. Not even due to the iPod facets of it, but because I’m sitting on my couch writing this entry on a completely intuitive full-fledged web browser.

and, of course, i can’t help but already be mentally running through all of the free public wifi spots near both my apartment and my office.

Im actually glad that i didn’t get the iphone (not only because i hate AT&T) but because i’d constantly have to check that i haven’t run down my cellphone battery doing stupid things like posting pointless blog entries!

Well, it looks like all the work I did yesterday actually did fix ALL of the rss feed varieties, it’s just that my laptop wasn’t clearing out the old erroneous stuff from the cache.  So now the coding is back to normal.  You can continue to subscribe to the feed I linked yesterday, or to http://www.very-simple.com/blog/feed, which is what the blog now registers as the correct feed.  Either should work from here on out. 

I finally figured out how to get one of the rss feeds that my blog generates to actually generate correctly, so it now validates and should be readable in any reader – unfortunately, it’s a different address than the feed I originally published, so those of you who are subscribing to my RSS feed need to re-point your RSS readers to the following address instead:

http://www.very-simple.com/blog/wp-rss2.php

I wish I could have gotten all three variants to work (rss and atom, in addition to rss2), but at least something works now, without me having to (yet again) rebuild the entire site. 

in going through my sitemeter referral logs, I noticed that there were quite a few people looking for things on this site who didn’t appear to be finding them, thanks to the move from iblog to wordpress.  While I’ve changed all of my internal links, I can’t change old references on other people’s websites, so here’s a short list of the most common things people appear to have been looking for and not finding.

If you’re looking for info on hardwood floors, tiny kitchens, or anything else apartment related, check out the home improvement or real estate categories, where I blogged my whole apartment buying and renovating experience.

If you’re looking for stuff on Italy, check out the milan category – I lived there for six months.  There are probably also a few posts on Rome, where I spent some time, in the more general travel category.  Also, pictures from Rome can be found here.

Pictures are sometimes inside blog posts, but are more often contained in my photo albums, listed on the photo album page, or here.  If you’re looking for pictures of the Dakota, check out the album titled NYC snow day 2006.

And don’t forget that if you’re looking for something in the blog, there’s a search box at the top of the page.