Most of my friends and acquaintances have stopped forwarding me chain emails. This is likely due to the fact that, bothersome skeptic that I am, I usually research the email and write back to the sender to explain how their original email is incorrect, a hoax, or a scam. I do get forwarded some chain emails that are legitimate, but they are few and far between. I haven’t been keeping stats on this, but I would have to say that more than 90% of these types of email turn out to be bullshit, and I think I’m being fairly conservative with that estimate.

I last wrote about this subject back in 2006, when I discussed this post-9/11 Nostradamus chain email that I took a few friends to task over. Suffice to say that my views haven’t changed much since then.

The bit that sent me off today was an email about little girl from Poland who was severely injured in a fire. The girl, who’s name is Alexandra Kuczma, is only identified as Alexandra in the email. The email goes on to explain that she narrowly escaped death in a fire (true), that she requires a great deal of surgery and rehab (true), that her parents have no money to pay for this having lost everything in a fire (true), and that for every person who forwards this email her parents get $0.03 (complete, utter, and total bullshit).

How anyone in this day and age can think this is true escapes me. Does anyone stop and consider how metering out money based on email forwarding would be done? Does anyone stop to, I don’t know, maybe check snopes.com to see if there is any information on this email there? Oh wait, there is. It’s right here - I found it after literally 10 seconds.

Another thing that pisses me off is that the version I have of this email contains graphics and disclaimers for two hospitals - the Cleveland Clinic and Driscoll Children’s hospital. So either some ghoul tacked those on in the hopes of making this look more believable, or (probably more likely) they were forwarded through these hospitals by yet more gullible people. This is most likely because there are literally hundreds of email addresses on the forwarded version I received (as an aside, what a nice harvest for your average spammer out there.)

However, the absolutely most irritating part of this email was this little snippet someone inserted right before the story, which I quote in it’s entirety:

If you don’t do this…you don’t have a heart!- Go to the bottom!!!

Luke 6:38 Give, and gifts shall be bestowed on you. Full measure, pressed, shaken down, and running over, shall they pour into your laps; for with the same measure that you use they shall measure to you in return.”

Yeah. Um, about that. Save me your admonitions. It’s got nothing to do with my heart - I’m not going to do it because I have a brain.

It’s a sad situation, and it would be nice to be able to do something to help this little girl. Unfortunately, forwarding emails isn’t going to help anything. Cash donations would probably be nice for the family, but from the snopes article it looks like there is no easy way to do this. The more cynical side of me also notes that this would require more work than hitting the “Forward” button.

So it goes.

It’s rare that you work through an upgrade that goes exactly as stated in the documentation. But that’s what just happened with my most recent Wordpress upgrade. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since in the year or so of running this site on Wordpress the worst problems I’ve had could be classified as only “minor annoyances”. All these years in IT have taught me to be a little cautious though, so I waited about two months before pushing the upgrade out….well, to be honest it probably had a little more to do with my procrastination than any desire to be cautious, but the former sounds so much better.

So I’m up and happy on 2.0.3, and all my plugins seem to still be working - this final post through Ecto will validate that everything is well and truly happy. Kudos to the Wordpress team on an excellent product….

Wordpress 2.0 was released around a month ago, and in that timespan I’ve been dreading going through the process of upgrading. Not that I didn’t want to - there are a number of reasons why I wanted to move up, the most important of which is that from where I was at version 1.5 I would frequently run into odd plugin issues.

But that is no more - as of around 30 minutes ago rants.psychoticpineapples.com is running the latest and greatest version from the hard-working, under-appreciated, and genius developers at Wordpress. All the difficulties that I was imaginging were no problem at all. The content came over fine, including all the links and graphics. The plugins that I use the most - Delicious Integrator, Spam Karma, Amazon Media Manager (not entirely integrated on the site, but in the works) - all worked fine. The theme I use - Equix - still looks the way it did earlier this morning, including the parts I painfully designed in Photoshop by myself (there was a warning on the page for Equix talking about a possible problem with the theme and archive pages, but I’m not seeing that).

This is all exactly what I was hoping - a nice, painless upgrade. And that’s what happened - I was able to backup my existing installation (well, OK, I very anally backed it up about 3 times on two different machines - but that’s more related to my OCD than anything else), follow the upgrade instructions, and then be back up and running. The complete downtime for the site was no more than 10 minutes. And some of that was me off making a pot of coffee. The perfect upgrade.

