The final moments are here … you have until 11:59pm EST tonight to get your dress entered in the Fifth Annual Dress Contest. There are no more excuses - go enter now!

It’s a day late thanks to Naomi coming over to visit last night, but I had to point you all to Scriptygoddess to check out the cool new look! And she’s implemented some GREAT new features there too - when I find time I must add in the Hotlist functionality to my own site!

Don’t you just hate it when you start to write a full post about something, then you change your mind, but you forget to change the title of the post? Well, that’s what I did last night. I was a little distracted since Naomi was over to visit me and we were having so much fun laughing about the craziest things - but more about that later today.

Now, about this “Big Debate”. You see, Mike is having this huge moral dilemna over which blog software to use. This caused a huge debate yesterday about what types of systems are really the best. On top of that, I got very annoyed when he said that switching to MT would mean “being a part of the herd. Baaaah. Moooo.” (Note my reference to “Go be part of the herd” at the end of my earlier post.)

I don’t believe that using MT means you are following the herd. Heck, in order to use MT you have to make a substantial commitment to blogging in my opinion. You need a host or server that can handle running the software. This involves a monetary commitment. You need to be able to install the software, find a friend to help you out, or pay someone to install it for you.

Blogger still holds a HUGE corner of the blog world market. But from where I stand it’s a lot like AOL. Most people use it initially because it’s easy to use. As Mike pointed out, it does everything he needs to run his site - and I agree with him. Matter of fact, I think Blogger is a wonderful service for many reasons. It doesn’t require the same commitments that MT does - namely money. You can blog using Blogger for free, and that’s a really good thing. Anyone can set up a blog using it, which is wonderful - but from where I stand that causes more of a herd than the MT users ever will be.

Personally, I used Blogger first. By May, 2000 they were having a lot of server down time. I wanted to be able to blog when the mood hit me, not when Blogger would let me log on, so I switched to Greymatter. I wanted the control of everything running on my own server. Once I hit the point of about 500 posts, Greymatter couldn’t handle my rebuilds on my host at the time and MT was released - so moving was a natural choice. Since then there have been others to come on to the scene - namely pMachine - that I would love to try out, but I am similar to Mike in a lot of ways, and my site isn’t broke so I don’t want to move to a new system and I am very loyal to Ben & Mena for all of their hard work on MT over the past year. As much as I’ve supported them, they have been supportive of me and Blogomania too. In addition to that, I have friends that develop & share cool things I can do in MT. (Blogger would never be able to fit my needs for gadgets, hacks & tweaks.)

I should toss in here that Mike & I made peace over the whole debate yesterday and it ended up just being just amusing that it was a debate to begin with. Now if only he had TrackBack, I would ping his post with this post to continue the discussion…

So now I’m curious to hear what others have to say about the Big Debate. What have you used for your blog if you have one? What do you like about it? Are there pros and cons to other systems that you want to share? Do you have anything to say on it? If you don’t have a blog and you were just starting out - what would you use?

I am really glad I have a Tivo because that way I can fast-forward through the biting, bitching, back-stabbing commercials of all of the likes of Tony Sanchez and Rick Perry. I’ve had enough. Finger pointing just seems like the worst way to try to win a political office. (You can read up on the election issues at Charles’s site, the archives for it are here.) So if you live in Texas, I suggest you use your power to write in whoever you want and vote for Jack Cluth. With his political plan to invade Louisiana, we can’t go wrong!

Is the election over yet? Is it safe to turn the TV back on?

If you haven’t noticed it yet, the upgrade to MovableType 2.51 is now available. Go be part of the herd.

Robyn & I discussed awhile back when one of her blog designs was stolen that you know you have arrived when someone does that to you. Well, today is my day.

This site is my main design here and this one is my design at Pixelog. The appropriate people have been notified (namely the site owner and the hosting company). It amuses me to know end that on the blog site they actually left the comments linked to my site! Wow, now THAT is some creative coding!

Come on people. We strive to have unique designs and layouts. It is so upsetting to see someone steal them. If you need help - ask. Hire someone to create something unique for you. But don’t just take the code. That’s just not cool.

