Post Christmas sales is a good time to pick up a bargain and on Sunday I was in Myer at the Galleria in Morley when I saw a couple of items of clothing that I wanted to try on.

As I walked into the change room, three staff members came in behind me, bending over to look through the gap at the bottom of the stalls, the female staff member making an exclamation of disgust as they all departed.

As I closed the door to my stall I looked down to see what they were looking and saw a guys legs and although I couldn’t see clearly I was guessing he was sans pants.

While I was trying on the clothes I had selected I heard him start to moan and I suddenly had this horrible realisation that he probably was … flying solo!

After putting on a pair of shorts I went out to show Lia and that was about the time when store security arrived.

I was trying on some jeans as they pounded on the door and asked the person to come out. Persons, in fact as it turned out to be a young couple who had decided to do something a little adventurous.

Store security didn’t make too much of a big deal out of it. They apologised to me although I was more amused than anything and, as the couple had said they were both just trying on clothes, security pointed out to them that the female change rooms were all on the floor below.

This morning Lia bought me in a nice hot cup of Earl Grey tea and started mock crying “wahh, you don’t like asian tea anymore” sob, sob.

It’s true that I have been drinking Jasmine green tea for longer than I have known Lia but before that, Earl Grey was my beverage of choice. Recently Lia bought some and I have re-discovered the taste and drinking more of it.

Lia’s reaction, while only her playing around got me pondering food.

The kids have been asking me a lot recently what my favourite food is and I really can’t answer it. I tell them all the time that my favourite food changes depending on what I feel like. I use this opportunity to encourage them to try different foods any time they have the chance but, kids being kids often do not want to try things.

They are all a little fussy in their own ways but Emily has always been the hardest to please. There were so many things that she just wouldn’t eat and our efforts to get her to try things were often fruitless.

“just try it,” we’d tell her. “You don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it.”

So she would take a small taste and exclaim “Yuck” the very second the food entered her mouth.

The other thing we have always told the kids is that their tastes will change as they get older. We won’t accept a claim of already trying something as an excuse for not eating it.

Emily, it seems, has taken this advice to heart this year and tried all the foods she normally turns her nose up at. This was most obvious at Christmas dinner where she tried everything that was on offer and found that she enjoyed everything on the table. This included the normally rejected honey carrots, brocolli & cauliflower cheese, gravy and the stuffing from the turkey.

This link is using the “add embedded media” and not the “Add media” bar

It’s clunky and difficult to manage because to get it to work I had to

1. select media
2. choose quicktime
3. manually type the full path to the uploaded media
4. physically set the size of the player (the default 100×100 made for a very small media bar)

The player also starts immediately which may not be the best option when embedding media into a post.

Second Solution

Attempts to use an inline audio plug in were proving fruitless but this was due to the wordpress version – the media player home page says it covers up to version 2.3 and this blog is running a more recent version. Clearly something in the latest version of WP is not compatible with the audio player.

A beta version 2.0 of the player is available from http://wpaudioplayer.com/ which worked very well.

While it is a beta version and therefore theoretically not 100% stable the plug in has a lot more settings and integrates nicely with the “Add media” bar that appears along the top of the WP Write Post page.

The player is highly configurable and this is the result -

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Much better!

I have almost finished migrating content to the new site and will now go live. This is actually quite a large task as I am ditching a couple of major componants in my blogging arsenal.

Despite my original optimism of using Joomla for my CMS, I found it difficult to update, especially as I was using a bridge to make Gallery 2 and WordPress function. I was also updating content both in the Joomla editor for front end stuff, as well as the WordPress in the members section.

I am no longer using Joomla and as a result have had to migrate all the posts to WordPress, not an easy task as they are completely different so therefore the table structure in the database is different.

After downloading the database tables I edited the sql commands in Dreamweaver using a lot of copy/paste to re-format the structure making it compatable with WP. I also had to do some minor adjustments to the old members WP database to make it compatable with the latest version.

Second major change is the ditching of Gallery 2, which was unweildly, hard to edit templates and difficult to upload images using the Joomla bridge. I have now gone with Plogger, which is much more user friendly in template editing and updating. The downside of this means I had to manually change the links of every image across the site – We’re talking about 175 posts and an image gallery containing 1115 photographs and I haven’t even started with the pre-CMS stuff!