If I could only understand a small part of what you are talking about Nez. I guess my technological talent days have long passed. I was a master of the old school world-- paste-up and mechanicals for text and graphics, actual physical cutting of workprints on the Steenbeck, large scale graphic creations on brown paper with pinwheel cuts and chalk for transfer and so on. Oh, and the famous "A" and "B" rolling of originals at Du Art.
All that is now lost to the past, overtaken by digitality.
In 13 months when I upgrade the whole website I hope you are available for the job.

You a little bit of spam leakage...at least in one post. Hope you come up for air soon. (I hate coding!)

I'm glad you were able to get almost everything working after the upgrade. My site is due for one, but I've waiting because I don't want all of my plugins + my theme to explode.

hey RC, chances are i will be. and you are right. (I miss my Threaded Reply plugin already) I saw this happen with my film knowledge in film school. as i went through it, digital was rising fast, a lot of changes i saw just in my time there. luckily, the fundamentals of light and photography still apply once you bone up on the rest, with digital. it's funny that "cut and paste" and other terms are probably used by many who have no idea where that comes from.

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rafa—i hear you man. me toooo.

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eric, not eveyrthing, not yet. i mean as i said, i really miss one plugin and one hack that i had worked into the pages, this THreaded Reply plugin that let you "reply" to another commenter on a post, and the hack in the code that let the gravatar show up by each comment. maybe i just have to move the code snippet. dunno. i have enough on my plate tho, now. i dont have time to be dicking with code. i may have to lose some sleep for a week. stay up late, get up early. act like i'm back in college trying to break out the sky.

my poor smiling icon will not show. how plain i feel!

and eric, i usually test changes out in a clone of this blog that is lockedup. but i just made a dumb move last night. not sure why. i think i bought the hype about how easy this one would be; they all were easy before this one.

i'm going to be ironing the kinks out of this for a bit. but the good thing is, i really see this upgrade of MT as...almost when Mac when to OSX from Classic. it really does drastically change everything and i think being open source now will really put some motion into things and bring in the developers in a big way. some of the things it does already (like have actual stats built into the MySql which will be far more accurate than any stats package (which always fluctuate depending on what you use) are really fantastic and are going to make using the upgrade a blast.

its a drag because that's all in the back. here, nothing really changes except when it doesn't work right! like my damn gravatar.

visualize howling.

I am swallowing my own words...what the hell...

that's cool that MT has gotten so much better with this release. I've been using WordPress for 2+ years and I have a similar testing area that I call "Eric's Sandbox" :-) I always have this feeling of dread whenever I update. It seems like it's never as easy as it should be...

Here's hoping that the howling does not last for too long ;-)

it's very cool. i sort of don't care of the "wannabe wordpress" look of the backend, i see no reason for that, but WP has grown a lot and a lot of people use it now, so the interface for the backend user is, of course, a "hot" look to emulate. now maybe i'm just being biased, but SixApart is a company very experienced with blogs/livejournals (they own Vox and LiveJournal and TypeKey and Movable Type) and they are hardly beginning; i think MT will pull ahead once they are past a few minor updates on this major one, and the 3rd party developers have time to write some more junk...and SixApart has time to then integrate those plugins into the core of MT, etc etc.

The problem is that MT for a while was very proprietary and techie and cloistered off, anti open source, pay-for-everything type of mentality. I've watched them go from that attitude to this final upgrade which has seen an arc of them realizing that 2.0 type interaction is the way the web is moving fwd. so it took them a minute to get hip (its only now they are finally including a theme selector in the backend; i design allll my junk from the ground up usually, ugh), but they have a lot of time in the scene.

but honestly, that's all really sort of after-the-fact reasoning. because as you can imagine, using them since 2002 or so, i can't hop off now. :)

yes, your with MT for the long haul :-)

Ha, good old cut and paste and effing rubber cement and offset photography! I guess younger people would laugh and laugh to realize how it was done in the past. I can still do some high level photography and composition in the viewer of the camera, but I have to get it right in the original pixels in the camera since I have no feel for digital manipulations.
I do like that I can take over 700 shots in an afternoon on a Canon A300 and I can use almost all of them. When I travel I can document an entire botanic garden if I have enough batteries charged. Back in the last century with 35mm emulsion it was often a matter of luck if everything was just right or not. You would have to stop up and down to be sure about the light. Shoot everything three times.
Eventually I will learn some new things, but the investment in learning time I just have not been making and I have no one here to mentor me.
Learning to write complicated building inspection reports with many photo illustrations on a two column page up to 40 pages on WORD took me forever and involved many hyperventilation sessions over months.
I think WORD is horrible and at 40 pages it starts to get shaky and do weird things, none of which I understand how to prevent. The computer {for me} harbors magic genii and my understanding of their ways {code} is remote.
No mentor and no school means lots of error. I read the Dummy books and the manuals, but so much info I need does not appear there.
I'm sure I should be composing illustrated text some other way, but I actually finally learned WORD so I continue. I shall move forward to something better one day.
I know many readers are probably amused by my ignorance. At least it serves that purpose.

