Cocktail Confessions

Before I get to the site updates, here’s a but that’s going on:

The step-daughter has moved into our house.  At 17 years of age it has been somewhat of an adjustment to undertake and a lot of people are giving us advice.  However, all the advice in the world cannot change the attitude of someone who doesn’t care about school.  Overall, she’s a good kid: she’s polite to neighbors and friends, she doesn’t drink or smoke or do any drugs that we are aware of, no tattoo’s, no errant piercings, no foul mouth.  She just doesn’t do her school work and likes to ditch which has caused her to slip behind….far behind everyone else her age.  And in California where our state is ranked pretty low to begin with in education…..well, as the guidance counselor recently told us….she’s setting herself up for a long life of retail employment.  Sigh.

As far as my diet goes that I self imposed on myself last Sunday, it’s been going ‘okay’.  So far, I only broke down last night when I got home from work and had one Bud Light, otherwise I’ve been drinking water.  I’ve had a few cookies here and there, but overall, my portion sizes have been reduced (although I am a bit hungry and have a mild headache…more so due to my allergies I figure than not enough food), and I’ve been eating a bit healthier.  I could and should even alter my diet a bit more and eat healthier foods (salads, veggies, etc) and need to start some additional exercise.  I had planned on doing some exercise this past week when I get home, but I just haven’t.  No real excuse. I just haven’t.

Halloween is tomorrow, and quite honestly I just don’t care.  I have a costume…more so because my wife wants us to go to a party…but I have no real desire to dress up.  I’m sure I’ll have fun at the party, but I know the temptation of too much drinking may be a factor.  I went to the same party last year, drank a lot, and fell on my ass where I believe I fractures my tail bone.  No joke.  I also had a mild hangover as well…something I’d like to avoid this year.

I have a podcast with my grandfather that I need to complete editing so I can post, and I hope I can do a few recordings this next week as well and supply a bit more content here.

Feedburner: I noticed the other day my regular Feedburner was no longer updating itself correctly and I’m not 100% sure why.  I haven’t made any changes at all to the FeedBurner settings, and after spending quite sometime looking at the various settings pages, account, and some basic troubleshooting it appears it all boils down to possibly a missin “/meta” tag somwhere.  After pinging and validating my pages and getting the “congratulations” response, some further digging revealed that FeedBurner is conflicting with itself somewhere else.  A search of the FAQ stated that this can indeed happen when you copy and paste from MS Office applications like Word or Excel.  Well, I do know I had done some recent cut and paste work from Word and unless I scan line by line the HTML code for the last few posts for a possible errant tag (which I may or may not find), it may or may not fix the issue.  Bums me out since I think Wordpress should be smart and compliant enough with Word to not insert additional XML tags, but apparantly not.  Hopefully this will eventually correct itself in the future when I post enough new content to bury the old stuff way down.  So let this be a little knoweldge to you: Wordpress, FeedBurner, and MS Word don’t play well with each other.

Site notes:

• BluBerry Power Press updated to v1.0.3.  I think I may try the full service soon as my podcasts aren’t showing up yet on Zune Marketplace and I don’t know why.
• Sociable upgraded to v3.5.2.  No real change for me as I didn’t change my options.
• The Hacker’s Diet – installed v0.9.8b.  This is a plugin behind the scenes in which I should be updating my weight.  You won’t see anything unless I take a snapshot and post it as a picture in a regular post.
• Count Per Day – Updated to v2.4.2 and I use this again behind the scenes.  Traffic monitor.
• Wordpress – Still using v2.7.1 although v2.8.5 is available.  I’m a little hesitant to upgrade.  I’m sure it’ll be fine for the most part, but there is always some hidden thing that gets screwed up.