On the Second Day of Christmas...

we return to the hospital. Deciding to spread things out we had a family Christmas party tonight. By the end of the night dad had a bad stomach ache. And it got worse until we called 911. The ER thinks its “pancreatitis,” which seems to be able to be caused by post-surgerical medicines, trama, etc. I just got home, its 2:13. I need sleep. Hopefully, I'll be back sometime tomorrow.

Prayers, as always… would be appreciated. Thanks.

Merry Christmas Once Again

Hope you had a great Christmas! Remember, today is just day one of the twelve days of Christmas…

Welcome to the Other Side

Welcome to SAFARI 2, codename “Alexandra.” The more I use SAFARI 2, the more convinced I become it is really still alpha quality rather than beta. Here is what is still broken, ordered in two lists, one that contains “soon to be fixed” stuff and one that contains later stuff.

• RSS will return in the next few days.
• Lingering display problems will be corrected.
• Blogroll will return ASAP.
• Topics will work again.
• Problems in admin panel will be fixed.
• “Remember Me” cookie for comment will function.
• Friendly URL's will return (in backwards compatible way, no need to change your links to any post on asisaid, it will work again ASAP).
• Posting a comment pages will retain look of asisaid.

• Proper rendering of trackbacks.
• Trackback support.
• Pinging of Weblogs.com/Blogrolling.com.
• Tons of other stuff.

If you see problems on these pages, please let me know in the comments below so that I can try to put it on the list of things to fix.

This will likely be my last post before Christmas, so have a very merry one. Blessings to you on the day of the celebration of Christ's birth. “Immanuel Hath Come to thee, O Israel”!

Progress as Promised

It looks like my new blogging software might be able to be unveiled later tonight or, at worst, on December 26. At least that's how I'm thinking at the moment. Right now, there are a number of key things missing, such as listing the proper number of comments on the front page, but that's more of a cosmetic issue than a serious issue that should be a showstopper. It's still better than no blog, right?

By the way, I want to give a really big “thank-you” to Christopher for offering WIT as a “home away from home” that I could post at temporarily. While I don't think I'll need it, given the progress I've made, it was nice just knowing I'd have a place to go, need be.

I wasn't sure how successful transfering the data from a flat file (plain text) database to MySQL would be, but it worked after spending a few hours hacking together a script to do so. The rest can come later, I figure. The big remaining job is to copy SAFARI 2 over onto the asisaid domain — right now I have it on a test domain and I'd like to keep that domain a test domain so that I can continue to work on progress to a “gold” 2.0 version of SAFARI without breaking asisaid (right now, I'd consider SAFARI 2 somewhere between late alpha and early beta stage — it works, but it still has some problems).

Anyway, just thought I'd give an update. I don't think I'll be done in time to do the Christmas post I wanted to do, but I'll just do it in a belated fashion. The other, really good news that I didn't have time to discuss yesterday is that the hospital released my dad yesterday. On Wednesday, he had sung “I'll Be Home for Christmas” to my mother — I'm glad he wasn't disappointed. The doctor seemed quite optimistic about the way things are going.

comments (on OfB)

Buh Bye

The old blogging software I've been using seems to have given up its ghost. It's dead. As a doornail. Gone. Bit the dust. Bought the farm. All the entries now refuse to appear, although all the data is intact on the server. I have no idea why.

Fortunately, I've been planning a blogware update to my new SAFARI 2 Content System. Unfortunately, I discovered some bugs in it this afternoon as I was considering migrating it (this was all before I realized my blogware had died). Fortunately, I've fixed most of those bugs. Unfortunately, I haven't fixed all of them yet.

My big hope is that I'll return to the blogosphere within the next few days, at worst, maybe tonight, at best. In the mean time, I'll update this page, but I don't want to put too much effort into this static page.

I've placed a place holder article on OfB.biz where you can comment on this “entry” if you'd like to. Click here to read and post comments.

In the mean time…If you have not visited all of the sites on my blogroll before, why not visit one of them right now?

About Fantastico

Eduardo upgraded to WordPress 1.2.2 the other day, and when he did, I asked him if he had used Fantastico to perform the upgrade. Ed followed my advice to Eduardo and that killed his blog. Well, not really, but it made it look like it had choked. As it turned out, Fantastico did not run the upgrade.php script included in WordPress, and thus the database was not arranged properly.

I checked around Fantastico and could not find a way to fix it directly from there. But, running the aforementioned script did the trick just fine. I thought I'd share this in case anyone else tried to follow my advice.

What I Bought

Music and Words by Matt Slocum; Sung by Leigh Nash (the two founding members of Sixpence).

if I could have the words to change 
to speak into the world would they fly 
I wonder if they'd put them in a jeweled box for sale 

Chorus 2
Chorus 1

Update From the Hospital

I just discovered that the hospital is kind enough to provide free wi-fi to “current patients and visitors.” I noticed this after seeing an antenna that looked suspiciously like a wi-fi one sticking down from the ceiling in the waiting room. After opening Safari and agreeing to the user agreement that appeared in lieu of my homepage, I now have high speed internet access.

OK, so here's the scoop. We were waiting in the waiting room for the cath lab this morning when my dad started having more severe chest and arm pains; his hands also became clammy. They soon transfered my dad to ER, where they gave him some morphine and other stuff and did some tests. One of our pastors had perfect timing to show up at this point and keep my dad occupied until the cath lab was ready. They did do the angiogram as on time as they ever do anything like that. The diagnosis was a bit hard to understand, but it seems that he does not have any blockages worth doing anything for, although one small one did seem to cause a mild heart attack this morning.

They've transferred him to CV ICU now and are going to monitor the situation for awhile. It sounds like any issues will be treated medically rather than surgically — good news! I'll post an update when I know more.

Your prayers over the past week are greatly appreciated. If you can keep dad in your prayers still for the next few days, that'd be great.

I Love "Buy It Now"

A Single Item. I love eBay's “Buy It Now” function. I just bought an item I've been looking for years for, and I “won” it for just $4 plus a couple bucks in shipping. I'll write about what I ordered tomorrow. Of course, if you want to read through my comments and figure out what it was, that'd be 25 tasty points. It relates to something I've talked about in the comments of the last few days. It's sad, but true that you will likely be unable to guess this. There are at least two hints in this paragraph, however.

Get Testy. As a side note, here's a question for y'all. I have my new CMS stable enough that I think I can start using it. It is missing a lot of features I want before I open up the code, such as trackbacks and multiple site support, but trackbacks are the only thing that would be missing as compared to the present asisaid. Do you think I should set up a beta asisaid and ask for some testers or just try it out here and see what happens?

Delay

Time's wingéd chariot came and went today and I didn't get anything written on here. The good news is that you have a whole night and day to take care of the question concerning our friend, Ben. Happy Hunting!