*blech* I hate being sick. Sure, it’s paid time off from work (121.5 hours of sick time remaining) but I’d rather be feeling good and taking vacation time. I am mostly over the bug I’d caught, but still feeling a bit congested. That being the case, I’m skipping coffee today in favor of hot tea1. This being Wednesday, my preference for tea caused a bit of confusion.

Let me ‘splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Buttercup is marry’ Humperdinck in a little less than half an hour. And every Wednesday, myself and a few co-workers head over to the Terrapin to get a cup of real coffee2. Almost without fail, I order a “Grand Canyon” which is 2 shots of espresso, steamed milk, a shot of dark chocolate syrup and a shot of mango syrup. *yum* When I got there today, I picked up their tea menu and Rob (one of the owners) ordered me to put it down. I explained about the congestion and he accepted it, but I wouldn’t say he was happy about it. Then I ordered their Chinese Breakfast tea, as the description sounded similar to the yunnan jig tea I’ve mentioned before. Hot caffeinated beverages acquired, we headed back to the office and I headed back to the mountain of email that had arrived while I’d been out. After clearing out that mess (most of it went straight to the trash), I started/continued testing a problem I’d been working on Friday. I’m still processing the data for that test now, but I’m also starting to wonder if I should have stayed home again.

Today, like Sunday, I woke up feeling better than the day before. The problem is like Sunday, I didn’t stay home. Sunday, Ariesna & I were invited to go to Niabi Zoo over in Illinois with some of her family. It was a fun day and I took quite a few pictures3 but by the end of the day, I was totally wiped out and realized I should have stayed home. Now I’m not wiped out (so far) but I do feel more tired than I should from just sitting at a desk, staring at a computer screen. Ah well, not much I can do about that now.

BTW, last night I upgraded Cath‘s site to the current version of WordPress. I was kind of annoyed at how long it took but then most of that time was taken up my crappy ftp client having problems deleting the files for the old version from the webserver. Mind you I was booted into Windows at the time4 which undoubtably was part of the problem. But I did eventually get it done and wouldn’t you know it looks nearly identical to what it did before. I’d call that a good sign for a seamless upgrade, but I’m waiting to hear back from her before I call it a success. So why the upgrade? In part to patch some old security holes and in part because all the new/interesting stuff for WP is happening on the newer versions. This way if she feels like going out and picking a different theme5; it should be trivial to install it.

Anyway, one of the reasons I was annoyed with the amount of time it took was last night also happened to be the season premier for NCIS. I’ve been a fan of this show for a while now, but season 2’s finale was murder. Quite literally, as they killed off one of the NCIS agents. I was very much looking forward to seeing where they’d take the show next, but with upgrading the site and some other things I didn’t get to watch the show as thoroughly as I would have liked. From what I did see, I’m not sure how enjoyable season 3 will be. I don’t care for the new characters they introduced into the NCIS office (Director Jenny Shepard and Agent Ziva David). The romatic background between Gibbs & Shepard could be an interesting subplot but they seem to be pushing it too hard in an episode which should be dealing more directly with the remaining NCIS agents working to find Kate’s killer. And then to make the episode a 2-parter leaving us on another cliff-hanger is distinctly annoying. *sigh* I guess we’ll have to wait and see if they can pull this up with next week’s episode.

1 Next to chicken noodle soup, hot tea works best for clearing up congestion and helping me feel better.
2 The first part of this paragraph is a quote from The Princess Bride. And when I say coffee, I mean flavored espresso.
3 I’ll see about posting some of them later. Incidentally, there was a classic car show being held on the zoo’s premises so don’t be surprised if you see more car than animals photos.
4 I had some work to do that required M$ Word, as OpenOffice Writer couldn’t properly edit the fancy formating in the document (originally created in M$ Word).
5 By perhaps looking through the themes in Alex King’s Theme Browser….

