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Has it ever happened to you that you'd hear about a movie, look at the title or read a plot summary and then decide that it didn't look too good and then later find that it was excellent and kick yourself for not watching it earlier? Seems to happen to me quite a bit - but with a slight twist in that I know that the movie would be good, buy the DVD and then can't summon up enough enthusiasm to watch it after the fact :p "Bridget Jones' Diary" was one such movie since I'd bought the DVD weeks (if not months) ago and then I didn't watch it for the longest time and then found it to be excellent. Now the same thing has happened with "K-PAX".

Blog 6.1 is finally out :-) Actually, Eddie over at BetaNews released it before I could announce it since I had the files all uploaded to the server yesterday itself and he asked me nicely and I said that he should :p I have to come home and do all the site changes etc. before I can make an announcement and so usually for me, a new release is a two day process - the first day I create the build, update the docs and upload it to the server from work and on the second day I announce it :-) Incidentally, the three people who tried out beta builds of 6.1 (that's you - Jason, Tyran and Phil <g>) should not try updating their Blog setup using the installer. You should run the upgrade and extract the files to a different directory and then copy over only the TXT and EXE files - this is especially important if you've defined new snippets.

Don't you just hate it when they release a revised version of a book with extra stuff in it and you've already got the older version? I guess this is pretty similar to when I buy a DVD and then find out that they are going to release a special edition with lots of added features on but at least with books this hasn't happened so much in the past. Maybe they've decided to take a leaf out of the DVD makers' book because it seems to be happening much more frequently these days. As some of you may know, I'm a big Terry Pratchett fan and also a hardback hater since I prefer the less bulky paperback (yes, those two facts do have something to do with my rant - let me get to it :p). I'd bought PTerry's (incidentally, Pratchett's called that by his fans - don't ask <g>) "The Last Hero" a while back in hard cover since it was an illustrated book and historically, they haven't released the illustrated hardcovers of PTerry's works in paperback (at least not with the illustrations ....) But now what do I hear? I hear that not only are they releasing a paperback edition with illustrations, they are adding 16 pages of new illustrations! Argh!! Save me from marketers and people out to make a buck!!! The same thing happened (if I'm not mistaken) with PTerry's "Science of the Discworld" - or something similar, I forget the exact title - since they added two extra chapters to the paperback edition. What a gyp!!

But enough of my ranting, since most probably it'll do no good anyway - not unless it inspires somebody to start a global network of people who'll boycott all such consumer-gouging efforts by marketers :p I received an e-mail from somebody saying that they'd settled on Blog as a corporate-wide tool and wanted to register it and pay for it. I sent him the usual e-mail about how Blog is freeware and that if he's worried about the nag screen, then he can simply purchase the relevant component for me and that I would release a new version immediately with no nag screen ... No word from him since then :p Ah well ... guess everybody will have to put up with the nag screen for the rest of their lives - or till the developer decides it's not worth it to have the nag-enabled version and puts a timer or something on it :p I'd be up a creek with no paddle (or even a canoe for that matter <g>) if that happens since I still haven't found a suitable alternative which has all the features of PlusMemo and is free. I guess, we'll deal with it when we get to it.

Another couple of bugs squished in Blog :p Tyran noticed that the current date does not get displayed as bold when you make an entry unless you switch to a different month and back - I knew of this problem but was hoping nobody would notice it :p Ah well ... fixed that yesterday and in the process created a new method to bold all dates with entries for the current month so that I can always call that method from anywhere - in case I find another such instance. In fact, I think I have already found a use for that procedure since I noticed later that the link to an older entry dialog's calendar does not display dates in bold when there are entries for that day :-( Now that I've gotten used to that feature, it's irritating when I find it missing :p Of course, since the link to older entries dialog is on a different form, I guess I will have to simply replicate the procedure on that form as well. Ah well ... at least that's another fix that somebody won't have to point out to me :-)

