August 12, 2006
Summer ending...
School - The weeks of summer are coming to an end. Michelle went shopping with the girls last night to get them some new clothes for school. She also picked up a gift for Tammy and Peter's new foster child.
Speaking of school, I forgot to mention that the boys all start school this fall as well. The thing that annoyed Michelle to no end was that the school system scheduled them for opposite times of the day and they won't budge. Timothy has morning classes and the twins have afternoon classes. Some days she'll be taxiing into Milford twice a day (which she was prepared for) and on others four times a day. Luckily it's only a few miles away. The afternoon classes will also make it difficult for her to get Claire to her gymnastics classes on time. Claire loves gymnastics and is often OCD about being on time to it.
Surfing - While Michelle was out shopping with the girls, it was a quiet night for me to do a little web surfing and iTunes browsing. Yes, complete wastes of time! As a recent VW owner, I did like the VW 'Un-pimp Your Ride' series on Google Video — part I, part II, and part III. I especially liked them because Michelle and I always laugh at the $15K Ford Focus's, Honda Civics, Integras, that have another $15K added in automotive bling.
It had also been quite some time since I browsed the library of available music at the iTunes Music Store. The breadth of stuff they have continues to grow and their "iTunes Essentials" collections by genre can be rather addictive. They have '80s & '90s Video Hits, One-Hit Wonders, Pop, etc. Yes, I was in a nostalgic mood last night… I foresee some major download purchases this afternoon.
EWTN - If you at all follow Catholic media, you might know that this weekend marks EWTN's 25th anniversary of being on the air. Whenever I hear the story of how a poor, sick nun started a network on a shoestring and a prayer and grew it to what it is today, I'm impressed. In many respects, Mother Angelica has done far more than people with much deeper pockets ($$$) or more letters after their name (ie. degrees). Congratulations EWTN!
Programming - I'd mentioned on Thursday night that I had started a programming project regarding cell phone minutes that I'd bailed on. Another project that I'd been contemplating was updating to the latest version of MovableType, the software that sits under the hood for all of the writing here. I've been running on the last version of the 2.x series for ages — according to my records, since January 2004. When 3.x came out of beta, it caused a flurry of criticism because of it's more stringent (and costly) licensing requirements. These have since been relaxed in the current 3.3.x line so that for my personal use it wouldn't require a dime.
So I downloaded the current version just to peek at its software infrastructure. It has so grown since the version I have. Worse yet, it's bipolar. Half of it is written in Perl, which was the language it was entirely done in prior to 3.x. But now the other half is in PHP with much of it being redundant functionality. I'm not against either language, but it certainly makes development a bigger challenge when you need fluency in both. For a lot of the extensions one might develop, you'd need to build both a Perl version and a PHP version — in essence, writing the same program twice. Gack! So for now, I'm going to let it go. Moving to 'the latest' wouldn't give me any feature I've been looking for. I know people say, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but most engineers have a hard time with that. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet. *grin*