After a long illness, Dakota John (my “bestest boy”) has passed away peacefully. He had spent the last two years doing everything he loved. We knew he had cancer but were not certain of the extent. We were able to provide him with the best care we could. Despite his condition, he enjoyed his time with family and friends, was excited to go for his walks around town and especially to the park. He managed to enforce the “last bite” rule no matter where in the house he had to venture to get it. His favorite food was french fries. He was 13.

His last days were spent saying goodbye to family and friends who came by the house to see him. We are all saddened by his absence, but we know he is playing once again with his best bud, Logan James.

We’ll see you at the Rainbow Bridge, buddy.

I know it’s been forever since I’ve made an entry here. I’m quite busy and don’t have a lot to say here. But I’ve been having annoying issues with Adobe CS3 products and finally found a solution so thought I’d get it out there.

I have DW CS3 and thought I’d upgrade my Photoshop to CS3 to take advantage of some of the new tools in it. Well, what a mistake. I had nothing but trouble with that darn program - PS, that is. I kept having freezes and crashes. So, I thought I’d just uninstall it and put it on my XP machine instead of the Vista laptop I use 98% of the time.

First, be aware that when installing on Vista, you may run into issues with an error code 2738. The fix for this is:

Start - All Programs - Accessories

Right-click on Command prompt and choose Run as Administrator. This is important.

in the command prompt type:  regsvr32 vbscript.dll   and hit enter.

When the command has run you can close the cmd window. This will allow you to run the installer program for Adobe CS3.

So - when trying to uninstall PS CS3, I could not find any uninstall part to the program. I also looked in the Control Panel , Programs - to remove it, but it would not uninstall. I read somewhere I might need to use the installation disk to do a repair/reinstall, then I’ll be able to uninstall it. yeh- I know, a real pain. So this brought me back to the command prompt thing - I had to run that again in order to get to where I could uninstall the darn thing. It finally worked but ever since then I continue to get an Adobe Updater error whenever I start up Dreameaver CS3.

I figured it had to be related to this uninstall - a remnant of some kind. I didn’t want to get into registry business and really screw things up. So for weeks I hunted and hunted the forums and couldn’t find much - except a lot of angry folks going thru the same thing. I did find out where the culprit was - just not how to fix it. The culprit is the Adobe Updater 5 - and it was recommended to run the updater5.exe and change the preferences to manual instead of auto update. Well, the updater5.exe was broken!!!

The Updater5.exe is located in  Programs/Common Files/Adobe/Updater5

Fortunately, I have DW CS3 on my desktop, too - so I copied over the Updater5 directory (first I renamed the old one, just in case) and was able to run the updater program.  And guess what I found - it was trying to update PS CS3 - which I no longer had, but registry remnants must still be there (even after running a registry cleaner). I deleted those updates from the list, clicked on the Preference link and turned off the auto updater. I opened DW and the nasty updater error was gone!

Despite some of the glitches I’ve been having with 2.6, I’ve grown to like most of the new features. Every time I come across a glitch, I research over at the wp forum and usually find some answers or more questions that guide me to finding my own solutions. I take notes and might publish some of them soon on this blog.

I’ve been playing with doing sidebars at the bottom of the page, even an area that has two sidebars, so it’s like a two-column sidebar - only they’re widgetized, so the user can customize it. The possibilities for Wordpress are far-reaching,  proven by loads of WP enthusiasts out there. Darren Hoyt, Justin Tadlock, and others have proven that WP can be a handy little CMS, with magazine style themes.

But even on a simple level, being able to have multiple sidebars in different page placements makes it nice. I tried using Joomla last year and spent a month learning it from a user and designer approach. I kept wondering how many users would have the time or patience to learn it (remember most users are still novice when it comes to this stuff.)  With Wordpress, the functionality can be built into the theme while the user end remains fairly simple. I like that.

I had the fairly recent pleasure of working with Wordpress 2.5.1. The new dashboard and a few other items took some adjustment, but after awhile, I’ve grown to appreciate it. But, just when I thought everything was going well, they came out with another update, 2.6. Even though there are some very cool features in 2.6, not all the bugs in 2.5.1 have been solved in this latest update. In addition, some hosts with Fantastico installer have rushed right out and updated their offerings, so 2.6 was the only auto install available. While this may seem nice, it can be a problem, especially when you haven’t had the time to really check out the update. Just take a look at the forums over at wordpress dot org to see all the issues.

My main complaint is the problem with Permalinks. There’s been an issue with permalinks: when you activate them and want to “pretty” up your urls to something like www.yoursite.com/page, you use a custom permalink code like this:  %postname%  which WP apparently doesn’t like all the time. It has something to do with the chronological nature of postings. Even though Pages are not chronological, they still use the same database and permalink system has a little trouble with that. One GOOD thing about the 2.6 is the ability to edit the Permalink once you’ve turned it on. There’s a permalink edit line right under the title box. You just have to remember to save the edit, and save the page, too. The folks who work on the WP code have said they’re going to address this issue in an upcoming update. Fingers crossed.

So, now the question is whether I’m going to update this blog. As you can see, it doesn’t get used very much and it’s a useful playground for working with this version - still used by many. I could upgrade to 2.3 at least, I suppose.

Summer in Maine is short and valuable. We make it thru the winter with the promise reward of spring and summer. Although Fall is my favorite, I can’t argue that seeing the lush greens is very inspiring. I like Fall because the air is drier and the bugs are gone.

But even though summer is here, I’m not out in it. My sciatica turned into a full blown disk episode that’s put me on my back for the past month. After the initial week of intense pain, some steroids finally took the inflammation down and allowed the ice packs and chiropractic treatments to take effect. But, I’m on orders to avoid sitting - too much pressure on the disk. Since I want to avoid surgery, I’ll do what I’m told. Some things I’ve re-learned and will share:

• TV is definitely a wasteland, with very few exceptions
• eating while lying down is an art: eat small portions and drink water
• a laptop/notebook computer is a sanity-saver. I found the lapdawg stand and it allows me to work while lying down.
• Pain meds don’t kill pain