TTBrown

Where's Paul?

Well kids, he's in Texas -- again. Here's why. No telling when I'll be back to my garret, but I've got my laptop, I found a place that's got WiFi, and I brought my red-penciled hard copy of the book with me so that if I'm here for longer than a few days I can get back to work.  I've also got all the materials I need (I think) to polish the book proposal that I've been working on. So I've got plenty to keep me occupied.  Which is a good thing, because there's no telling how long this vigil will take -- but that is nature of such things. 

New Forum: "Soundtrack"

Over this past weekend, a couple of forum members mentioned a couple of songs whose lyrics seem pertinent to the stories being told and the themes being conveyed here.  Some one suggest that we start keeping track of these tunes, that they might someday be part of the soundtrack of the movie that is sure to find its way to the bijou after the book is published.

So I have created a new forum just for the purpose of discussing "The Soundtrack of the Parallel Universe."  It is an open forum, and the way it's set up, every song idea or suggestion can have its own thread within the forum.

I have to be out of town again the next few days (going down to Dallas to catch up with Ann and see her father), so perhaps this new forum will give you all something to play with while I'm "AFK."

Not that I'm ever really very far from "K"...

-PS

Laptop Probs for the 4th of July

Happy Independence Day, everybody.

Today, I am compelled to observe the occasion by being independent of my laptop computer.

The laptop -- in this case a less than one year old MacBook, crashed yesterday, and has been diagnosed with a defunct hard drive. That's the bad news. The good news is I think everything on it is well backed up, and except for a few e-mail messages I think I will be able to restore all my apps and files once I decide the best approach to replacing the hard drive (see my blog post re: my run-in with the "Genius Bar" at the Apple Store yesterday.

So, while I don't have the laptop at my disposal as usual, I do have my desktop, and I'll be monitoring the forums that way over the weekend.

On an unrelated note, I will also mention that Ann is in Texas at the moment. Her father is in the hospital again, we're waiting for a prognosis, but the outlook at the moment is... well, grim.

So, thinks are a tad dodgy here this 4th of July weekend.

--PS

Gone Fishing

OK, not exactly gone fishing. More like, gone swimming with the fishes.  Hopefully not in the sense that expression was used on "The Sopranos."

Ann and I leave at oh-dark-thirty Sunday morning and we'll be gone for roughly two weeks. I will not be taking a laptop (what's THAT gonna be like?), so I will not be checking my e-mail or monitoring the forums while I'm gone. So, if the secrets of the universe are revealed during this time, somebody please make a note and send me the link.

Also, new users: now that our new software seems to have the bogus "bot" sign-up issue under control, registration has been normalized to a "user activated" mode.  If you register for the forums, you'll be sent an e-mail to confirm your registration.  You don't have to wait for a system administrator to do anything.

If there are any other issues that arise during my absence, please contact the deputy system administrator.

Thanks, everybody, for your continued interest.

--PS   

Forums Will Reopen ...

..tomorrow, Tuesday, at 9AM CDT. 

I hope everybody is enjoying the break and that nobody is like hyperventilating or freaking out from the withdrawal.

Forums are Down

The Townsend Brown forums are now down for routine maintenance and upgrading.  They will be back online later today. 

Forum Maintenance & Upgrade - Monday 5/19

The forums behind this website are will undergo some maintenance and upgrading on Monday morning, May 19, from roughly 9:AM Central Time until about 11:AM.

During that time, the forums may be down briefly.  When they come back up, we will be using the very latest version of phpBB, the software engine that drives the forums. 

Things may look a little different, too. I don't think we're going to use the page templates we've been using, it's going to be a bit more standard, but we might be able to match the colors some.  The new page layout should be simpler, too.

The big difference, we hope, is that by upgrading to the newest software, we'll be able to finally find off all the "bot" registrations, those bogus entries that bloat our member numbers every month until I get around to purging them.  If that works, then we can return to the default, conventional way of registering new users, without the "contact me first" routine that we've had to resort to.

The upgrade should also give me/us more options for creating and moderating new threads, something I've wanted for a long time.

Everything else should be pretty much as you've come to expect.  Just be patient for a bit come Monday morning if you discover you can't get in.

--PS

We're BACK

OK Kids, I think we're back in business.

We hit a slew of glitches today, but eventually we got everything ironed out.  This front page looks like it's supposed to look, and the forums are up restored on the new server, with all the most recent posts up-to-date.

And we narrowly dodged the bullet of having it all go down until the end of the month due to excessive "bandwidth usage."

FYI, the URL for the forums now is

http://ttbrown.com/forum

If you have them bookmarked, you'll need to update your bookmark.

I also have to change the link in all the chapter pages, so don't be alarmed if you try to get to the forums from a chapter.  I'll get those links updated ASAP.

Translation & Search Added

I've been tweaking my websites over the past couple of weeks, and have just found an easy way to add a focused "search" function to this website.  In the sidebar on the right, scroll down till you see the "Google" logo.  You can enter any term you want into the field under the logo, and it will search just this site for those keywords.  Wanna find what we've been saying about "USO"s? Enter that term and click "search." 

Using the same "widgets" technology, I've also added a Google Site Translator.  Just click on the flag of whatever language you want the site translated into, and presto... the site is translated into your language.  I hope that will help expand our international audience.