McBlog

Nykolai went on a sort of Ukranian scout camp at the Sokil eco arts retreat in the hills behind Anglesea on the Great Ocean Road. He was invited to attend by friends and spent 8 days going on multi-day mountain bike riding expeditions, bush walking and sleeping in a tent.

He got back this evening and is currently blissed out in his bed following a hot shower and a good meal. He was also very happy to be back to a “civilised” toilet :)

We’ll be hearing all the stories for the next day or so as he returns to reality, all while making the most of his Christmas and birthday presents over the next few weeks of school holidays.

Yes, it’s great to have him back.

Maria Langer, a helicopter pilot & author in Arizona, keeps a rather insightful & amusing blog where she posts her thoughts, experiences and other items she finds worthy of archiving. One of her posts commented on Christianity and, like rancid meat, it’s drawn the annoying, sickening horde of rabid Jesus-freaks in to comment.

To say it’s amusing to read the article’s comments is an understatement. For a religion that professes to be based on love, these folks are certainly destroying that brand image.

Aside from an amusing read at 03:00 in the morning after weather forced us to cancel this morning’s scheduled balloon flight, it also inspired me to make this observation:

Religion is like underwear – it says a lot about who you are, shapes your actions and can give you a comforting feeling, but if you keep showing it in public you can get a really bad name for yourself.

I wound up losing about 2 hours of my day today (yes, New Year’s Day) thanks to some problems with the latest version of the PodPress plug in. While making some changes on the Plane Crazy Down Under site, I noticed that a Plugin was ready for update. I dutifully ran the update process and upgraded to the latest PodPress version (8.8.2). All seemed OK and I went about my day.

Hah!

An hour or so later, I received an SMS from Steve, my partner in PCDU saying there was a problem with the podcast’s feed. Yup, the feed’s text was there but the mp3 files couldn’t download.

I ran the feed through the Feed Validator and it confirmed that the mp3 file had to have a full path, not a relative one. Damn – looks like the updated PodPress is to blame.

With a bit of effort I picked up the previous version of the plugin, deleted the current version from the site and loaded the previous version. NOTE: WordPress makes it easy to load updated plugins (and themes, and WordPress versions – for which we’re all extremely greatful :) but there’s no easy way to roll back to a previous version. Oh well.

Once rolled back, I then spent a while getting the FeedBurner feed sorted out (took a ping to get it to refresh) and did the same (ping) for iTunes. After that it was just a matter of “Check for Updates” on the podcast in iTunes and everything started working fine again.

Whew!

The lesson learned: Don’t upgrade to the latest version of a plugin without checking to see a) how long it’s been around and b) whether anyone’s hit any snags with it yet. Also a good idea to not upgrade when you’d rather be spending the day chilling out & relaxing :)