We spent the last couple of days reluctantly driving it between Orlando Harley-Davidson, our nearby self-storage unit and our home for the next few months in Saint Petersburg. You can clearly see how disappointed Tave and I were at having the car in the pictures below.

To offset your jealousy a little, you’ll note that it sometimes rains even in Florida. Especially in the hurricane season :-)

If you don’t want to miss reading about my travels in America, India and the Philippines over the last few months, the easiest way to survive the timewarp is to subscribe to the RSS feed. Alternatively, now that all my posts are announced there, you can follow me on twitter. Either way you’ll get all the posts as I write them, rather than missing out on what my time traveling alter-ego is posting…

Sorry if you thought this post was going to be more exciting ~Al Torigo

1. iPhoneDrive – As if space wasn’t already tight enough on your iPhone, here’s a way to fill it up even faster ;-)
2. Inco, simple sysadmin from your iPhone – Webmin on steroids with an iPhone interface, and hosted server side collection. Nice but, I’m still waiting for OpenSSH on my Touch…
3. TextExpander 2 – A whole new version of my 2nd favourite abbreviated typing application, with a 30 day demo or as a free upgrade for registered users.
4. Dealing with Signatures in a Paperless Office – Maybe I can use this tip to get me out of the print-sign-scan bind that a lot of businesses still make me do if I want to deal with them?
5. 9 Tips to Throw Off the Chains of Consumerism – Mis-titled post to make you contemplate why you think you’re unhappy in modern western society.
6. Did You Mean… – Reminds me of the Ms. Chanandler Bong incident :-D

1. HSA – Why You Need to Notice These Special Accounts – After suffering at the hands of HSBC’s small print, I was left to find a large sum of money for an unexpected visit to the hospital from my own pocket. While I’m in my 30′s a backpacker’s holiday insurance will get me by, but if I continue to travel after that, something like this might be necessary to save my savings from another mauling by the insurance companies.
2. 5 things you need to know about the iPhone 1.1.1 update – Some of these apply equally to my new iPod Touch too.
3. Secure Your Mac: Untrusted networks and how to deal with them – Excellent advice for working safely on a free wifi hotspot in a coffee shop.
4. The Cloud offers UK iPod touch users low cost Wi-Fi access – This would be a great deal, if I didn’t plan to be out of the UK for more than 9 months of the year.
5. Reality and Perception – Interesting world view from Steve Pavlina. I find this article a lot easier to swallow than his Subjective Reality ideas.
6. The downside of the outboard brain – Yay! Merlin Mann is back to a regular posting schedule at 43 folders.
7. Arghh! – Don’t look at this, or you’ll have nightmares.

Don’t forget to send me any cool links you find, and you’ll get a free linkback in next week’s Sunday Link Love. It couldn’t be any easier to leech some of my traffic… just go to the plugoo box in the sidebar; type in your blog url, add a link to something on the intertubes I might find interesting and press send. That’s it!

Truth be told, some part of my motivation for joining John Chow‘s daily blog post challenge meme was the prospect of a link-back from John’s hight traffic front page. The karmic gods obviously spotted my selfishness, and that’s why the promised link in the followup post missed me out :-(

Also, contrary to my plan for future posting some strong articles, I’ve actually ended up posting articles almost a week after their listed date in some lame attempt to fill 20 consecutive days with a post. Well, the pressure is off now, and I can quietly go back to a writing schedule that I can actually keep to :-)

If you’d like to submit anything for inclusion next week, please do send it to me. Not only will I include the links I think you guys might like in the next Sunday Link Love, but I’ll also link back to your blog (or site of your choice if you don’t have a blog). That way, we all get to share a little link love :-)

And here are this weeks links:

1. 5 Ways Skype Helps Your Business – Somehow, despite getting a whole year of globetrotting under my belt, I haven’t yet bought into the Skype phenomena. It sure looks like a great way to stay in touch with friends that I’ll be checking out before jetting off again…
2. Minimalist Fun: The 100 Things Challenge – Dunno about owning only 100 things, but Traveling With 50 Things or Fewer I can do :-)
3. Haiku Productivity: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential – More minimalist advice from Leo Babauta.
4. Pixelmator – If I weren’t already so happy with the gimp, then this would be my first port of call for photo-editing done the mac way.
5. VMWare Fusion 1.1 Beta – I didn’t even have time to download the 1.0 final release yet, but the VMWare folks sure do release early and often!
6. Drobo – Oh man, I would sooo love to have one of these. Hard to fit it in my luggage though :-(

Don’t forget to send me any cool links you find, and you’ll get a free linkback in next week’s Sunday Link Love. It couldn’t be any easier to leech some of my traffic… just go to the plugoo box in the sidebar; type in your blog url, add a link to something on the intertubes I might find interesting and press send. That’s it!

