After the initial file upgrading, I was greeted with a completely blank screen and the underlying HTML file was completely empty.

The two major nuisances causing this problem were:

• I put the WordPress site-files into its own directory.  Due to something in this major software update, this functionality was broken.  Thus, I had to explicitly access the “WordPress URL” directly.
• I was using the “default” theme from 2.x.  This theme is not present in 3.0. So, after a successful upgrade.php, I had to go under the Site-Admin “Appearance” tab.  Once there, it detected it was configured with a non-existent theme, and changed this setting to the new “Twenty Ten” theme.

Now it’s working.  Default theme probably needs to be personalized a bit.  Otherwise, it’s working fine…

The main tenant of the book is that human psychology causes us to create meaning and find patterns in what well be randomness, noise, unpredictability, or natural complexity.  He uses the markets as his main analogy, but cites a few philosophers and psychologists work.

Additionally, he also points out that the human mind is not very good at scientific / mathematical thinking.  Simple probability is easily misunderstood.  He also addresses the inability of us consider alternative histories or do Monte-Carlo runs on future possibilities.

Things I found of note were his approach to this subject, which is that of a non-serious, philosophical skeptic.  I find it refreshing.

Reading a bit on Amazon’s review of this book, I see allot of chiding remarks.  Nassim uses many known financial professionals as examples in his book, and it’s apparent that some did not take kindly to it.  However, the auther makes his intentions, those of non-serious dialogue and argument from simple logic deduction, clear in the prologue to the book.  Any who didn’t read that far may well have earned their disappointment.

3 out of 4 possible stars.

Still trying to iron things out on the server end. Also got allot of content I dumped into “Pages” that needs to be thrashed into better content. Also got allot of things to post about that I never got to with the old site. All in good time.

My only big annoyance right now is that “Pages” cannot be categorized. What if I want a Page that relates to a category of other things I’ve posted about?? I could just post about the subject, but then it will get lost over time. How to I assign permanence to a post!?

Narrowed it down to a cached copy of three RSS feeds, stored in the administrative “options” table. Why would cached data of any RSS feeds, let alone those that are superfluous to WordPress development belong there????

Anyway, commented out the PHP lines that fetch the RSS feeds. Then manually had to remove the cached entries in the database itself. Now it compresses down under 5KB. I’m content for now.

As to why this data was stored there, or at all is still a mystery to me. But I’m a newbie; I’m not supposed to understand, right?

Right now, it is not linked from the root of my webpage, so realistically I’m the only one who will view this. But given enough time, I’ll make the switch. I wish to figure out the basics of configuration; I also wish to import most of the static info from my current (old and busted) webpage. After that, it should be a go.