I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth! Seriously! While life has gotten more hectic (read: interesting) thanks to Andrew, my lack of time is exacerbated by my MacBook Pro’s half-completed repair.

I took my MacBook Pro in for repair a few weeks ago for the notorious logic board replacement, and during the repair my top case was damaged in a way that doesn’t allow me to use the keyboard, trackpad, or power button for the time being.

So, the machine has been powered on and running for the last 14 days straight, tethered to my desk and unable to be used around the house (which is where I tend to use it most now that Andrew’s around).

To make matters even worse, I switched to a new HDD during this logic board replacement, and I’m half way between a restored workspace from a backup and a fresh install. I can’t fully return to my regular workspace until I get my top case replaced, and I can safely power on/off the machine during installs/backups/restores.

So, right now, I’m treating this period of limbo-time as a bit of a break from the regular grind. It’s nice to refresh my head, and work on some other things I’ve been meaning to do for months.

That said, I’m still fixing bugs in, and adding small features to FuzzMeasure Pro. I’m also being fully responsive to emails and support. I’m just not spending every free minute that I’m away from my day job and family on the computer. That really only means I haven’t been able to post blog entries so often, and haven’t touched NetNewsWire for a while.

I could probably post tons and tons of stuff talking about what I’ve been doing these past few weeks, but it appears I’ll have to just bottle it up for a another time.

I’m not sure where his iPod went, but Andrew (my newborn son) showed up on Saturday September 10th at 6:53AM at the very healthy weight of 9 pounds, 15 1/2 ounces.

Needless to say, my response to emails might be a little spotty over the next few weeks.

I finally got off my butt and set up the commenting plugin for pyblosxom. Many folks have asked me to add this, and I’m happy to oblige. You kids just try to keep it civil, mmmkay? I can almost hear the tidal wave of comment-spam that’s heading this way…

Another important improvement to the site is the permalinking. Previously, I used the default pyblosxom method of providing permalinks using a post’s date/time. Now I use the far more readable method of providing the path/name of each individual post. It was so easy to fix, but I just haven’t really sat down and tried to figure it out before. Since I was poking around with the comment stuff, it seemed like a good idea.

If you encounter any trouble with the commenting system, linking, or other web issues, you know where to reach me (hint: scroll to the bottom of the page).

The design of this main page is in currently in flux. This is something I’ve been meaning to fix for a long time, and I’m happy to have finally gotten started on it.

There are still some bugs in the site that I’ll have to correct, which I hope to get fixed over the next few weeks. In the meantime, it’s a huge improvement, and I’m looking forward to posting some new (somewhat useful) articles soon.

I experienced another mail backlog that lasted about a month, it seems. So, if you sent mail to website@, and didn’t hear from me right away, then you may have a reply sitting in your box right now.

It turns out that MySQL corrupted some key FogBugz databases and I didn’t really realize it. Yesterday I had to screw about in mysql to get things repaired properly, and now things seem to be okay.

At the same time, a search index table from my wiki was corrupted, which would cause errors to fire after editing a page. The wiki still worked, but it was annoying to see. I finally figured out (and corrected) the cause of that shortly after fixing FogBugz.

So, if you sent me mail, and I didn’t respond right away, I apologize. If you still didn’t receive a response, and were expecting one, poke me again and I’ll get back to you. Normally I’m quite responsive, when the system allows it.