I spent the greater part of the day importing all of the archived church bulletin articles into Movable Type on the church webpage. So everything is in there right now. Hopefully it will make everything look uniform and easier to update. I’d be surprised if anyone at church notices, even though it took several hours to do.
The Resume Black Hole. Most companies don’t even bother with courtesy letters to potential applicants. I’m beginning to realize I’ll probably be without a job for quite a while.
I wish I had much more to say. But my mind it sorta fried from all this archive importing. So until tomorrow….

Spent the greater part of the day trying in vain to install cgi comments to Todd’s weblog. And it still doesn’t work. “500 Error.” I know it has something to do with file permissions and I’ve changed the pertinent files to 755 privledges. Still doesn’t work. Oh well. Maybe there’s a work around.
Todd’s webpage is hosted on UTK’s Volspace. They’re using some type of CGIWrap software to allow users to use their own CGI scripts, yet still have security on them. I have a feeling this might have something to do with it, but I’ve checked all the paths and CGI calls and everything looks good.
I also told David Shannon about the wonders of Movable Type and how it would allow him to update the church webpage himself. Unfortunately he seemed unimpressed. More work for him to do. And he’s already overworked.
I’d like to be able to have a form on this webpage which would allow users to send me messages. However for obvious reasons I don’t want to reveal my email address either in the output of the form or in the actual code. If anyone can direct me to some piece of code which would allow me to do this easily, please let me know.
Somehow I get tired of local news stories from NYC making national news. Prime example. This pending NYC transit strike. It was the lead story on the Today Show. Like I care. I realize that New York City thinks its the hub of information for the rest of the country, but no one in the heartland really cares if the buses won’t run in Manhattan.

The Mt. Juliet News’ website ( www.mtjulietnews.com ) is in terrible need of updating. This particular edition is from September 2002. Someone should install Movable Type on their webserver and make them update their webpage more frequently. Yet they are still advertising their webpage in each hard copy edition of their news paper.
Todd Burka has a weblog. I set it up for him yesterday. His first post, as the many that will surely follow, is kinda funny.
A new ski trip with Scottsville coming up on the 23rd of December. I guess I need to contact them and ask them if I can go….and pray for snow.

Successfully Installed Movable Type on this webpage. It’s a whole lot better than Blogger. Some of the features:

• You can edit the date stamps of posts. So if you go somewhere and keep a travel log with you, you can post your entries when you get back and they will appear to have the correct dates on them.
• Titles on each post. So I’ll have to think of a catchy slogan for each entry.
• Easily Imported from Blogger. MT made a special import utility and gave special instructions on how to do this. Saves alot of time.
• Multiple Users; Multiple Blogs. This would be GREAT for Newspaper Websites.

I’m glad I took the time to install it. It was well worth the effort.
At times I feel like I have to ask permission for everything. Case in point – this ski trip. I had to pull some strings in order to ask some friends to come with us. I didn’t realized this was a “closed” ski trip. We are in a disturbing trend if we start closing off church activities to outsiders. Will we soon have to ask permission to invite visitors to our church services?
In any case I am going up to Portland tomorrow to share some information about this ski trip. I really guess I should have kept my mouth shut when it came to this trip. There’s always the possiblity that I could wear out my welcome up there. Also folks might find it rude that I’m asking them to pay $100+ dollars for this ski trip – a price that could be reduced drastically by having the ski trip at a different time and not spending the night. I’ve skied for as little as $30 before.

Nerdy Stuff:
Successfully installed Greymatter on the church website. Basically it is a utility which helps webmasters update their webpage easily. Kinda like blogger except the scripts are stored on your own server instead of Blogger.com. Hopefully this will be one step closer to getting the preacher to update the webpage himself instead of me doing it for him. I already maintain too many sites and turning it over to the people who actually “own” the sites will make it easier on everyone.
I’m surprised about how easy Greymatter was to install. I had things going within an hour. I *may* use it in lieu of Blogger on this site, depending if I can get CGIs working on this page.
Trio TV supposedly is running a 50+ hour marathon of old Dave Letterman shows this weekend. But alas, I do not have access to this wonderous television network of Trio TV. Maybe they will end up adding it to the extended basic cable lineup which seems to grow every few years. Interesting thought – when was the last time you heard of anyone wanting to see Leno reruns? It’s because you don’t. No one wants to watch Leno in reruns. Letterman reruns are still as funny as when they were first broadcasted.