I quietly waited a couple of days to see whether the tubes caught alight from failed WordPress upgrades, only to be met by a frosty silence. The received wisdom seems to be that it is safest to upgrade any plugins to the latest releases after checking the plugin compatibility list… and yet one of the big features of this release is that it does that for you, so I threw caution to the wind, backed up my database and install directory and ran the upgrade anyway. Sure enough, when I logged back in, WordPress prompted me to upgrade several of my plugins, which I did.

I run a fairly hefty list of plugins, including Ultimate Tag Warrior, which is most definitely complete overkill for Azazil’s basic tagging needs. I actually spent more time on the backups and preparation than I did on the WordPress upgrade itself, and since the other big feature of this release is native tagging, I also went ahead and migrated from UTW to native tags, by updating my theme following to Zachary’s example.

A small hiccough is that the Yet Another Photoblog plugin I used for the photos on some of my older posts hasn’t been updated in a very long time, and isn’t supported by the latest WordPress. This means that those posts will be missing a picture until I go through my database and redo those posts.

The worst problem I hit is that 3 Column K2 (on which Azazil’s theme is based) hasn’t been updated to work with 2.3, but luckily K2 itself has, so I was able to merge in some changes across by hand and keep everything running smoothly. If anyone is interested in what exactly I did to fix everything up, let me know in the comments. All in all, the entire process took just a couple of hours, and I’m very pleased with the results.

Since I haven’t accepted a meme tag for a few weeks, I’ve decided to participate in a group writing project from JohnChow.com. A few short weeks ago, Gary Jones guest posted an article entitled What’s Holding You Back From Blogging?, and set a challenge for participants to write a little on that subject and then to put a new post on their own blog every day. I’ve consistently beaten my at least 2 posts per week resolution in all my Groundhog Resolution Review Days, and this is a great opportunity for me to take it to the next level. So, I’ve written I will post in my blog daily for 20 days straight on a floating sticky, and placed conspicuously in the top left corner of my desktop. When I’ve posted this article, I’ll change it to read 19 days straight to give myself some positive feedback.

And to answer the question: I think the main thing holding me back from blogging is time. To be more precise, I need to consistently dedicate a little time at the start of each day to writing an article for that day. I’m also concerned about being careful not to succumb to the temptation to post drivel just to put something new here every day… if I can’t write something genuinely informative or entertaining, then far better to write nothing at all. My antidote to that particular issue is to keep my moleskine planner with me so that I can jot down post ideas as the inspiration occurs. So far, that list has always grown faster than I can write up the ideas in it and I suspect that will continue to be the case even as I ratchet up my post frequency.

It’s certainly true that I can see my traffic drop noticeably if I miss posting for more than 2 or 3 days now, and similarly it creeps back up if I post for 5 or 6 consecutive days. So far, the longest number of consecutive posts has been a paltry 9, so I’m curious to see whether traffic continues to rise as I break through that record.

If you have a blog, and you wish you had a bit more traffic, why not take up the challenge too? It can’t do your blog any harm to get a linkback from John Chow!

If you’d like to submit anything for inclusion next week, please do send it to me. Not only will I include the links I think you guys might like in the next Sunday Link Love, but I’ll also link back to your blog (or site of your choice if you don’t have a blog). That way, we all get to share a little link love :-)

And here are this weeks links:

1. Use Your iPod Touch as a Second Rate $400 USB Stick – After my iPod fell to it’s death a couple of weeks ago, I’m now the future proud owner of this lovely gadget. Anyway, TUAW comes up trumps with the skinny on getting files on and off the device in this post.
2. Put Your Content in My Pocket – Continuing the theme of new Apple hardware, this is an informative article highlighting changes you can make to your site to be more iPhone friendly.
3. Reaction vs. Response – A short, but insightful post on Martial Arts from Steve Pavlina.
4. Managing the Mac OS X Keychain – How to store your keychain (where the Mac stores all the passwords you ask it to keep for you) on an external USB drive (on a keychain?).
5. jQuery – Super sexy javascript widgets for highly interactive web applications.
6. Meditation Expert – Hell, I’d be happy to be a meditation beginner, but any advice is welcome as far as I’m concerned! Especially the free kind, of which this site has an abundance.

Don’t forget to send me any cool links you find, and you’ll get a free linkback in next week’s Sunday Link Love. It couldn’t be any easier to leech some of my traffic… just go to the plugoo box in the sidebar; type in your blog url, and a link to something on the intertubes I might find interesting and press send. That’s it!