OK where do I start? 🙂 I know I’ve not updated the journal for a pretty long time (for me that is :p) and there is a good reason – first of all, over the long weekend I had to switch computers since I got a new notebook and that meant that I had to reinstall Win2k Pro and then reinstall all of my software on the new machine and then transfer over all of the stuff from my old machine. That took about a day and during that time, I was basically offline. Once I got things set up, I got online but had only about two hours of access before my ISP – Prodigy – suddenly stopped working! I spent the rest of the day hoping that they would get things working but nothing! So I went to bed with the hope that it would be fixed in the morning but still nothing when I got up!!

Now I was getting really antsy since I needed my online fix <vbg> and so I signed up with a new ISP from Michigan so that they’d at least have fast response in case they went down too and would you know it, an hour after I signed up with them, my Net access went off again mysteriously :p I talked to the ISP and the problem didn’t seem to be at their end since they said there was nothing wrong over there but DNS resolution for me seemed to be messed up since I could ping servers by IP but not by their URL and since I just knew a couple of servers by IP and none of them were websites, I couldn’t really test whether browsing worked. I spent a couple of hours with the ISP tech support to no avail and even tried a different machine to see if it was my new machine but I had the same problems on the other machine. Then suddenly my Net access was back and I still have no idea what happened!

It was Monday evening by then and I was just too tired to even get on the web – which is unusual for me :p So I played a bit of “Final Fantasy IX” and read a little and so went that day. Then I got into work yesterday and since my new notebook was not part of the domain at work and the company machines all have to go through a firewall to connect to the Net, I had further problems. I had to figure out what I’d done with my earlier machine to get through the firewall all over again and I had forgotten all the details :p Added to that, there was a lot of accumulated work from the long weekend – guess people had time to think up stuff while they were relaxing at home <vbg> Anyway, I finally figured out the firewall stuff a couple of hours later but work was getting really hectic by then and so the update had to wait till now 🙂

Incidentally, the promised Blog 5.0 pre-release didn’t happen for another reason – I had been using the Indy 9.0 beta components for Blog (I know, I know … I should never use beta stuff for production software <vbg>) and sometime over the weekend I updated to their latest CVS sources since Greg Mitchell was having some weird problems with even connecting to an FTP server and I had hoped that the newer source might have a fix in it … but guess what? The newer source actually broke something :p It broke proxy support and now Blog won’t compile because there is no proxy stuff in the new FTP component (they still have to add it …) while Blog expects proxy support 🙁 This means that I’ll either have to wait for Indy to reinclude proxy support or try to go back to the old code I was using (if I can find it and remember all the changes I made to it :p) or do a release which is kinda broken. None of the options look very appetizing to me but I guess the second one is what I’ll have to take – unless they’ve added proxy support over the weekend by some miracle<g> Ah well … that’s my story and I’m sticking to it :p