Ever since I upgraded CoffeeBear to the newer version of WordPress and my fancy new theme; I noticed that mozcc wasn’t displaying any Creative Commons info for my site. I’d thought it a bit odd but figured I’d broken the extension somehow and have been a bit too distracted to really look into it until this evening.

First, I made sure I had the current version of mozcc installed and that I’d freshly restarted Firefox so I knew I had the lastest version running. When that didn’t work, I checked the source code of my pages and realized that I’d completely forgotten to add in the license info when I did the upgrade. Whoops! I’ve since rectified the problem and now you can see that this site is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. The missing license info has been added in by using the WP-CC Plugin developed by Firas. So many kudos to him for this nifty plugin!

WP has released version 1.5.1 and I’m finally going to upgrade CoffeeBear.net. You may notice this site looking/acting very oddly during this process. If this happens to you, please try back later.

[2005-05-09 17:48 (GMT-06:00)] Update: I’ve completed updating my installation of WordPress to 1.5.1 and have turned on the new theme for WP that I’ve been working on for a while. The gallery is still styled like CoffeeBear’s old theme, but I’ll see about updating that later. I wanted to go ahead and use the new theme once I upgraded and I wanted to go ahead and update to avoid some of the massive amounts of trackback/pingback spam that I’ve been getting hit with.

I just noticed that my contact form is currently busted, but as I’m at my day job; there’s nothing I can do about it for now. I’ll try to get it fixed either over my lunch hour or later tonight. In the meantime, if you absolutely must contact me the easiest way will be to post a comment to this entry. Thanks!

Update: I’m home for lunch and just tried to fix this but didn’t have any luck and it’s about time for me to head back to work. I’ll try working on this some more later tonight.

Update (08 April 2005, 1:47pm: I did try last night to get the contact form up and running again but didn’t have any luck; so that page is down until further notice. Currently, I’m looking at a different solution for having the page when I upgrade to WP 1.5 which shouldn’t be too far off.

I’ve not been posting around here in a while and mostly it’s been do to a lack of *umpf*. The way work’s been going of late has strongly discouraged my creative urges and since I have no desire to get dooced I can’t really talk about that much. I’ve been doing some job hunting but that’s slow going as there aren’t too many jobs around here that I’m qualified for and that wouldn’t totally suck (e.g. 2nd shift & a pay-cut).

Still, life isn’t all bad. Ariesna and I are getting married in a little over a month from now1 and I’ve got all the parts of my outfit. That’s right no simple tux for me but rather a modern kilt with a formal jacket and all the trimmings. I’ve tried the lot on and you’ll have to forgive me but I think it looks rather sharp. 🙂

Also, I’ve been secretly working on a theme for WP 1.5 so when I upgrade this site; it’ll be all shiny and new. I’m holding off on the upgrade currently while I wait for some WP plugin developers make 1.5 versions of their stuff, though I’ve also started looking at alternative plugins as well.

Other than that, the only vaguely interesting thing to report is my iPod appears to have gone insane. For a while there, I couldn’t get it to work properly with iTunes and a quick peek through the Apple support forums convinced me to try an Adaptec Fireconnect 4300 PCI firewire card. That worked for a while but then Windows started blue-screening when I connected the iPod though occasionally it would work if the iPod was connected when I booted into Windows. Eventually, that stopped working but I was able to get it work with gtkpod under Linux but now even that seems to no longer work. I’ve not found anybody else with the exact same problems as I from some rather intense googling. During my last test, it looks like my Linux system got stuck in a loop trying to access the iPod; so I’ll be digging through my old receipts and seeing precisely how long ago I bought it as I did buy the extended warranty on it from Best Buy when I picked it up. I’m crossing my figures that I’m still w/in the warranty period and they’ll replace it for me. That would be pretty schweet if it happens. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see for now.

1 If you feel up to the whole gift-giving thing; we’re registered at Dillard’s, Kohl’s, Target, Walmart and Amazon.com.