Upgraded

I’ve upgraded the Blog to what I hope is the final version of Bloo v. 1.34. Will do a bit of testing on this blog and a few others and then release it into the wild.

This version has been a long, strange trip. It includes an image uploader, which necessitated an Ajax facility (called Bloojax, also being released in 1.34) and – unfortunately (due to an aversion deep in my DNA) lots of Javascript. Javascript requires lots of cross-browser testing, because it’s not standard across browsers.

I’ll quit bellyaching. But this version took me forever to get done (and things can still go wrong – I still need to do final testing in Chrome, IE, safari . . .)

More miscellany

The college and young singles home group last night was great – a whole lot of them came over (I think we had around 16 to 20 or thereabouts). I love those people! They were talkative, open, we ate, sang, studied, discussed, prayed and played games together. It was a good start.

Jill and I were talking last night, and I remarked that we’ll have ups and downs in this thing. Last night was an up, but my goal is to be flexible and persevere through the downs.

I spent the last few hours dragging seventeen years of stuff out of our attic. The garage now looks like a landfill, but the attic is completely cleaned out. Now to start rebuilding . . . the great Garage Renovation of 2010 is in progress. Slow progress, albeit.

No soccer this weekend. Which is a good thing.

I’m almost done with Bloo version 1.32. Will be deploying the 1.31 test version very soon (maybe today). In 2010, I’ll be doing a lot more (and more frequent) Bloo releases. This first one is more or less a maintenance release, with a few goodies thrown in. More later.

Soon will get my lesson prepared for tomorrow.

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. – John 6:35

Have a great weekend!

Theme

My current theme (Texas Sunset) looks messed up in Internet Explorer 6, due to the idiotic 3px Gap bug in that browser. I’ll have to do one of those maddening hacks in the CSS to make it work in IE before releasing this theme out into the wild.

If you’re still using IE 6, switch to Mozilla. Breathe the free air.

[grumble . . .]

The Mac is Back

Our venerable iMac G5 (from the early production run of late 2004) blew its mind two months ago. Since then I’ve had a crash course in replacing iMac logic boards. I use the plural because I’ve been through three of them while on this 60 day technological adventure.

Our original board developed a video ram problem. I ordered a replacement from some place in Cali, and the replacement had a . . . video ram problem. I got them to ship me another one. It had bulging capacitors (a common problem with early G5 boards). It worked for awhile but kept losing its mind whenever we put it to sleep, make undue noise, or breathed on it.

After some wrangling, I received a refund after shipping the deranged board back. Then I ordered a third board from another place. I was disappointed to find that it too has a couple of bulging capacitors (a mild case), but at this point, because a) it appears to be working and doesn’t lose its mind when we put it to sleep and b) beggars can’t be choosers, we’re going to try it for awhile.

I really only want another year out of this Mac before replacing it. Hopefully we’ll get there.

It’s good to have it back. I was getting really tired of using our Wind’ohs machine.

Hobbit News

This may be old news, but it was news to me. The Hobbit will be not just one movie, but TWO movies, as reported in this Empire article:

We spoke exclusively to both Del Toro and Jackson for our birthday issue, and they told us the latest, which is…

“We’ve decided to have The Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur,” says Del Toro.

“We decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie,” adds Jackson. “The essential brief was to do The Hobbit, and it allows us to make The Hobbit in a little more style, if you like, of the [LOTR] trilogy.”

So there you go. The second film will not, as had previously been suggested, a film that will bridge the 60-year gap between The Hobbit and the start of Fellowship Of The Ring.

The one thing that will make me completely flip is if they bring back Ian McKellan as Gandalf (a cameo of Orlando Bloom as the ageless Legolas in the battle of five armies would be cool too).