If you haven't figured it out from the news, the Mount Saint Helen's eruption is not really that big a deal. Here, in the Portland area, life goes on and we cannot see or hear anything from our neighborhood volcano. The media even is a little over blown -- unlike the volcano.

We're having a garage sale this weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday). I'm going to move one of our cameras outside so you can witness our selling extravaganza. Stop by and purchase some of our jun^H^H^Htreasures.

Did I mention that we have a new kitten? I didn't? Well, I, the cat person of the house, had nothing to do with it. It was my son and his girlfriend that brought it home. There is a growing collection of pictures.

Well, lets see if this WordPress installation holds up. Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3......

I haven't been around much because of work and I've finally returned to the living. That means the only thing I've been doing to my web site is delete comment spam. Grumble, grumble.

Which leads me to the "upgrading" in the title. I tried a whole bunch of tools to close comments, filter comment submission and black list comments but I have been frustrated in all attempts. My Moveable Type installation is all in PERL and it's hard to debug and impossible to know what's working and not working. I'd run various scripts and they'd do stuff but, like comments would still be open. No error messages. Not log entries. Nothing. I've been trying to get a plugin of my own working for a long time but it doesn't work and no one can help ("it works for me") and I'm tired of digging through MT code to find where things are invoked and adding my own debugging logs.

So, I'm going to try and get WordPress working this weekend and see if that improves things. I'm more at home with PHP and MySQL and Apache so I'm hoping for an improvement. But then, it could be a case of the devil you know vs. the devil you don't know. We'll see.