Know what sucks? When you’ve got about ten unpublished blog posts sitting there in the queue, and you can’t figure out how to flesh them out and get them finished. And they just sit there. You go back and try to get one finished, and by the time you give up, you’ve deleted more than you’ve added. Shit.

I’ve got one bitchin’ cold right at the moment, so I didn’t have a whole lot going on yesterday. (Temporarily) gave up on trying to find inspiration for the next installment of the draft preview, so I decided to go ahead and upgrade myself to Wordpress 2.5. Don’t see anything different? That’s how you know it worked, rather than turning into a huge pain in my ass. There’s not a whole lot in this world that’s more satisfying than averting ass pain.

So since I seem to be having so much trouble inspiring myself to write about anything interesting, I figure I’ll pass a little time geeking out with my blogging compadres (assuming, of course, that you’re not one of those Typepad chumps.)

Of primary importance, I guess, is that nothing broke. Well, more accurately, nothing blew up. A couple of my plugins didn’t exactly enjoy the trip, but I was able to shut them up and get them back to work within a few minutes. That is, the ones I even cared to reactivate after the upgrade. I was able to trash half of ‘em because their functionality is now built into Wordpress. Sweet.

Speaking of plugins, Wordpress now has built-in update notifications for new versions of your plugins, and a one-click upgrade option (which doesn’t always work, but it’s pretty slick when it does.) I was able to one-click update to the latest version of just about every plugin I still use. Turned off Gravatars, which for some reason never really worked right anyway. Either that or Bea’s Head had sabotaged the whole thing from day one.

I had mentioned a while back that for some reason, Wordpress’s anti-comment-spam gadget (Akismet) had just up and decided to start deleting perceived spam comments altogether, rather than leaving them in my queue to review for false positives first. I’m sure Saintseester wasn’t the only one to have fallen victim to a false positive that I had no way to recover. In fact, I know that’s the case, because I was able to recover a falsely-flagged comment just this morning from everybody’s favorite aforementioned Typepad-using chump. It’s nice to have that ability back.

Meantime, since I bitched about the false positives, it’s only fair that I point out that overall Akismet works really really well, and is hands-down the best thing going for bloggers. Sure, occasionally it’ll flag a legit comment, but I don’t remember it ever letting a single legit spam comment through. Which is good, because I just checked and it got ten of them just while I was typing up this post. If ya can’t kill ‘em, you can at least shut them the hell up.

They’ve completely revamped the backend, and it only takes about 10 minutes of "Holy shit, where did everything go?" before it becomes apparent that the changes are about 100% positive.

The "Hey, somebody out there linked to one of your posts" list now comes from Google Blog Search instead of Technorati, which is a substantial improvement. Nothing wrong with Technorati, but if you haven’t realized yet that Google is pretty much completely in charge of the entire world at this point…

Bored yet? Yeah, me too. Bottom line, if you care, is that I can assure you that there’s very little chance of there being any reason not to let ‘em let ‘em let ‘em upgrade ya… grade ya. Good stuff, minimal ass pain.

And since this post doesn’t contain nearly enough lame "comedy" (you’re probably wondering if you’re still at moosedenied, being as you probably haven’t audibly groaned in a minute or two) we’ll take this opportunity to go ahead and update you all on what’s been happening in the logs lately.

There are people who are currently wishing they had that three seconds of their life back from: Germany, Micronesia, the Russian Federation, Puerto Rico, Switzerland, Belgium, the Marshall Islands, South Africa, Ecuador and Metairie. God bless the global reach of these here internets. Never before have I been able to annoy people over such a broad geographical scope. Outstanding.

Lots of people think Judy Greer is pretty fuckin’ hot. I agree. Even more still haven’t figured out who sang that damn song in the Old Navy ads. And about 97% of those who have figured it out will not rest until they find out where she got the frames for her glasses. My money’s on Old Navy. Someone affiliated with Megalyn Echikunwoke, or Megalyn herself, Googles her on a fairly regular basis. Yo Meg, if that’s you, just call me already. I’m down.

Whoa…. a hit for "Aaron Craver"

Even crazier…. a hit for "Mickey Guidry"

And then there’s the big elephant in the room that nobody, including we here at moosedenied, wants to talk about. There seems to have been an explosion of Google searches for phrases including the word "saintsreport"… and suffice to say that the other words aren’t exactly complimentary. Yikes.

Hey, we here at moosedenied have never been anti-saintsreport. In fact, we’ve pretty much kept our mouths shut altogether where saintsreport is concerned. "Friends from way back who kinda had a bit of a falling out" suits us just fine, and as far as we know, we’re only kinda-sorta written in pencil on the Enemies List for the time being. Well, depending on whose copy of the list it is, I guess. Last thing we want is for our humble little blog to turn into a raging shitfest of bitching and moaning about some other web site. There’s an ever-increasing number of other places for that. So if you don’t mind, pissed off Google users, please refrain. Thanks. Or, as David Robbins might say, "Thanx." Damn, that’s clever. See, the X is kinda like a "ks" only shorter. Fucking brilliant.

Meantime, wow Andrus. You know you’re aces in my book. Always have been. But the fiefdom is growing increasingly restless and discontented brah. Just a matter of time until they bust out the moldy rye bread and really start freakin’ out. I’m just sayin’….