Last night while the West coast was voting at around 1:20 AM Eastern time there was some sort of oddity in the voting that caused predictions to get a bit screwy with the girls. Paige was a significant benefactor from this as was Katelyn and Didi. Paige probably should be closer to the bottom than the top if not at the bottom altogether. Katelyn, Didi, Haeley and Lilly are probably higher than they should be too. You can see the bump in DIHardGraphs.

None of this really matters too much since the predictions are too close to call this week at all and everyone is in a virtual tie. This happens around this time of year and will eventually get better if more people pick up the phone and vote.

DialIdol v3.5.1.0 has been released today. This version should work a little better on Windows 7 - meaning it shouldn't require it to be run as administrator and hopefully it won't ask you if the program ran correctly when you close it. Your call data and a log file (if you generate it) will no longer be stored with the executable; instead those files will be stored in your AppData folder. Additionally those files will be backed up every time you launch the application. These are the only real changes. Oh - the XML file is now called DialIdol.xml instead of DIStats.xml. If you want your old stats to show up in this new version you will have to move the old DIStats.xml file (located wherever DialIdol was installed - probably C:\Program Files (x86)\DialIdol.com\DialIdol) to your AppData folder (perhaps located here depending on you version of Windows - C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\DialIdol.com\DialIdol), when you move it - be sure to rename it DialIdol.xml (there may be an existing XML file there is you ran DialIdol after you upgraded to 3.5.1 but if you haven't dialed with this version it doesn't contain any data and thus is safe to overwrite.) The older version is still available for use/download - mostly because I only tested the new version a little (versus my usual obsessive testing).

An old bug resurfaced relating to moving DialIdol from shared web hosting to dedicated web hosting last night. It was corrected by 10:36 PM Eastern. The only real ramification is that DIHardGraphs showed double interval data for intervals prior to 10:36 PM. This had no impact on the actual predictions and DIHardGraphs has been corrected.

DialIdol moved to its in-season home today. This move is a bit risky as it marks the first time DialIdol.com's old web code will be running on a different operating system/web server so look out for oddities.

DialIdol does work on Windows 7 though admittedly it could work better. You must run DialIdol as an Administrator on Windows 7; this is because DialIdol tracks your statistics in an XML file stored where the executable is stored. This location has since become a read-only location and thus requires Administrator privileges to bypass it. I intend on fixing this at some point but in the meantime please use this workaround.

I have been a bit absent since about May of last year - if you tried to get a hold of me then you probably didn't succeed. :) I'm hoping to be a bit more responsive now that we're starting back up again!