The WordPress sites here have been updated to version 2.2.2.

A more substantive post is scheduled for tomorrow. Don’t miss it!

As one travels along the so-called Sunset Highway, near the crest of the Sylvan hill one spots a sign advertising the presence of a church. I don’t have much use for churches in general, but this one amuses me.

Its logo consists, as near as I can tell, of the image of a white bird going down in flames. No, I’m not kidding. You see the stylized white dove (common Christian imagery, that) and above it is a wavy, spiky line that is supposed to denote… something. An aura, perhaps. It looks like nothing so much as a representation of fire.

Can anyone explain what may have possessed the designer to go with such a motif? I’m sure there’s a valid theological reason; I just can’t come up with an idea which doesn’t involve the concept of a church poking fun at itself.

I remain amused, of course.

I have installed a potentially interesting application – BlogJet. I used BlogDesk for a while but was generally underwhelmed by the formatting it generated, so I’m giving BlogJet its 30”“day evaluation period to either impress me or follow its predecessor into oblivion.

If nothing else, the software is prettier than anything else I’ve looked at in its category. Seriously.

There are also some pleasant features for WordPress users, such as the ability to retrieve X-number of recent posts for editing, cross-linking, tagging and such. (Yes, I could start using Technorati tags. I don’t know if I will, though, ”˜cause if I start down that road then I’ll want to go through the entire archive and just, no. Ugh.) One can natively drop in Flickr and YouTube material, but that’s not terribly useful to me at present since I don’t patronize those services. Someday, maybe.

Will this revolutionize the way I post to my journal? Will it at least spur me to post more often? I have no idea. I just like playing with stuff. I am, after all, a geek-dilettante.

(Now to find out what breaks when I click the “Publish” button)

(Uploading. Go figure. I think it has to do with some WordPress settings but I could be wrong.)

(Yes, it was the WordPress setting. Fixing that made uploading work, though the filename the picture ended up with isn’t quite what I had in mind. Oh well. Not bad for a first attempt, only requiring two edits to make everything happy.)

Today I’m getting my first hands-on experience with Windows Vista. So far I’m not terribly impressed. There’s a little bit of good and a fair bit of annoying, if not actually bad. The good consists mostly of the built-in search capabilities and (I have to admit it) some of the visual improvements. On the downside, however, there’s the fact that I have to agree to everything if I’m doing anything actually interesting with the OS, the fact that it runs about as nimbly as a drunken three-legged basset hound, and (as usual) the fact that I have to turn off so many default “features” in order to reduce clutter and annoyance levels. Also, the “power” button icon doesn’t do at all what I thought it would, namely give me some options as to what sort of powered-down state I would like to achieve. Nope, clicking that simply put the thing to sleep without a prompt.

Wait, wait: I have to confirm every time I want to change display settings or show additional processes in Task Manager, but going to Sleep Mode doesn’t require any confirmation at all? Oh, that’s just spiffy.

I just don’t see myself going to Vista any time soon, I’m afraid. Sorry, Mr. Bill.