There is a cat that "belongs" to the family across the street.  I understand from another neighbor that they have two cats and they leave them outside all the time.  They leave their garage door up a crack and the cats go in when it is really cold or when they are hungry. 
 

I have discussed the topic of when to backup your computer with lots of folks, most of whom never back up at all.  I also talk to people who use their computers as an electronic typewriter and rarely save a document after emailing or printing it.
 
I don't understand these people.  Having an archive of what I have sent and received is one of the most useful parts of computers for me.
 

I upgraded to Service Pack 1 when it was offered by automatic update.  I have my PC set to notify me when updates are available but let me choose to install them.  I usually check with Windows Secrets newsletter before I install an update.  Susan Bradley writes a great column on watching for good and bad and important patches.

My old laptop has been a great trooper these last 6 years, but 6 years seems long enough for a laptop.  Technology has moved on.  It was working OK, but some operations were getting slow, and I really couldn't upgrade all of the software.  In addition, as I support people in the AARP TaxAide program who are now upgrading to Vista laptops, I needed to learn enough about it to support them.  So I took the plunge to a new laptop. 

I was poking around the Drupal site, and discovered that Zen had released a new theme - v1.0.  Well, I thought, this is probably an improvement, so I downloaded it and installed it on my test system, which is my development PC using XAMPP.  SHOCK!  They completely changed the philosophy and operation of the theme.  Fortunately, they included the "zen classic" theme, which is what I have been used to, so I had a way to get back to where I was.

I just returned from spending two weeks in Biloxi, Mississippi, as part of a United Methodist Church Volunteers in Mission trip.  Our goal was to help restore housing and hope in the Gulf Coast.  You may be surprised to learn that all is not back to normal there. 

It isn't normal there.

On November 1, the bridge between Biloxi and Ocean Springs reopened.  It was destroyed by Katrina.  This was a major event of hope for the people. 

The site needs the ability to maintain News and Events on the home page, with detail to expand any item.  I created a temporary version of this using a forum, but the look of the forum for the expanded content was not acceptable.  I reviewed the functionality of the module developed by IBM Internet Technology Group as part of their series,
Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site
 

I am working with a church to build a new web site. Their current site is rather tired looking and needs a real re-do. They hired a web designer to design the new site look and feel. They also agreed that a CMS approach was a good thing to do. We settled on Drupal. Now that they have approved the designer's concept, what does it take to make that design be the web site design of a Drupal based site?

Last night, I trained the core team on how they can directly contribute their content to our new web site. The training went well. Most questions were on the use of the editor, FCKEditor. It has all of the power that they wanted. There are many details that are needed to complete the site. The choice of calendar tools in Drupal is not what I would like. It seems that the future is toward Date rather than Event. I tried to get WebCalendar installed but there are unresolved issues that I can't take time to address right now, so I will go to Date.