We’ve been talking about doing this for months and months, and finally did it. We enrolled Hooper in a beginner’s dog agility class at the Boulder Humane Society, starting up in a couple weeks. Hoop spent half the morning running and jumping in the ballfield today, and we’ve long thought that Hooper would be a natural at agility trials. And even if he sucks at it, we figure he’ll have a good time trying to not suck at it. And so, on November 12th, Hooper will show up for class once again at the Boulder Humane Society and hopefully will ace his classes!

Wow, start actually blogging again, and you discover all these new things about your blogging software. WordPress, the software that has “powered” this blog for the last several years, is up to version 2.8.5 and a lot has changed for the better. Software updates are automated and work seamlessly, even for users running WP on other hosting sites (like me). Themes and plugins have similar auto install/update functionality.

Apparently there’s also a change to the database from latin1 to utf8 character sets, which is wreaking havoc on a few of my posts that have “smart quote” characters in them. Lots of solutions exist, but the “right” one seems to be a slightly involved conversion of my MySQL database and I’m not in the mood. I think I’ll manually change all the characters that need changing.

The upshot of all of this is that I’ve been spending the better part of the morning reading the WordPress Codex site and looking at new themes and plugins for my site. I guess I’m motivated again.