Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
From the NOAA Environmental Visualization Program (via today’s APOD) is a very cool photograph of Frances taken yesterday morning by the GOES-12 satellite. It shows very impressively just how big the Frances really is.
And on the heels of Frances comes TS Ivan, which so far looks to be taking a more westward track than Frances did. This will be yet another one for people to watch and keep an eye on.
Yesterday a couple of local radio guys were joking about how if Jim Cantore from the Weather Channel showed up on Folly Beach, then it’s time to get out. He always seems to go where the weather is going to be the worst. But if Mike Seidel showed up, then it was probably OK.
The latest 11 AM discussion from the NHC makes a Florida landfall in a couple of days more probable The wife has a notion that Frances will decide to skirt the coast, so our preparations continue.
Continue reading “If Jim Cantore is in Daytona, it’s time to leave”
A friend of mine at work received a page today that made me think about how things get done and how to get people to do things in health care. The page was from a nurse manager, and was a complaint about the web based image viewing system not working and how it was affecting patient care.
And there it was, the two magic words: patient care. As anybody who works in a hospital will tell you, you can get just about anything if you mention that patient care is involved. Need to buy or replace a piece of equipment? Just say that it’s required for patient care. Trying to get someone to do something? Mention how the job not getting done is having an adverse effect on patient care. Need something fixed? It’s affecting patient care. Got your eye on some space and want to kick the current occupants out? “We need that space to make patient care more efficient.” And the list goes on.
Of course, it doesn’t work everywhere, and there are a lot of areas in the hospital that aren’t directly related to patient care. So bring up environment of care. “It’s necesary to maintain/establish/promote a good environment of care.”
Patient care, that’s what it’s all about. And it makes people jump.
Looks like Frances is going to be taking a bead towards central Florida, although I won’t feel like we’re out of the woods yet for a couple more days. We had planned to evacuate out to Atlanta for the weekend, but now it seems that will probably be a bit too early.
From the 11 AM 1-SEP-04 NHC discussion:
THE SUBTROPICAL RIDGE CONTROLLING THE MOTION OF FRANCES IS FORECAST TO PERSIST BUT TO WEAKEN. THIS WOULD ALLOW THE HURRICANE TO TURN MORE TO THE WEST-NORTHWEST AND NORTHWEST WITH A DECREASE IN FORWARD SPEED. THE OFFICIAL FORECAST IS VERY SIMILAR TO THE PREVIOUS ONE…AND BASICALLY FOLLOWS THE GLOBAL MODEL CONSENSUS. THE OFFICIAL FORECAST BRINGS THE CORE OF THE HURRICANE NEAR THE FLORIDA EAST COAST WITHIN 3 DAYS.
Ok, since I’m trapped here at work while the wife is staying late to study Biochem, I thought I’d use the time to plunge into the MT 3.1 upgrade.
Upgrade process went pretty smoothly. Copied the files from the MT 3.1 upgrade package into my MT directory, ran mt-check.cgi to make sure everything was still ok, then ran mt-upgrade31.cgi. It did the DB schema upgrade and create a couple of new templates used for the dynamic publishing.
Next step was to enable the dynamic archives. Followed the steps in Movable Type 3.1 Guide, which are pretty straight forward. The only change I made was to put the stuff for the .htaccess file into my webserver httpd.conf file instead. Then did a rebuild. Since there are no archives to rebuild anymore, the rebuild process is so much faster now.
And then I ran into my first problem. I use Paginate for my category and date based archives. The Paginate tags don’t seem to get parsed when those archive files are accessed though. But, from the MT 3.1 guide, this is to be expected
Please note that at this time, only the standard Movable Type tags are supported with the dynamic rendering option. Existing plugins are not compatible with this new feature, since they are written in Perl and not PHP. If you are seeing errors due to using plugin tags, you will either need to remove the tag(s) or change that template to render statically.
Then I noticed my second problem: no side bar in the individual entry archives. The side bar gets brought in with a PHP include(). A view source showed everything there, but the PHP include() doesn’t seem to get parsed by the dynamic templating. Very odd. A post by Phil Ringnalda on the MT 3.1 beta blog indicated it should work. So in an act of desperation, I changed my PHP tags from <?PHP to <?php and surprise! In came the side bar! But inexplicably, this didn’t work for another entry that I have PHP embedded into. Perhaps there was something else that I did that fixed the first problem.
So I’m still having problems with PHP embedded in entries. But so far aside from that small issue MT 3.1 looks pretty good. Still need to play with it a little more though.