I’m part Techophile and part Luddite. On my desk I have a laptop computer and a dip pen and inkwell set. I’m addicted to email, but I have a nice collection of pens to select from when I write a handwritten letter.

Of late, when it comes to writing, I’ve been leaning toward the arcane. I’ve decided to set aside the computer in favor of the rollerball and spiral notebook—at least for rough drafts.

But now I’m eying a new toy that may help to synthesize my techie and Luddite natures.

For Christmas I got my better half a LiveScribe Pulse pen. It’s a digital pen that when used with special paper records whatever a user writes. It also used a microphone and built in MP3 recorder to record audio in sync with what is written. I got it to help her with school, which is really what the pen is designed for. When used to take notes for class, one only needs to touch a section of the text to hear what was said as the words were written.

The features that I’m most interested in are it’s ability to translate what is written into computerized text, or even to search through handwritten text for words or phrases.

I’m always wary of such devices, as early generations of these fusions of technologies often have all the grace of a hippo in a tutu. But the reviews of this pen have been largely positive, and my sweetie’s experience, so far, has fallen in line with expectations.

For reasons I won’t go into here my sweetie shut her blog down about 8 months ago.

So a few months ago, when she decided that she wanted to make her way back online, she decided she wanted to move blog back to her old URL, and give it a design overhaul. So as I redesigned my own blog, I hired an artist to come up with a whole new set of graphics befitting her new theme.

And now I’d like to announce that she is back…

Head on over to Volcanic Sacrifices and see what she has to say.

When it comes to designing WordPress themes I guess I’m not quite ready for prime time.

WordPress 2.7 was released a couple of days ago and I have upgraded. The new interface behind the scenes is nice, but I’ve been using it on wordpress.com (for a blog I contribute to) for a couple of weeks now.

And the functionality I was looking forward to—the new way WP handles comments—is a little more complicated to implement than just installing the latest version.

Supposedly the new version included comment threading—so that I, or other visitors can respond to previous comments—and comment pagination—so posts with large numbers of comments don’t go on and on for ever.

Strictly speaking, this blog doesn’t need either of these new features—after all, in the last month I’ve gotten about 25 comments. But as someone who designs websites and blog templates here and there for a few extra bucks, I feel it’s a good idea to understand how to use the new functionality.

Well at least so far WP2.7 comments are confusing. I carefully followed the instructions provided on WordPress.org for installing the new features, and all I got was an oddly formatted version of what I already had.

I guess the best way for me to figure it out is to find a functional WP2.7 theme and dissect it.

I probably shouldn’t quit my day job.

A couple of years ago I thought I was done with IE6. And thankfully so. Even my handful of web design clients, didn’t seem to care if their pages looked correct in the Jurassic browser. But now, it seems to have had a resurgence.

I recently took on a client who does business with the government and military of several NATO counties. And evidently in the government sector IE6 is still the standard browser.

And let me tell you, it is pull-out-my-remaining-hair frustrating to design webpages and blog templates that work correctly in new browsers like FireFox and Opera (and OK I guess I should throw IE7 in there among the fringes) that also work in a Neanderthal like IE6.

There’s not just a slight difference between IE6 and IE7, there’s worlds of difference. In between those browsers Microsoft fought and lost a legal battle for unquestioned dominance of the browser market. And as such, Microsoft had to actually develop a browser that met people’s needs.

So earlier today I took a look at some of my blog stats to see which browsers my readers were using to read this blog. I was shocked to learn that IE6 is the second most popular browser to access this site. Now I’m sure much of this has to do with the fact that the computers at work use IE6 so I’m sure that has a little to do with it, but IE6 users drastically outnumber IE7 users on this blog.

For anyone interested, the most common browser was “Generic Gecko”. Gecko is the rendering engine used by FireFox and many other smaller browsers, so I don’t know specifically what “Generic Gecko” breaks down to.

So I guess I can’t call IE6 extinct yet. And I guess I’d better make sure that all the website I design work well enough in IE6 to look professional.

Sigh…