I'm too lazy. I sticking with blogger. Sure it has all the variety of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but right now I don't care. Having to create my own CSS sheets or micromanage scripts is not my idea of fun. Way back when yes...but not today.

yeah, rafa..it does all depend on a vato's needs/wants. really, just having a page to type ins good enough, when you think about it. but for types like me, well. jeje. nuff said.

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RC, i hear you man. ive been feeling that way. i am self taught on all my computer programs and GAH it is so hard and so tiring. these progs are so deep, you can know so much. you can use them for years and still learn things. it can be very daunting, and some just are impossible to get down without tons of free time. a mentor/teacher is the only way to go on some of these.

BUT you are right. Word is terrible for what you are doing. you want to be using the most basic functions of Quark or Indesign (layout apps). all you'd need to do is learn a few basic commands/keys (draw text box, draw picture box, resize pic, etc) and you would save worlds of hassle. you are trying to use Word for....above and beyond what its best at, which you know yourself. these apps are spendy, but what do you use? PC or mac? please say mac.

anyone "amused" with your "ignorance," i hope, is at least wise enough to keep it to themselves in here. there is no person who knows everything. those who act like they do give far too much away.

It's really OK that people are amused by my ignorance. Even I am. I just finished leafing through a 400 page, 4000 illustration tropical plant book while the power cut out as Dean passed by. I only knew about 10% of the names and I have been in the tropical plant field for 30 years.
I know you will be upset to hear that I use a PC. I never even touched a computer until July of 2003 and when I told the computer person who was supposed to advise me what to get {I emphasized it was for business but would also have to store massive photo files}-- he sold me a PC. At the time I was profoundly naive.
All of my stuff is on Msoft on a PC, now my third PC in four years, and I am completely in agreement with you that before the next giant step, I must go Mac.
I am hoping that now that Mac has the capability of also running PC software {at least I think that's what happened some months ago} it may be easier to transfer all of my stuff over to those Mac formats.
Hell, I can't even burn discs to use as backup of my photo files on the crappy equipment I have now. It is supposed to do that, but never has.
I went to CompUSA in Carolina, PR because I had to replace my fried {don't know why} no name PC the same day {had to send out a $1200 report}, I traveled across the sea 16 miles each way on a boat and drove a car there 50 more miles each way, and the top three lovely models they had that I loved were not in stock and I needed one THAT DAY, so I bought some wacko brand called CISNET because they had it. Had to also buy a home version of Msoft Office because the crappy computer did not have it. And so on. Needed a new printer that day too.
I'm on a hiatus from my regular routine from September 23 of this year until November 2008, so in the interim, if you can advise me how to start over, but hang on to my files, you are welcome.
Later when you are done with your current rush to raise Nita and birth the documentary at the same time {hard to push those pointy little documentaries out} I will email you the details of my vastly ignorant present computer morass and the better place I hope to be after elections 2008. No rush now.
I do have three hard drives backing it all up presently, I think. I can never tell if they are actually backing or just sitting there.
Ignorance is really not bliss.

"above and beyond what its best at,"
I didn't know WORD was best at anything, but if it is, similar programs from competitors must be abysmal. Again, I'm too ignorant to opine validly.

on mac at least, i dont really have any issues using it as a word processor document. just typing, formatting typing. maybe an image on the cover page of a manu, but you can do an entire manu in InDesign or Quark anyway...it's really the way to go once you have your edit. but i write the manu in Word. So far, its fine, even with my book that exceeds 300 pp.

I use Wordperfect and I prefer Word, so RC, your absolutely right.

I know you will be upset to hear that I use a PC. I never even touched a computer until July of 2003 and when I told the computer person who was supposed to advise me what to get {I emphasized it was for business but would also have to store massive photo files}-- he sold me a PC. At the time I was profoundly naive.

—RC

naw, i'm not upset. sure, i've had one a long time—since my 8600 running 8.6, back when you could reasonably argue that PCs were superior (in terms of actual computing, not GUI or any of that discussion about usability/asthetic). and true, there's no doubt that by now Mac is creaming PCs in terms of computers that look and work beautifully (but are expensive, verdad). but hey, i just happened to get into macs because i got one second-hand from NYU when i worked the video floor and they replaced all their 8600s and 9600s in the AVID edit rooms with G4s.

and if you want to know if your drives are backing up, search for a file that you know is on your main HD, but limit your Search to one of your backup drives. see it the Search pulls up duplicates of files that should be getting backed up.
i mainly meant i hoped you have mac because then, well...it's easier to transpose my knowledge to your situation. and to go back and forth with such things as applications.

Thank you very much for the help and advice Nez and commenters. I shall solicit more help by email in the future. The computer compost turnover is a few months away yet for me. Yes the Mac costs money and I have the bucks faced in another direction at present. I have to do a lot of traveling and pay a lot of airfare for a while until the cash catches up and then I shall need the mentoring on what to buy.

well, definitely let me know when. because i've got a nugget or two of wisdom on that end that i'd love to share as often as possible, simply because i paid dear prices in mistakes, etc, to gain them. you know how it goes. cost the universe a few less pain molecules down the line. less frustration, more joy. less pulling your hair out over what could be a toy.