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I had high hopes for last week.  It started off with me officially becoming an old man, celebrating my 30th birthday.  It ended with me laid up in bed for the better part of 4 days with a nasty cold.  Good times.

On the plus side, I had more satisfying nose-blowing experiences in the last 48 hours than I've had in my entire life.  It was great.  I'm a weirdo in that I really enjoy some parts of being sick.

So, anyhow.  Frustration-wise, my PhpBB Joomla Comments plugin 95% works, but it's going to require a large rewrite because of naming collisions with certain functions in Joomla and PhpBB (relating to dealing with UTF).  So the one thing I thought was almost done is now a week or two off.  On top of that, the really cool feature for this site I was excited about was going to be the addition of an XML-RPC capability, which would allow me to update the site from outside the browser.  That way, I could throw together outlines of posts I wanted to write into a desktop app and work on them as I pleased before publishing them. Joomla has a nasty habit of letting me type 90% of a post and then having me time-out of my session in the admin, causing it to lose almost all of my work.

Unfortunately, that too became a frustration. The plugin, the Movable Type XML-RPC API - is stripping out all brackets, which renders writing HTML impossible.  I contacted the author of the plugin, but as you can see, his native language is Japanese.  This makes communicating a little cumbersome. 

However, I guess in my "emphasize-the-negative, forget-the- positive over 5 year near-depression" I did manage to accomplish something pretty damn big as my cold was beginning to sweep me to the bed - Preppermint was finally migrated to IIS7 and .NET 3.5 after a six-month struggle. When I finally beat the stumbling block that had held us up for so long, the solution was so stupid it almost removed any joy I got from the situation - but I did manage to hit Deirdre up for a "And! that! is! how! it's! done!" Danny McBride high-five session (I tried to find the clip of that from "Hot Rod" but couldn't.  Interwebs, you have failed me.).  I'll explain what all of that means later, but basically it means big changes for Preppermint in the very near future.  So, there was that.  I also built Rock a radio studio in his house, which was pretty cool.

As you can see, when I do sit down to write something it tends to be long because I can't type as fast as I can think, so my mind races ahead and starts making connections to things that I will have to write about as well, before I'm even done typing my last thought. I'm not a particularly slow typer, it's just that I make mistakes too frequently, so I end up having to go back to fix them before I can continue, and my mind wanders. The result is choppy half-work, like this.

Wait, where was I?...

Oh, yes.  As I get back into the groove of writing again on a regular basis, I promise you the posts will be less choppy and more coherent (but will still contain the same amount of parenthetical asides - although I may adopt the footnotes method of Dream Loom). I'd say something about frequency too here, but I think it's better that I prove it before I promise it. I also promise a post about why I hate "Benny and the Jets", a topic that has bugged me a great deal for the past few months.

Finally, I also want to say that the microphones, stands and cords arrived, meaning that I now have all the equipment necessary for podcasts to begin.  I want to get them started before Christmas, but between the template for the site, the comments plugin and Preppermint, I may hold off a couple more weeks.  But I will begin gathering drops, looping beds and writing and producing promos.  I want the podcast to be technically well done, so there's still some research about the mp4 container format, xml feeds and itunes submission to be done.  Rest assured - now that I've spent money on the equipment, this thing is happening for sure.