We upgraded the site this weekend to Movable Type 4.21, the latest version, in order to get the option to use the Community Pack features.

We decided to do a totally fresh installation, and to import the posts we had previously exported. There are not a lot of posts on the site, not even in the poetry section.

The challenge now is that we cannot reuse the old templates, as there have been enough minor tweaks with modules and widgets being renamed that the site fails to build. We could have upgraded in place, but we felt a new clean installation would put us in a better position to keep our code clean.

So things look a little odd. The sidebars aren't right. We have to recreate custom pages. It will probably take a week or so, as it has to be a part-time job.

My friend Bill Baren has started a new blog and wants to know "your biggest challenge or frustration with being productive and managing your time."

Last month I had to travel from NYC to Baltimore for a family emergency. I was struck by the smoothness of my mobile work experience on the train as I set up to complete a project I owed a client.

It felt distinctly odd to realize that my work context  - laptop, internet connection via broadband cellular card, sepatate cell phones for business and personal phone calls and texting, IM, e-mail, felt emotionally identical to my work context in my office. I had more interesting scenary, and felt some nervousness about getting up and leaving my equipment on my seat, but the work and expecially the connectness and communication with colleagues, clients, and family were identical.  I was as productive as if I sat at my desk in my office.

The context of work had changed for me. Working while travelling has always seemed an irritating compromise, even though I have used mobile broadband services since they first became available. Making sure I had access to power was always an issue.

I wonder if the difference was in the attitude of the people I was working with. The tools we were using made any of our physical locations irrelevant, and over the years we have become practiced with them, so we just carried on our work and our social interactions as normal..

If train travel were cheaper, I might ride from New York to Boston to DC and back, just for the novelty and a change in physical work environment. GPS lets you watch your actual progress, my digital camera let's me shoot all sorts of track side footage. Sounds like a vacation.

I make no claim to even begin to understand astrophysics, or in fact any sort of physics at all, but sometimes when I read an article written for the popular audience, explaining some newly discovered phenomena or discussing a new theory about some aspect of the physical universe that I had never heard of or even imagined, I am stopped dead with amazement, and an enormous vista of infinite possibilities appears before my mind's eye.

So apparently, there may be an unknown force causing objects in the universe to move in away that cannot be explained by anything within the known universe.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080923-dark-flows.html

Also, apparently a theory related to the Big Bang theory, called inflation, speculates that there may be regions of the universe, or cosmos, inaccessible to our observation, that do not contain stars and galaxies, which might indeed only be products of local mass density patterns.

Because of the limits on our ability to observe the universe any ideas about the universe outside our inflation bubble are pure imagination, or poetry.

"In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn't contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow." Clara Moskowitz, Space.com

I feel, in fact, like Keats's Cortez.

I had a family emergency that kept me away from this effort since mid August, but I am back. Next step is to add a blog of my own poetry, and then a photo blog.

At the bottom of each post, there is a link to a page with all the poems by that poet on the site.

I managed to add several pages to make it easier to find individual poems and poets and also to understand what was on the site.

List of poets - alphabetical by first name

List of poems and poets by date posted

A list of poems and poets in chronological order by century For this last I should be able to sort within each century by poet's name, but that's not working.

 I am going through the previously posted poems and adding external resources for each poem.

Charles came to me with a catalog from http://www.teach12.com a few weeks ago and showed me a listing for a set of DVD"s.  He has bought a number of courses from this company and wanted a reason to get these so I suggested that he get the set and that we watch it together.

Very interesting so far. You can only do so much with a couple of math professors enthusing abour theorems and fractals as far as production values go, and the two lecturers are truly truly math geeks. We have been able to follow the lectures so far, but we decided to order the workbooks because the equations flash by so fast you don't have time to study them,

All the classes look appetizing, and if you get on their catalog mailing list, you can take advantage of their frequent sales, which we always do. (When they are on sale, you can get a course for $99 as opposed to $250)

I think I will wait for From Plato to Post-modernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author and Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age and about a dozen more to go on sale.

I thought I was finished tweaking but it was altogether too much fun.

I have been putting off fixing/creating/updating bettinamay.com for months and months because I didn't want to invest in figuring out the Movable Type templating system, but actually if you have hand coded HTML it's not that difficult. I like the the new 4.0 version of Movable Type, but for some legacy blogs I am going to have to use the 3.x version of the templates.

I decided to get a new server and put all my personal and family websites on one server, so a lot of my time has been migrating sites and databases and playing with server configuration files and loading cpan modules and all that kind of fun stuff.

After a week of fiddling, I finally got Movable Type 4 configured.