...somehow often seem to be blown apart.

At work this afternoon, around 4PM, I suddenly see a bunch of emails arrive on my PDA.

"Reservation Cancelled" ...and shortly after that, another... "Reservation Cancelled".

The emails are coming from the online aircraft reservation system that my FBO uses. They're telling me that both of my reservations (Saturday, and Sunday) have been erased for some reason.

An immediate call to the airport ensues.

Seems one of the 152's has unexpectedly gone down for maintenance, so the schedule is being bandaged based on a "priority" schedule.

Understandably, renters (As opposed to dual student/instructor) flights are pretty low on the priority list, so my flights were cut. Totally understandable yes, but still slightly frustrating, indeed.

Anyhow, it's not their fault, but it does throw all of my plans for the weekend into disarray.

The best I could do to scrape together any remnant of my original plans was to take a 7AM to 9AM booking for Sunday. My intended Sunday passenger passed on getting up that early, but my original Saturday passenger jumped at the opportunity.

There was a 10AM to 12PM slot tommorow that I had originally booked, but I had to pass on it after realising it conflicted with other commitments.

Anyhow, Sunday it shall be.

And shortly after I'm down from that flight, the Muskoka trip (Barring any last minute weather oddities) will be a go.

So, instead of flying three times, I'll be flying twice. No big deal I guess afterall, and I've got a guarenteed passenger for next weekend.

So..I'll stop whining now. :-)

Anyhow, after much frustration, I finally got my blog imported to Wordpress. It was an unbelieveable disaster that should (According to Wordpress) have been a simple process.

The blogger.com import function steadfastly refused to work when executed from my web host... Others (on different web hosts) report the same. It's just...broken.

I was able to import about 50 posts this way, but then it kept hanging. Repeated attempts to restart it would accomplish the import of a few additional posts, but then was also causing duplicates.

It just sucked.

So, as a last ditch effort, I had a thought this evening - I fired up SQL, reinstalled Wordpress on my server box, and tried the import locally using the local copy of Wordpress.

And blammo, it worked perfectly on the first try, and sucked all of my blogger.com posts into the Wordpress database.

So, now what to do... Ideally I'd just copy the SQL database file from my own server to my web host, except they dont allow that without presumably calling into tech support and having some uber-tech do it manually.

Not worth my time, although (based on the one time I actually called, for something minor) my hosts tech support seems excellent. I just picture them all sitting aroung giggling later in the evening after a long day of dealing with "Real" companies and corporate websites, only to be interrupted by little ol' me wanting to fix my blog.

Anyhow, I ended up exporting my local Wordpress installation to a RSS feed. I then took that XML file and went direct for the Import feature again on my "real" Wordpress installation.

It's supposed to take RSS files directly for the import..

Again, easy, right?

Bzzzzt again.

Wordpress continually barfs on the file when I select and upload it.

Multiple attempts, no difference.

Something is telling me that this is a browser problem, so I once again stoop to loading up Internet Explorer, and try it again.

Sure enough, it imports perfectly on the first try.

Mission accomplished!

But why does Wordpress seemingly hate Firefox?

Oh well, at least it's finally done.

As a side-effect, it seems that all of the "republish" attempts (probably about 50 of them) on my blogger account as a result of this import fiasco has resulting in it being flagged as a Splog! (A Spam-Blog).

So, I had to jump through some hoops to request that someone at Blogger manually review it and remove some restrictions now put upon it. Ugh.

So, that aside, my wife is now taking issue with me typing away on the PC at 12:20 in the morning, so it's off to slumberland..