I think you can ignore Thursday’s entry wherein I described cosmetic changes I had made to this blog.

I just started over from scratch this morning and just completed a totally new “theme”.

I will never be done tweaking, correcting and optimizing this website. Tonight I was so engrossed, I actually missed both “The Office” AND “30 Rock”. I hope the DVR picked them up.

A few changes:

1. New header
2. Number of main page entries pared down from 10 to 5 (cuts down on scrolling)
3. Removal of “archives” from front page (the search function works really, really well)
4. New footer
5. Subtle color changes throughout
6. All new sidebar headers
7. Rearranged the sidebar contents
8. Slight CSS changes on the calendar

I’m working on an entirely new template, but that may have to wait until my two-week holiday at the end of the month.

Someone asked me last night if I had seen an increase in hits on this website since the whole Prop 8 thing had put the church and gays in the spotlight. I shrugged and said that I hadn’t checked.

I did tonight and here are a few high-level stats:

The first month I enabled stats to be recorded:
(this site has been around since 2000)

The last four months:

I guess there is someone reading this. I’d better stay sharp (and thanks to you all!)

I had read horror stories about how difficult it was to upgrade/replace the hard drive in the 2007 Macbook Pro, but I was not ready to buy one of the new “unibody” ones yet and figured this was an inexpensive way to scratch the itch to do so, since my existing 160GB hard drive was the only real issue that I have (I was down to only 40GB free).

I bought a new 250GB Seagate Momentus 7200.3 for $88, brought it home, cloned my old drive to the new one with SuperDuper and proceeded to carefully follow the instructions I’d found on iFixit.com.

Piece of cake. Took me less than 20 minutes.

7200 RPM is dramatically faster than the OEM 5400 RPM as well. Win, win for me.

During a conference call I decided now was a good time to convert my MySQL 4 database to version 5 as per the nagging emails I keep getting from my web host (MySQL 4 may be gone as of January 2009).

I did as instructed only to realize that I had already done this and had just overwritten everything here since last July 8th (I had not deleted the version 4 database, hence the email reminders).

A few sweating moments later, I found that my web host actually does DAILY MySQL backups!!! I was able to restore to yesterday (I hadn’t added anything since then) and THEN convert the old version 4 to version 5.

Whew (and thanks, ICDSoft!)

I had to take my MacBook Pro in for a battery-related issue to the Apple store yesterday (replaced the battery under warranty; in and out in 10 minutes) and got to the Gateway early because I was already out and about and didn’t want to go all the way home and then come back for my 5:15 Genius Bar appointment.

I had a couple of hours to kill, so I went to the movie theater, with the hopes of seeing The Dark Knight, but I was between showings, so I picked the next thing that caught my eye: Pineapple Express.

Not a movie I would normally have paid to see, but I was pleasantly surprised and laughed out loud several times. I don’t think my mom would like it, but I’m pretty sure all of my brothers would. That’s a pretty good recommendation.

Finally–I was able to get Wordpress working with my iPhone.
This is my first post…one letter at a time.

I am so impressed. I got a nag screen indicating I should upgrade to the latest version of WordPress (this blogging software).

While perusing the WordPress site, I stumbled across the “WordPress Automatic Upgrade” plugin. So I downloaded it, installed it, ran it and in less than 2 minutes was back in business with nary a glitch and am happily running WordPress 2.5.1.

Microsoft, are you listening?

I just upgraded this blog engine to the latest (2.50) version of WordPress. Hopefully this will hold for a while!

We both took off yesterday from work so we could start getting party-ready. We’re probably about 75% there with the toilets scrubbed and the garage all decked out for overflow and food.

I went into our old photo albums and scanned about 75 photos from our Halloween parties dating back to our very first in 1988. Talk about memories!

I’m synching those photos and about 300 others into the Apple TV downstairs to display as a slideshow on the big screen TV during the party tonight.

A friend called and chided me for not considering using the “chocolate fountain” tonight and then volunteered to bring the chocolate. Ok — I give — we’ll have it again this year (I’m still remembering the cleanup from last time).

A little later I’ll post some of the aforementioned photos.

BTW– I upgraded to OS X Leopard yesterday on two of our four Macs. Smooth and without a single hitch. I’ve already found some really cool features and am not regretting this a bit. The nicest thing was just clicking “install” and walking away for about an hour for a completely unattended install (take that, Microsoft!) including all settings, applications, preferences, etc.