Read about Asides

Oh, as an Aside: Water balloon not exploding in high-speed (From the 31st of March)

I am so totally stealing this video from Talk Like a Physicist, but it is worth it and I promise I won’t do it again. I really don’t have anything intelligent to add except: COOL!

Oh, as an Aside: WordPress 2.5 is out, and WordPress.org is dressed to match. (From the 29th of March)

New and shiny WordPress.org for a new and shiny version of WordPress.

This website is officially not running beta software now, so yay!

[geek]I upgraded after it was released for only 10 - 30 minutes. That has to be a record.[/geek]

Oh, as an Aside: Are you shutting down for Earth Hour? (From the 28th of March)

Earth hour, which takes place on March 29th at 8:00 P.M. your local time, is an event sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund to raise awareness of the dire1 threat of climate change.

What do you have to do? Nothing much, just turn your lights off for an hour when 8pm rolls around. I’m planning on hitting my circuit-breaker for a total blackout, but you don’t have to go that far. Want to participate? Head over to the Earth Hour website for more information.

Now this is one of those “make a lot of publicity but not have much of a real effect” events, so not even the organizers would argue that this would save the world, so don’t worry about that part of it.

Continue reading. »

Notes:

  1. Hyperbole much? Yes and no. My view of climate change is: if we want to kill ourselves slowly, let’s go ahead and do it. []
Oh, as an Aside: Failings of American Education system. (From the 23rd of March)

Many people feel that outsourced jobs are a problem in American; however, it is just a reflection of the failings of the American education system. For several generations, America was a technological leader, and this technology created what are essentially low-leveled white-collar jobs such as telemarketing, informational technology, computer programming, and other support services. While America was the technological leader, these jobs were the source of revenue for the middle class as they moved away from the factory-type jobs. The American education system prepared people to work in these jobs that could not be performed by the most of the world. However, time marched on and the level of technology in the rest of the world caught up. Suddenly, the developing nations were capable of performing the same duties for a much smaller cost.

This is not the first time the American economy has shifted many of its lower-skilled jobs to developing countries.

Continue reading. »

Oh, as an Aside: I’m running Wordpress 2.5, and so far so good. (From the 15th of March)

There are still some issues, but for the most part, everything seems pretty good.

  1. The automatic upgrading is nice, but it still has a couple kinks in it: it says one or two plugins are at the latest version even though it says they aren’t, it died when upgrading wp-phpmyadmin but not until it deleted it, and it upgraded me to a bum copy of Redirection which wasted two hours of time while I thought that AWP was broken.
  2. I still think the Admin panel is way too washed out. If it stays this way, one of my first tasks will be to release an Admin theme. I think everything has a cartoony feel to it, and it is way too bright. (As well as difficult to see.)
  3. For some odd reason the Gravatars aren’t working even though they were on the test install.There is a reason you should allow at least 24 hours between hitting the save button and hitting the publishing. I just forgot to echo it.
  4. Love the new media library. It alone will be worth the upgrade for some people. It auto generates galleries, and makes uploading and editing several pictures extremely easy.

Check out the gallery of screenshots below the fold.

Continue reading. »

Oh, as an Aside: Parlez-vous français? Glowing AJAXed WP Review (From the 14th of March)

I can’t speak it, but I can read it well enough to know that the reviewer approved of AWP.

Vous voulez mettre de l’Ajax dans votre blog WordPress ? Vous voulez choisir où et comment s’affichent les effets Ajax de votre blog ? Alors jetez-vous sur le plugin AJAXed WP, qui n’est ni plus ni moins que le plugin Ajax ultime pour WordPress. Interface très complète, installation et intégration faciles, paramétrage très complet et intuitif : une vraie Rolls-Royce des plugins !

If that isn’t enough, the next line makes it even better declaring “Epoustouflant ! Incroyable ! Enorme !.” So if you read French or have a background in romance languages, head on over to BLOmiG and read the full review.