Update: The owner of the sites wrote me back with an apology (and they wrote to Jennifer too, since she designed Pixelog.) The sites have been removed and all is right in the world.

Someone asked how I found the sites in the first place - Blogomania offers a variety of stats for the hosting accounts, and I was reviewing the “Latest Visitors” stats and the site owner was directly linking to my images for the background, so it was showing up there.

If scientists can shake hands over the Internet now, can you just imagine what this will do to cybersex in the future? Being able to touch over the web will put a whole new spin on things! [via Kairosnews]

Photoblogs.org - The Photoblog Resource is a great idea. Pixelog is listed, and if you like it you can vote for it. Meanwhile, add your photo blog too! [via Dawn]

Like J-Mo, I almost cried this morning when I walked outside and discovered that the sky was BLUE with little white puffy clouds. My mood is 150% better then it was 24 hours ago thanks to finally having some sunlight! I even took photos of it, I was that excited - I’ll be sure to post them later today.

The car survived the raging flood waters (ok, ok, they weren’t raging - just deep) and checked out this morning when I dug around under the hood to check out the belts and the oil. Doesn’t look like I got water in the engine - yeah! So all has ended well here. Really, I couldn’t ask for more.

Oh Dear Lord. I was complaining earlier today about the fact that we’ve had 10 days of rain and it just seems like it will never end. Now? Oh my.

At about 8pm, going out to dinner seemed like such a good idea. Sure, it’s raining - but this is Houston! If you can’t handle rain you really need to leave. We’re tough, we won’t melt, so off we went to the restaurant.

The place was dead, but the service was great. As we were finishing up the waitress commented that they had closed because of the storm - not to rush, but she wanted to close out our check. Ok, no big deal. We talked for a little while after we finished our meal, hoping the storm would let up. No such luck. We finally decided that we could make it to the car, I would skip the errand I needed to run, and head for my place.

We had taken my car to the restaurant. Heading home, I tried to go down the main street to my apartment … until I noticed that the street was completely full of water. Uhm, ok, I’ll try to take “the back way” in, going through the subdivision and then down to my apartment. Ha! When I realized how deep the water was (I was about to float away) I pulled in to the first driveway I could get in to just to get out of the water.

DateMan hadn’t met my parents yet, and I didn’t really think that 10pm at night, soaked from the rain, was the best time to just drop in, but there were no other options left. It was either that or cruise around Houston looking for higher ground, so off to my parent’s house we went after a courtesy call to warn them that we were coming over. (They only live 8 blocks from my place, and about 5 blocks from where I was stranded at the moment.)

One problem. Their street was flooded too. I was able to make it to the house across the street from theirs, but no further. So I pulled in to the neighbor’s driveway, explained the situation, gave them the key to my car (I’ve known them since 1985, so I felt pretty safe) and asked them to move my car to my parent’s house when the water went down. Then we waded through water that was at least 7 inches deep (ewwww!) over to my parent’s house. Dad greeted us outside, and we went to the back porch to wait out the rain. Cozy and dry, which was better than we had been.

After awhile I realized the rain was letting up, so I went outside to look and discovered that the street had cleared and I could see the curbs and pavement again - quite a switch from the missing curbs earlier, water in to the yards of most houses. It seemed like it might be the only chance I would have to move my car, so we were off again. I got my car out of their driveway and headed for home.

But it wasn’t going to be that easy yet. Both routes to my place are still completely flooded - so I ended up parking in the lot across the street and we had to wade through water that was close to knee deep to get back to my place. Add to that the fact that my umbrella decided to leak, and I was pretty much soaked from head to toe.

Ahhhh… the stories we have to tell. Hopefully everyone else in Houston is doing ok and their evenings aren’t as exciting as ours. Only 8 inches of water in 3 hours here, and there is still more to come tonight. They claim that after 10 days straight of rain, it might finally go away for a little while. I don’t believe them. According to Weather.com the flood warning for Harris County doesn’t end until 8am tomorrow morning. Someone hand me some wading boots…