Rant: Never Upgrade

I’ve eyed the new Microsoft Office 2004 for (Mac) OS X, and upon careful reflection, I know I should not buy it.

I’ve eyed the new Microsoft Office 2004 for (Mac) OS X, and upon careful reflection, I know I should not buy it.

This has nothing to do with my current version of Office for OS X. Actually, that product works and works quite well. I have no complaints and it is an excellent piece of software. So why must I not upgrade? Because of all the other major software upgrades that have bitten me.
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Updates

For my most recent ramblings (which have to do with seeing the documentary “Super Size Me”) go to my political blog.

As has been the case for the past several months, I’m afraid my own personal web site has taken a back seat to the Stonewall Young Dems site that I’ve been working on for so long. Specifically, whenever I’m short for time (always) I try and make sure I have a recent update on my political blog.

Another reason for not writing for the past week (in either place) is that I was blessed to have my mom come and visit for four days. Between that and trying to squeeze in as much work as possible (including long hours over this weekend) my web site maintenance was put off.

But don’t despair! This next week should be much better. Anyway, for my most recent ramblings (which have to do with seeing the documentary “Super Size Me”) go to my political blog.

Postmortem, iBlog

Actually, a lot of my recent criticism of iBlog stems from the fact that I’m so immensely pleased with MovableType. It is not difficult to install, it’s free for the individual (non-commercial) user. It’s network based (although desktop apps exist so you’re not stuck with web interfaces) and quite portable and expandable.

Arguably my website owes a lot to the iBlog application. When Apple released a free license of iBlog to all .Mac subscribers I downloaded it, played around with it, and quickly discovered a glaring security hole.

I wrote a warning article about the security issues and posted links to my article on a few Mac news sites. Thousands of visitors flooded my site and ever since I’d say it’s been “on the map”. Even though I have hardly done anything since December (until now) the site still draws dozens of people per day.

Later on I decided that if I was going to write an unpopular article about the application, I should really be fair and give the package a good shake-down and ended up writing a review of the package and got another several thousand visitors.

I would say the review was mostly favorable. The application had a couple bugs, particularly when publishing the blog, and especially if I tried ever jumping from one computer to another. Really I was forced to pick one computer and use it exclusively for my blogging activity. But otherwise I though the design was nice, the templates were customizable… enough. Of course, I wasn’t a blogging expert—I had just started about a month previous—so I didn’t have much of a comparison.

Time to return and write the epilogue, or more specifically, the post-mortem.
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