Thoughts on the upgrade? Well, as I mention above I’m only about 20 minutes into the new version, but the first thing I picked up on was the speed improvement. My pages are generating and loading faster than they were in the past. The other thought concerns the management console - the plugin configuration works across the board on all the installed plugins, they’ve cleaned up the interface a bit, and it just looks better.

Now for the big question - with this upgrade out of the way will I stop avoiding my weblog and post more often? One would hope so, but only time will tell….

Update: Ahhh, perhaps I raved too soon! I use the very excellent Ecto tool to post, manage, and generally keep some measure of control over my blog posts and the Wordpress 2.0 upgrade broke the ability to upload images to Wordpress from Ecto. This was discovered by trying to upload my little squirrel buddy at the top of the post to my server. However, there is a work-around that was able to employ which fixes the problem for now, and my guess is that this will be officially fixed in a maintenance release somewhere down the road.

I’m readying myself for the pain - WordPress 2.0 is out, and by all accounts is well worth upgrading to. The only downside I see is that….well, I like the way my site looks right now! And to get things like this involved many hours of pain and suffering….mostly my own.

If you’re truly geeky you can read the official announcement here. Don’t expect things to change overnight, though. We’re heading out for vacation this Thursday - and I’m thinking that this is definitely something that can wait.

If you’re looking for something a bit more, er, human and normal - I’ve got a number of half-finished posts that I’m looking forward to finishing off while sitting around a pool in Orlando.

Oh yeah, the picture. Ummm, it really has very little to do with the subject of the post - well, other than the fact that it looks like the laptop I’m using to write this. I’m feeling at a very low creative ebb right now, so this is as best as it gets.

Stay tuned…

Out in San Diego again, and very tired. The flight out was delayed, the connecting flight out was delayed as well, so I was very delayed in getting out here. A trip that normally only lasts eight hours from the time I leave my house stretched out into 15 agonizing hours of sitting in airports and on planes. Four or so fitful hours of sleep later I was at work prepping for a meeting.

On the plus side that was yesterday and I did manage to get about ten hours of sleep in last night. Things seem a little less blurry, and I feel a little more coherent. I’ll be finishing up the last of the migrations for our client here in San Diego tomorrow, but after that I will have the rest of the weekend free to enjoy San Diego. Which is probably a good thing, as I don’t think I will be coming out here all that many more times - well, at least where this client is concerned.

So, as to the subject of this email, which is decidedly not related to work in any way, shape, or form. I’m a bit excited about the latest version of Tinderbox . I downloaded and upgraded a week or so ago. This is actually my first chance to work in it (for those of you who don’t know, I keep my weblog and some other writings in Tinderbox). At a very high-level, and without really having a ton of time to try all the things that are talked about in the release notes I do have to say I like what they have done. There are some subtle things with the user interface - it feels much smoother now than it did before. I will spend some more time in this app over the weekend and will probably post again on it….

Now as to the other subject - NaNoWriMo. This is the shorthand for National Novel Writing Month, an interesting little event that I read about last week. The premise behind this is that you spend one month writing a 50,000 word (or more) novel.

This is taking the premise that everyone has a novel in them and raising it to a whole new level. Per the insane gentleman who started this (fellow by the name of Chris Baty), the thing that is keeping everyone from writing is….well, not having any reason to write. Or, more accurately, the lack of having a deadline to complete their writing.

There are two ways you can participate in this insanity - first, you can pick November (which is the official month), sign up on the NaNoWriMo Website and participate with a whole slew of other idiots (er, I mean fellow travelers on this insane journey, or something like that). Or the other suggestion is to pick a month and try to go it either alone or with as many other socially challenged, and stupid friends as you can get to go along with your harebrained scheme.

The first thing that came to my mind when reading about this was “hey, doesn’t this result in a whole slew of garbage being written?” Well, this Baty guy has an answer - he notes that it is because you are writing so much garbage that you can complete your insane novel in a month. That by having this ridiculous deadline you are enabling yourself to - basically - write crap and not care too much about it.

As I read further about it - and yes, I was intreguied enough to buy Chris’ “No Plot, No Problem” book about this event- every single objection I could muster was smoothtalked by this used-car-salesman/novel writer.

My final thought was “what kind of idiot would actually want to go through with this?”

And of course, the next thought was - yeah, I’ll probably do it.