Gosh Darn It!

So about six months ago I messed up with my blog design by accidentally saving over it with a template, completely losing everything I had tweaked it into. Took me four hours to get it back into shape.

Today I decided I would back up the design so I wouldn't make the mistake of doing that again, and had a look around for the link I knew was available to save my template. And there I found a button that said "Save Template".

Did it have an explanation next to it? No.

Did it have a warning after clicking on it? No.

What did it do? IT CHANGED MY TEMPLATE TO THE DEFAULT.

Turns out, the button should actually be labelled "Save OVER My Template".

Fuck shit damn.

So I spent two hours restoring it to something close to what I had before, found the real link that actually backs up my template, and now I have it sorted. Except I'll probably tweak it as I discover things that just don't sit right and need a-fixin'.

Windows Live Writer

In an attempt to make my blog posting easier and more reliable, I’m going to try and use an offline blog composer, in this case Windows Live Writer, to see how this improves my posting. I hopefully will be able to see a live representation of my post exactly, and an easier way to publish images and links within the text. We shall see how it goes.

Visions of the Future

Stumbled across a great blog that collects predictions of the future made throughout the last 120 years. It's fascinating to see what they inevitably got wrong, but, more surprisingly, what they got right! Ranging from 1880 through to 1990, you can see amazing imagery and articles that try to guess what life will be like "in the future" (a popular choice of this mysterious period is the year 2000, which of course is now long past so we can legitimately see how wrong they were - though some of their ideas may yet come to pass in some distant time).

What amazed me was that predictions as recent as 1995 were still pessimistically under-estimated. The mind boggles that we can still not see something as basic as predicting growth and expansion properly. What they didn't seem to do is understand that if something seems like a bad idea, it doesn't mean it can't or won't happen - people can be persistent, or foolishly stubborn, about something that is presented to them that promises much (even if it delivers little). More importantly, if it seems unworkable now, it doesn't mean that a solution may not be found for it eventually that will then make it a profitable and useful idea.

Here's my prediction for the future: "Some very intelligent people will continue to make foolishly inaccurate predictions for the future." I think I'm safe with that one.