The only internet access I’ve had for the past couple of days was in a McDonalds parking lot for a few minutes and at the local public library in the small town where some relatives live. And Murdoc Online was filtered out at said public library:

Totally busted.

But now I’m in sunny Orlando. Well, we drove through a nearly blinding rainstorm to get here, but I’m assuming the sun is still out there somewhere. At least the hotel internet seems decent.

My apologies for the extremely light posting. I should have lined up a guest poster, but I didn’t think I’d need one. (Plus, the guest posters usually draw lots of traffic, which dents Murdoc’s ever-so-fragile ego…)

A while back the folks at the Smithsonian Channel web site asked if they could have a quick Q&A with ol’ Murdoc. I agreed, and it was posted a couple of days ago. Check it out if interested.

I’ve found myself taking a bit of an unexpected break from blogging. It’s actually kind of nice.

Go watch some football or something.

The winner of the first-ever contest on Murdoc Online is Hawke! Congratulations!

Hawke wins a one-year (six issue) gift subscription of Air & Space magazine.

Hawke was the 11th commenter on the post and the number at Random.org was 11. My wife witnessed the number generation and winner determination.

Thanks to all those who commented on the post. I’m thinking that we’ll probably run another contest of some sort real soon on MO.

Midnight tonight is the deadline for the big contest. Sign up if you haven’t already.

Hey, ad sales on Murdoc Online are down by a significant percentage.

Where do I go to apply for my bailout?

There are apparently some problems with the clock somewhere on MO. I noticed that a scheduled post went up at the wrong time but said the right time. Other posts are off by an hour, too. Not sure where the problem lies.

UPDATE: Yeah, I didn’t realize that you had to manually adjust for DST in WordPress. I was thinking it was on my server somewhere. Should be fixed now. Some existing posts and comments are stamped with the wrong time, but I’m not going to worry about updating them.

I just accidentally deleted a bunch of comments on recent posts. I will get them back soon.

Also, I turned off the “refresh” thing. It was more annoying than anything else, and a number of readers complained about it.

All of today’s reading and posting will be done via Google’s new Chrome browser.

At first glance, it appears a bit sluggish (okay, a lot sluggish), but I mostly want to verify that my sites display and function correctly. In the early going, all appears fine.

UPDATE: Hmmm. It appears that each tab you open is actually a separate process with its own discrete resources. Makes each tab its own little island, but memory usage grows quickly that way. Ouch.

UPDATE 2: End of experiment. Performance was a 1 out of 10. Until the first production release is out, I will not try Chrome again other than to check my site design for compatibility.

If you’re reading this, you are on the new site.

Things are still under construction, but I’m expecting greatly increased performance (on both your end and mine) and working comments.

There is currently a fair amount of IE weirdness. (What else is new?) I will be working on that and much more in the coming days.

But why take chances? Make the switch to Firefox!