15 January 2008

Rain continues

Heavy rain fell again overnight. In anticipation, the shops damaged yesterday were sandbagged against further flooding. (See photo.) Today we had some breaks in the weather, though the clouds remained and the rain returned in mid-afternoon. The Bruce Highway north and south of Proserpine reopened, but the road from here to the highway was still closed the last time I checked. Neither the mail nor the newspapers arrived in the morning; Eric hasn't gone out again to see if they came in later. Update: The roads are all apparently open, and I just phoned the newsagent who says the papers arrived around lunchtime. Now to brave the rain and go collect one!

14 January 2008

A good old-fashioned wet season?

Yesterday and today have featured rain, lots of rain. A weather pattern centred on our immediate area has dumped over 350mm (14 inches) of rain on us, and it's still continuing. Last night a huge amount of runoff down a creek that runs under the main street of town met a high tide and spilled up through the drains, washing a load of mud against one of the buildings on the downhill side of a low spot in the road and breaking windows. The news reports said the supermarket was flooded, but in fact it was the chemist shop at the other end of the building, with the travel agency next door suffering too. Eric went out during a break in the rain around 9AM and took some photos, some of which are below. Meanwhile, the excavation at the site of the new marina has turned into a lake. The first photo below was taken on 5 January, just before the workers came back from their end-of-year break. Since then they have deepened and widened some of the excavation. Today they moved some of their equipment to higher ground and then presumably had the day off.

10 January 2008

Upgrade of three websites to WordPress 2.3.2

I have now upgraded three more websites to WordPress 2.3.2, so they are all done now. This time I made no mistakes in the sequence of work, so each upgrade went fairly quickly—but in each case I forgot (despite my notes) at least one tweak until I noticed that the site wasn't displaying quite right and realised that I had forgotten to activate a plug-in or replace a file in the theme or do something equally trivial.

08 January 2008

More travel photo albums

I've been using JAlbum to put together digital photos albums for a bit over a year now. I started with a fairly simple design for the album from my trip to Europe and used the same design (with colour changes) for several Australian trips. In the meantime, JAlbum (a free, open-source program, written in Java, that runs on Linux, Mac and Windows) has gone through several upgrades, and so have the album themes. A few weeks ago I was playing around with the latest iteration of the basic Chameleon theme and found a combination of options (including colour scheme) that appealed to me. So I'm now using that theme for some of the albums from our 2004 around-Australian trip. The first few albums from that trip are still in the old theme; I'll update them to the new theme later. The first of the new-theme albums is from the flight I took over the Kimberley from Kununurra; it starts here.

01 January 2008

Upgrade of one website to WordPress 2.3.2

Today I upgraded my Taming OpenOffice.org website from WordPress 2.2.1 to 2.3.2. I misunderstood some of the instructions, and ended up spending far more time than I should have in recovering from my mistakes. Eventually I succeeded in getting everything working, and I now have notes to help me avoid making the same mistakes next time. Only 3 websites to go!