Sleep, where are you?

I think I need to learn to to sleep all over again. My sleeping pattern is so far out of whack that I’m not sure how to bring it back. You know it’s bad when you find yourself glued to the hotel TV for a couple of hours watching Urban Cowboy at midnight.

Where’s that Lunesta butterfly when you need it?

Gotta go. Looks like a really bad movie about 1970′s roller disco called Roll Bounce is on.

Finally – a solution to desktop alerts in entourage not working on Intel Macs

Ran across this while trying to find anyone that may have the same problem. I like to have the Desktop Alert display the Subject and From when I get a new email. I lost that functionality when I got my new MacBook Pro. Thankfully Microsoft has written a support tip on how to get it back.

You can find it here. Thanks Microsoft. Now let’s get Office 2008 for the Mac out the door (or at least let me know if you need a beta tester). I’d still rather have a real Outlook client, and now the Calendar Items in Outlook2007 look like they were done by the MacBU, but entourage has worked out pretty well so far.

WordPress comment email notification fixed

Here’s how I finally got the comment notification working.

I deactivated the wp-PHPMailer plugin that I installed to help with email issues. Ends up I no longer needed it. What I did need was the realization that WordPress will not send the Author comments to his/herself! It only sends comments from people that did not write the post, so I went to another browser and commented as someone other than me (the author) and I received email notification of the comment immediately.

I can’t believe I spent so much time searching every forum I could find and it ended up being something this simple. Hope this helps someone fighting this in the future.

Here’s the Support Post that made the little light bulb go off over my head.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/100849

Vonage – another nail in the coffin?

Federal Court barres Vonage from using technology that infringes on Verizon’s patents. Vonage will learn in two weeks if this becomes permanent, but they state that this will not hurt their customers. Does anyone know exactly what patents we’re talking about here? I’ve read that it was the technology to allow VoIP calls to talk to people with regular land line service. If that is true how can this not hurt the customers?

As a customer, I’m still pulling for you Vonage, but I’ve got other phone providers on speed dial at this point.

One last issue with hosting my own WordPress blog

I have searched the WordPress.org site, the forums, the WordPress.com forums, Google, and the forums and knowledgebase of my new host, BlueHost.com. I cannot find the answer to my last remaining issue with hosting my own WordPress blog – how the heck to you get comment notification email to work?!

I tried everything I could think of. I even did a live chat with a BlueHost support person and we couldn’t find anything wrong. Installed the wp-PHPMailer plugin and that didn’t work either.  I must have configured that thing a dozen different ways but I was never able to receive an email when someone would post a comment to the blog.

I’m going to post a question on the BlueHost support forums next, but for now I have subscribed to the Comments RSS feed until I get this figured out.  It’s better than nothing.  One step away from perfection.  If anyone has a suggestion please leave it in the comments, I’ll eventually see it in my feed reader.

The move is complete

I’ve been wanting to host my own site for a while now so I finally got off my butt and moved to a web host that supports WordPress for blogging.  I was a Simplehost customer for a  year and a half.  They did a decent job, but I wanted to host my own blog again using WordPress software.  Although Simplehost provides WordPress for blogging, they are way behind on the versions and would not commit to a time when they would upgrade.

Enter BlueHost.com, my new web site host.  I think their pricing is fair and they are running much newer versions of all the software, including the Control Panel that you use to manage your site.  Hosting my own WordPress blog was pretty simple, and I made sure to keep the look as close to what I used on WordPress.com as I could.  One nice thing is that I now have an almost unlimited supply of different Themes and Plugins that I can use, so I doubt the site will look like this for long.

I tried to make sure that all feeds and links redirected correctly,  so if you find a  broken link or feed somewhere, please let me know by leaving a Comment.

Welcome to the new site.