http://www.ComputerBob.com/journal_archive/2003/11.php
Thank you, Lord, for always loving me, always watching over me, always providing for me, and always forgiving me,
even when I've been ungrateful, unfaithful, and uncaring.
It's getting so that you can't even give things away. In preparation for our move to the Sunshine State, my wife and I decided to sell some of our furniture and household items, and donate the rest to charity. That was easier said than done, as it turned out that I had to call 9 different charities before I could find one that would even bother to come and pick up our stuff. At that time, I read them a list of what we had, and they told me which items they would take. They arrived yesterday with a big white truck and took our kitchen table, large folding table, glider/recliner, patio chairs, wooden file cabinet, and many other items, but, for no apparent reason, they decided not to take our bicycles, weed whacker, or metal file cabinet. And even though their charity also runs a women's shelter that would have loved to have gotten our entire box of non-perishable food items and our entire box of brand new toiletries (shampoos, toothpastes, deodorants, etc.) they politely refused to take those items because "that's a different department." So, now I'll have to spend even more time trying to find a charity that will take those items, and I'll probably also have to find a way to deliver the items to the charity myself. I'm very surprised and more than a little disappointed that charities would choose to make it so difficult for people to try to donate things.
UPDATE: I found a women's shelter that was very happy to take our boxes of food and toiletries. Unfortunately, they
were 45 minutes away, but I took the boxes of stuff to them anyway. When I got home, I called the charity that had given me
so much frustration, and told their director about my experience with them. She was extremely apologetic and said
that the people who picked up our donations should have taken everything that they had committed to taking, and they
should also have taken the box of food and box of toiletries for the charity's women's shelter. She's going to speak
with them about it, to make sure that they treat future donors better than they treated me. In the meantime,
a different charity has agreed to come to our house in a couple of weeks, to pick up our remaining unsold
items.
It's funny how learning one little fact can completely change your mind about something that you thought you had made up your mind about. I thought that I had decided to switch my forums back to using phpBB forum software, but now I'm having serious doubts about the switch. The problem I see is that, while my other Web pages meet the XHTML 1.0 Strict standards, phpBB software currently only meets the old HTML 4.01 Transitional standards. Since it appears that phpBB's creators have no plans to update it to XHTML standards in the foreseeable future, switching to it would require a big a step backwards in terms of Web standards. In contrast, despite all of its faults and the questionable marketing techniques of its owners, at least Invision Power Board software currently meets the XHTML 1.0 Transitional standards. Hmmmm...
My wife and I have been working like crazy for 8-14 hours apiece each day, getting our house ready to put
on the market. I haven't worked this hard in years. And our Virtual Garage Sale has been a
big success, with buyers claiming many items just a few hours after the sale went online. Now, we're waiting for
several people to come and pick up their stuff, but the blizzard that brought us 10 inches of snow a couple days
ago has delayed many of them -- that's why several items are not yet marked SOLD on our sale page.
Unfortunately, our septic tank and well inspections revealed that our 30-year-old septic system does not meet
current codes, and that our well water contains about 30% more nitrates (fertilizer from the field behind our
house) than allowed by law -- I wonder how that has affected us for the past 10 years. So, we're putting in a
new $10,000 septic system and a new reverse-osmosis water filtration system. Though our house will finally be
ready to put on the market tomorrow (the day before Thanksgiving), our realtor says that we would be smart to wait
until after the holiday and do it next Monday morning, December 1st.
Here's the big news to which I alluded last week: I have accepted an offer to be the Distance Learning Manager at a college in the Sunshine
State. The college has 51,000 students, with 6,000 of them taking courses through distance learning methods. I hope to tie up all my loose
ends in the Frostbite State and start my new position about a week before Christmas. My wife and I have been working like crazy to get our
house ready to put on the market, and hope to sell it as soon as possible. For those of you who are local to us, (you know who you are), let
us know if you want anything from our Virtual Garage Sale.
I haven't yet converted my User Ratings pages to use Links Directory software. In fact, I may not have time to do that for quite awhile. For the past several days, I've been extremely busy, working on exciting major changes to both my professional and personal life. I'll be able to write more about those changes next week.
I've also been seriously considering switching my forums from
Invision Power Board forum software back to using
phpBB forum software. Why? Because, even though more than two years
ago, IPB's creators publicly stated that their software would always be free, several months ago, they started charging a $149 lifetime
registration fee, and stopped providing any support to anyone who hadn't paid it, to encourage (i.e. pressure)
everyone to pay for the software. And lately, I've read accounts that say that the latest IPB upgrade instructions are
so poorly written that they almost guarantee that users will mess up their forums during the upgrade process, thus forcing them to
pay the registration fee before they can find out how to fix their forums. If that's true, then I will no longer use or recommend
IPB software to anyone. Though phpBB software doesn't have as many features as IPB software, I know that the phpBB people are committed to
keeping it free and Open Source, so, if I switched back to using phpBB, I'd never have to worry about being pressured or tricked
into having to pay for it. Like my upcoming switch to Links Directory software, if I decide to switch back to phpBB software,
that process may have to wait awhile, until my schedule opens up enough for me to have time for it.
In the past several days, I've checked and re-checked each of the Review scripts that I had originally looked at last week. At this point, I've decided to try the only XHTML-compliant script that I found, even though it doesn't look as fancy as a few of the non-compliant scripts. In the next week or so, I'll install Links Directory and try to edit its underlying code to allow people to review products and services that don't have hyperlinks. That could end up being a lot of work, and afterward, I'll have to manually re-type all of the current reviews in my User Ratings pages. Still, it looks like that will probably be less work than it would've been to try to convert any of the other Reviews scripts that I found to comply with Web coding and accessibility standards.
UPDATE: I wrote to the author of Links
Directory this morning, suggesting that he add a few if-then statements to his product's code, to allow users to be able to
rate/review any product or service, instead of just those that have hyperlinks. A few hours later, I was very happy to receive the following
reply: Version 3.6 will hopefully be out next week. I will try to put that feature in, sounds easy enough... thanks for the idea, it's a
good one.