Yesterday was the birthday of one of my colleagues (a member of my team actually ...) and he invited some of us from work for dinner. I was supposed to go there with my friend Robin and so I went over to his place to meet up with him. His Mom asked me where I was going and I said that it was to a birthday party and she goes "But Christopher said that you were going to a farewell party?" (his Mom calls him Christopher because that's his given name - Robin is actually a sort of a non-hyphenated combination last name ...). I knew there must have been some reason for Robin to say that he was going to a farewell party and so I tried to sort things out by appearing to be a total git who didn't know why the party was being held :p Since, I normally appear scatterbrained to most people anyway - it wasn't too hard <vbg>

Incidentally, Robin and his family are Jehovah's Witnesses and they had some people from their church over when I went over there ... So when I asked Robin about it later, he tells me that members of their faith don't celebrate birthdays and while he and his family aren't really strict about it themselves, that his family doesn't like to sort of lose face in front of other members of the church and so that he'd told them that he was going to a farewell party to ease the situation. And then of course, I had to come along, blurt out the birthday party bit and spoil the whole thing :p Of course, Robin's Mom called him and asked him about the whole thing later while I was there and he was able to patch things up by telling her that I was totally clueless about most things and that I'd got it wrong <g>

The much anticipated (I don't really think so :p) and the much delayed Blog 6.1 still keeps on trudging forward. Tyran found a bug with the new BlogNext and BlogPrevious tag code in that sometimes it points to the main page instead of the next or previous page. I did some debugging and realized that this was because of a logical bug in the code which would mostly crop up only if you were using Monthly archives. That's fixed now. At the same time, Tyran suggested an improvement to the HTML code snippet feature - to place the cursor between the beginning and end tags if no text was selected in the edit window. Did that too. I think I am ready to release Blog 6.1 unless Tyran (or Phil - to whom I still haven't got the beta yet actually :p) find any more bugs.

I'd like to run through a full private beta cycle before I release Blog 6.1 since that way I can be sure of not having to do an interim bug-fix release while I work on Blog 7.0. The next release is going to involve quite a few major changes and depending on what has been completed - it might be awkward to try to release a bug-fix release in the middle of development. Of course, there is the alternative of fixing the code from the 6.1 release and then migrating the changes to the work-in-progress code as well but I always hated that approach since there is the possibility of missing something and introducing a new bug. Anyway, everything's moving along - slowly yet surely.

Another fairly busy weekend :p Had an office party Friday evening since five or six people are leaving the company and they wanted to cut costs by holding a joint farewell party <g> The party went on till late but I was tired by midnight and decided to get out - guess I'm getting too old for these shindigs :p Got home and got to bed around one o' clock but had to get up again around six o'clock for prayers. Went right back to sleep after prayers and didn't get up till around 9:30am :-) I was still recovering from the party though and I don't think I did much except to read "The Eleventh Commandment". If I feel this sore and lethargic after a night out where I did not drink, wonder how the ones who really drank beyond their limits feel the next day? Fortunately, my friend who tapped out last time and started puking wasn't that drunk this time - in fact, I dropped him home before I got home :-)

Sunday was again quiet. I begun a new Ludlum that I didn't know was in my library since my brother had bought it while I was in the US. It's called "The Prometheus Deception" and is billed as "the best Ludlum ever!" on the back cover. Not sure how well it stands up to the rep though since I haven't even gotten beyond the first chapter yet. The reason I haven't had much time to read was because I had to attend another wedding! It must be the season for weddings since my friend Imthi got married last week, I've heard of at least a couple of more weddings this week and then had to go for this particular one where our neighbour's son was getting married. I went because my Mom wanted to go but didn't have anybody to go with but didn't expect anybody to be there that I knew but strangely enough, turns out that I know the groom :p No, I'm not being facetious here - though they are our neighbours, I've never seen the son since I was abroad when my parents moved in to our current house and by the time I came back, the son was abroad. So I'd never seen him before but I realized at the wedding that he had been part of a company which supplied computers to my former (and current) employer. Guess, it's a small world after all :-)