Theoretically, the people who do the Friday Five could setup the post to run every Friday from here to eternity. Then they could have the hands off treatment and not have to worry about it, unless some special event happened to where they would need to change the questions. They’ve just chosen not to do one this week. Why should I worry? It’s not like it take some genius to come up with 5 questions for meaningless bloggers to answer.
Also having the hands off treatment is the Mt. Juliet High School Alumni website (mjalumni.com). Seemingly the person who created it has pretty much left it alone, not bothering to delete the duplicate entries and obvious fake entries. For example, “Joe Dirt” is listed as an alumnus of 2004. The last year you can search for is 2004. Makes me wonder what will happen after 2004 when the class of 2005 will want to add their entries.

Friday Five comes from a website called “www.fridayfive.org” These are not random questions I thought up on my own. So just in case you were wondering…..
I spent most of the day making enlargements of church photos at Kevin Bass’s printing company. Kevin was nice enough to let me bother him about it. I hogged Amy’s computer printing out the photos. Digital photos turned out much better than the regular copied photos. I’m going to concentrate on digital photos from here on out. No need to copy meaningless dark photos.
I vote at my old elementary school. Everytime I go to vote I usually try to look up my old teachers and try to see them. A lady from my church is now vice principal, so there shouldn’t be any problems with me trying to see an old teacher. I think my 6th grade teacher and my 5th grade math teacher are still around. So tomorrow I’m going to bring along some old pictures and try to find them.

Is a redesign of this site in order? I’ve had basically the same design and same colors since this site when online. If I do redesign it, the background will still need to be black since I think that looks best. Other colors might change, though. I’m gonna hate having to redo all those cheesy banners which are randomized. Most all of them are in the color scheme of blue lettering on black background. I might have to design the site around that size of banner.
I’ve also thought about putting together a photo page of the people I talk about on this weblog. Just to get a face with the name. So you’d know who “bob” is. Bob already revealed his identity on this webpage a while back. However I think some of the other people might have privacy concerns. So it might not be a good idea just yet.
There is a job fair at Nashville Tech on Thursday. Looking over the list of participating companies, I have a feeling that most of the positions they will be hiring for would be sales positions. I don’t do sales. People are always looking for salesmen. When was the last time you heard of an unemployeed salesmen? Come to think of it, when was the last time you heard of an unemployeed nurse or teacher? People are always getting sick and people are always needing to learn something. Maybe I picked the wrong profession.
I’ve been told I need to get in my application for a job with the state ASAP. The new governor we elect tomorrow is very likely to put a hiring freeze when inaugurated. Since it takes at least a month to get it processed, I might have a chance to get a job with the state before the freeze takes effect. However I’m not sure I want a dead end job with the state.

I went over to a friend of a friend’s house to try to fix her computer. No OS. Bought directly from the state of Tennessee. Obviously something was wrong with the intergrity of the hard disk because I wasn’t able to format it. Solution: Return it to the place of purchase and exchange it for a replacement.
Spent the greater part of the day calling churches to tell them about this anti-lottery movement. Mostly I got answering machines at the smaller churches. No full time staff. I wonder if they listen to their answering machines. The rest were pretty well receptive toward me.
I was told that some kid threw up in church Sunday night during the sermon. The kid happened to be sitting up front on the 2nd row. Our minister didn’t miss a beat. Kept right on preaching.
I wish I could write something profound. But I got nothing new today. Just the same ole same ole that’s been happening for forever.

Yesterday afternoon I converted all of Scottsville church’s webpage to where it would open in Frontpage express. It’s a long story, but the preacher’s daughter wants to take over maintaining the page (Be my guest I told her). She is familiar with Frontpage Express. The pages were originally designed in Netscape Composer. When we tried to open them in Frontpage, it looked terrible. Call it a problem between the browsers. I just wish all the browsers were able to interpret HTML the same.
I also put together a webpage of pictures of the retreat. Tried to make sure I included a bunch of different people in it, and not just people who I knew.
I’m going to go to church later on to type up the announcements in Powerpoint for Sunday. I don’t have a copy of Powerpoint on my machine. I’ve done it before (the person who usually does it is out of town this weekend). Usually takes me about an hour to do it. Not that anybody reads it. Here is how it works. Everyone picks up an announcement sheet when they first walk in the church. Then they get to see these same announcements flashed on the big screen. Then at the end of the service, they get these same announcements read to them. Gotta love it. I wonder if the apostle Paul had this trouble with announcements? People just might get upset if their pet project isn’t read in front of the whole church.