My website fell asleep

Holy smokes! Six weeks have gone by.

There was a phone call at the end of August about developing a small Web site. The next thing I knew, I was sitting down in my office every morning at 6 a.m., walking downstairs for dinner after 7 p.m., watching an hour or so of TV, and crashing shortly thereafter. I could see and hear summer fading away outside my window, but I couldn’t go out and play. I broke for Chicago Bears games and not much else.

It was hard work, but I started learning some new things in the process, and I also upgraded a whole mess of the software I use for Web development. Between Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium and Macromedia Studio 8, I made some serious leaps in bringing my tools up to date, and they probably won’t become outdated again until, possibly, days from now.

Once my side job was finished, I turned my attention back here. It had been a while since I upgraded Movable Type (which powers this blog), so I downloaded version 3.33 and installed it, only to find out I would also need an upgrade of Perl and DBI and a few other components. This, in turn, required a series of emails and phone calls and trouble tickets between me and the support team at my Web host as they moved all of my files to a newer server. The whole process ended up killing another week. Now everything seems to be working fairly well and should not become outdated until, possibly, days from now.

Anyway, several people have asked why my Web site wasn’t being updated, so there’s my answer.

Meanwhile, I did manage to get outside long enough to put some alfalfa hay down on our flower beds, replace some of the trim on our garage, and go for a walk in Kettle Moraine State Forest. Now, overnight, our bushes have all been wilted by frost, there’s snow on the roofs and ice in the bird bath.

I’ll watch my Adobe training videos just as soon as I finish Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition, by David Pogue, which I bought with my iBook way back in June 2005 and still have not completed. It’s a very thick and helpful book, like all of his stuff. Considering his output of books and his articles and his blog and his Web videos and his radio and TV appearances, I really have no idea where he finds the time. Taking on one extra little project just put me on complete lockdown.

Thanks for checking in, and thank you for your patience. With luck (and the new tools), I should be able to maintain these pages a little better than I have lately.