Upgrading to WordPress 2.7.1

Today, I'm in the process of manually upgrading WordPress to 2.7.1 so you may see some anomalies.  But at least this will be the last manual update I will have to do.

I hope all the plug-ins and themes I've set up remain intact.

One Last Exam

Let me write one last piece of awesomeness tomorrow night and I'll be back to updating the site.

No Update this Week…

...on account of being all the way in New Orleans.  I had an awesome time tonight and will post LOTS of pictures and stories when I get back - though I have about 4 mid-terms waiting for me when I get back.  I'll be fine though. 

I'm alive and well.  I'm leeching free Wi-Fi off someone in this quiet suburban neighbourhood.  But I have to wake up in a few hours so I'll be going to bed.

I'll end with this:

2 Corinthians 5:7 - "We walk by faith, not by sight."

Day of Giving Pictures

I posted some pictures of the Rotary Day of Giving.  I wrote an entry detailing the day in the journal.

Oh yeah, I put pictures up a long while ago of the December 17th, 2008 Raptors game against Mavericks.  I meant to write an update post for that too but Raptors sucked that day and they suck now.  The seats were 100-level.

Song of the Week #21: ATB – Made of Glass

This song was first recommended to me by a distant friend and I think it's fitting for it to be the first song of the week for 2009.  In a world experiencing economic recession, the focus has certainly shifted away from the environment and the lyrics are definitely about the fragility of the world in which we live.  From ATB's 2007 album, Trilogy, the song of the week is "Made of Glass".

I picked this song because a lot of it ties into a lot of what I've learned and what I've been thinking lately.  So, I've written these thoughts in the journal section to outline what the themes of 2009 will be for me (if everything goes well).

I'm warning you that it's a very long journal post and it's more for structuring my thoughts than something I typically write for readers.  But I publish it anyway to be more open on here. 

Another change is that I'm posting the lyrics here now, so here they are:

A change is coming I can sense it now
The weight is lifting and I'm sinking down
Birds are flying in the trees below
The tears are coming, I just let it go

If I could, I'd hold this moment
If I could, I'd make it last
Sometimes life just seems to shatter
Like we're made of glass

Breath on the water, dust in the sand
Make this moment last
Breath on the water, dust in the sand
We're all made of glass

I feel the wonder in my flesh and bones
I feel the hunger, will you take me home
Birds are flying in the trees below
The tears are coming, I just let it go

Sometimes life just seems to shatter
Like we're made of glass
If I could, I'd hold this moment
If I could, I'd make it last

Breath on the water, dust in the sand
Make this moment last
Breath on the water, dust in the sand
We're all made of glass

Gallery Update

I added the pictures from Victoria's birthday karaoke party on November 15th, 2008.  Not much is different from what you can see on her Facebook profile.  I added the three videos that were taken that night, however.  Quite some lively performances.  Well done guys. 

As I post this message, the gallery program is still uploading all the pics and the videos.  Estimated time remaining was 3+ hours when I wrote this.  So anybody visiting my site now and within 3 hours will only see a partial gallery.  (Check the time of this post to see if it's done or not).

Spammers

Just wanted to let you know that those typical spamming bots that crawl through the Internet searching for blogs to spam comments about Viagra, porn, and the like have crawled through andrewchow.com.  This is evidenced by looking through my server logs about who's been visiting my site.  (Don't worry, I have no idea about the names of individuals who visit the site.  I just know visitor numbers and IP addresses, which have been increasing steadily over the few months.  This data helps me plan out if I need more power and problem spots on the site.)

However, I have taken precautions to prevent comment spam in the form of multiple special plugins and through WordPress's own Akismet program so that spam shouldn't make its way on to here ever.

You may have noticed a slowdown of my site.  This is partially due to all these spambots going through every single entry of my site.  =/

FYI

For the wall, if your comment is truncated with a [...] at the end, it just means the rest of your comment will be shown in a tooltip when you mouse over (i.e., hold the mouse cursor over what your wrote).

Yes, the gallery is slowly being updated still.  I have lots of photos past and present.

Gallery Update

Added some more albums to the gallery.

Again: If there is something you don't like up there and want it down, let me know ASAP in the comment, e-mail, MSN, Facebook, or wherever.  You can also pre-empt this by letting me know before it even gets up there if you distinctly remember. I have thousands of photos and it would be nice if the gallery was as complete as possible in chronicling all the memories everyone's had.

Site opened to public

I've officially opened the site to the public (this means navigating normally through www.andrewchow.com and not through secret URLs).  I know a lot of people's computers are different and internet browsers like to interpret things differently.  So, let me know of any bugs that need squashing, concerns in the gallery, don't like what's in the random image rotation above, having trouble commenting on things or etc., etc., etc.

I feel I can open the site up in this state.  The gallery will take quite some time to update since I have a lot to upload on a backlog.  So expect that section to be continuously updating.

Again, I don't know how everyone's computers behave so let me know if something acts up.