So here I have been in London for five days and I haven’t even written a decent blog post about it yet.  There’s just so much to talk about!  Julie and I are having a fantastic time.  The folks at MOO are just as cool as you’d think.  Today, they let us take part in their Easter egg hunt.  Sadly, between Julie and I, we only found a fourth as many eggs as the winner, so we did not get to take the giant chocolate egg home with us.  Alas.  After work, they invited me to go to a pub (an actual English pub!) with them.  I had to leave earlier than I would have liked (it was fun hanging out and I hope to get to know them a bit better next week), because we went to the awesome Jonathan Coulton show up in Camden tonight.  Look for videos on YouTube, they should be up soon.

Going backwards in time, I took an evening stroll through an historic part of the city the other night.  It was quite a bit of walking, but coming up out of the Underground into Trafalgar Square was breathtaking. Everything I had seen so far was basically a modern city with some old brick and crazy streets.  I suddenly felt like I was in an old city (in fact, I am).  From there, we walked down to the Palace of Westminster.  We walked right past Downing Street, but didn’t realize it until we had already passed.  From there, we walked around Westminster Abbey and up to Buckingham Palace.  We’re going to see more of some of these places and I’ll keep you updated.  Tomorrow, it’s off to the Tower of London, the Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s Globe!

That’s the other thing.  I already have a place that I post most of my quick little thoughts and they’re already coming into my blog.  After a little digging, I found a very useful plugin called QuickPost that can bring one of the most useful parts of Tumblr’s functionality in to my WordPress blog.  For short text blurbs, you may notice that I stole the design idea from Matt.  I’m saving tons of vertical scroll space by compacting the bits of text into one or two line segments.

If you have any comments about this new design feature, let me know.  I haven’t decided whether I want video and photo “quick posts” to share the same design as the text posts.  That left bar looks kinda weird on videos and photos.

Last night, we visited with Len and Nora and their relentlessly enthusiastic children.  I think I’ve had around 10 awesome portraits made of me (Julie got a couple too).  The ones they gave us will be going up on our fridge when we get home.  We got to be on their podcast, so go check it out.  Tonight, I got to play some “slayer” in Halo 3 with the kids, who ended up teaming up on me and the praising my “skills”.

This morning,  Julie and I went to see the house from A Christmas Story.  It has been recently remodeled to look as much like the house in the movie as they could make it.  It should be noted that most of the scenes in the interior of the house were filmed on a sound stage in Toronto.  We got our pictures taken in front of a replica of the famous leg lamp.

After that, it was on to the Cleveland Police History Museum which houses an exhibit about the “Torso Murders,” complete with death masks made from the remains to aid in identifying the victims.  They also have a home-made shotgun and a gun wielding robot.  From there, we visited the world’s largest rubber stamp on the way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  I’d have pictures from there, but they forbade photographs because they’re laaaame

We’ll be in Cleveland, OH for the rest of the week and will post plenty of pictures of the world’s largest rubber stamp and the taxidermied carcass of Balto, the sled dog.

For these examples, we’ll assume that I’m in a folder that contains the folder that this domain’s files are in. First, we’ll want to make a backup of my files and then delete everything inside the subfolder for the domain. You can skip this if you’re doing a fresh install.

tar czvf dancoulter.com.tar.gz dancoulter.com
rm -rf dancoulter.com/*

Next, check out the Subversion “tag” that corresponds to the version of WordPress you were using. I was using 2.2, so it looks like this:

svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.2/ dancoulter.com/

Now, if you have made a backup of your files (if you’ve made any changes to your theme, or uploaded any files or plugins, you definitely need to do this), simply unzip that backup file you made before.

tar xzf dancoulter.com.tar.gz

If you look at your WordPress site now, you’ll see that it should be working normally.

Now to upgrade (this is the only step you’ll need to do to upgrade files from now on), just point your Subversion “working copy” to the new “tag”. I was upgrading from 2.2 to 2.2.1, so I just ran this command from the ssh prompt.

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.2.1/ dancoulter.com/

Pictured above: Kevin McDonald (Left), Nicolas Sarkozy (right)

The winner was Serbia.  I couldn’t understand what the song was about as it wasn’t in English.  The video makes me believe that it has something to do with lesbians, however.  Despite this, it’s not very exciting, so instead I’ll give you the wonderful performance of Verka Serduchka in Saturday’s Finals which won second place.

P.S.   Verka will always be #1 in my heart.

I can’t believe that one of the funniest and most creative literary minds since Mark Twain is gone. Even though his books often dealt with the concept of seeing one’s death coming, it just doesn’t seem right. He heralded his own death ten years ago when Kilgore Trout (beloved science fiction author) died homeless and alone. So it goes. From what I can tell, Kurt died in the company of loved ones, which is some consolation as his books repeatedly teach of the all-importance of family and friends and close relationships. So it goes.

Vonnegut was one of the authors whose books could entertain and bewilder and teach you how to love all at the same time, whether it was through Bokononism, renaming the population of the United States or simply accepting your fate.

If you’ve never read one of his books, go buy Slaughterhouse-Five: Or the Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death. It begins like this: Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. It ends like this: Poo-tee-wheet?