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Happy Birthday Scan-man!

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Had lunch with my old college friends, Steve and Delfin at an Irish Pub around the corner. It was Steve (Scan-man)’s birthday yesterday. Great catching up with them, the last time we saw each other was at Miguel and Jennifer’s Wedding a few weeks ago.

So I feel like I could write random stuff in my blog, every day/week/whatever, just so I get in the regular habit of writing. But it just seems like such a waste and not very fulfilling or encouraging for me, not having any way of getting images into the site easier. As it is, I have to use my scrappy little all-in-one HP office office printer to scan all my images into the machine at home, and then upload them to an FTP location where I can access them anywhere I have a connection. The all-in-one reliable, but really old. (“Dad, why don’t we get a wireless printer?” my son says)

Without a camera or some sort of portable scanner on me all the time, it’s hard to post pictures on the blog unless I’m at home. And I don’t get to get on the computer at home very much because of chores and time with the family. Of course, I’d love it if I could get pictures off my camera-phone and onto the web painlessly, but Verizon crippled it, so that it’s not a simple file download from memory to another device. Verizon forces you to have a data plan, because that’s the only way to send your picture OUT of your camera, (via MMS).

Sophia’s convinced Apple is going to come out with a Verizon iPhone, so she’s waiting for that to come out. Now if that baby worked the way I hope it can, there’s a device that would be great to get all sorts of pictures into the blog. Ian’s iPod Touch is great, but without a camera or a cellular connection, it’s not that useful outside of the home, which is where I’d want/need to use it.

Which reminds me, SHAME on Weatherproof for using a picture of President Obama on a recent trip wearing one of their jackets to hawk the brand. Just so that Weatherproof does not benefit from any of my inadvertent SEO goodness, here are links to some of their competitors: North Face, L.L. Bean, Eddie Bauer, Land’s End, Patagonia, American Eagle,

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Tags: iPod, iPod Touch, Obama, Politician, Steve Brodner

3 year plan — My aspirations/goals for January 2013

Monday, January 11th, 2010

My 3 year goals as a “look back” document written in the future. This idea was provided by Diana Scheidman and her email newsletter/website standup8times.com.

January 2013

I’ve finished my painting(s) for Sophia. “I didn’t sell my art by the square foot!”, and I found a way to paint at home without poisoning everyone or the cats (no oils and nasty thinning agents and paints) and no God awful acrylics. Poster paints/watercolor and tempera paints were all good choices, oil or chalk pastel could also be cleaner and/or less toxic to try next, beautiful mediums without the toxicity.

I’ve saved up enough money to buy Sophia one of those new Apple book readers/iSlate devices, and filled it up with a fewbooks from her Amazon wishlist already, She loves it as much as I do, (I’ve got to get one myself).

Ian is enjoying his laptop, it’s powerful enough for him to play games, and he’s become disciplined enough now to know when to play and when to work on it. The drawing tablet for art work is one of his favorite tools, he’s done some very cool work with it.
Justin is touch-typing very well too, he’s getting a lot of mileage out of his laptop too.

BlueBerry, our new British Blue Tabby is fitting in well with Jonesy and Stu, we think he makes a swell addition to the family.
I asked Sophia if she had to do it all over again, would she still marry me? is that the right question to ask?
I’ve already done a marathon, and thinking of doing this every year now, and getting my time better each year…

I’ve established my blog, or should I say blogs, trying to figure out which was going to be my “personal” blog, and which was going to be my “public” blog was not an easy decision, I’m glad I bought that additional domain so that it was easier to separate the two different parts of me, we’ll see if that was the best way to do it or not in the next few months as our traffic has increased substantially on both.

Every couple of months the crews at RFX, Sirius and all the old PIC crew have been able to meet up for a get-togethjer or two so I’ve staying much more in touch than in previous years.

I have a self published comic book, it doesn’t have to do well, but it’s just an accomplishment to get it finally finished

I’m living with a lot less regret than I did 3 years ago (coulda, woulda, shoulda)

I have succeeded in overcoming my addiction to THE BEST CANDY IN THE WORLD, NUTRAGEOUS!!!!

The basement toilet is fixed, and we have ceiling tiles and flooring in the “livable spaces” in the basement

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Tags: 2010, 2013, Art, aspirations, goals, looking back, looking forward, painting

What appears to be my first legitimate pingback…

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

It’s probably some kind of a crawler, but at least it’s a relevant ping-back to what at first appeared to be a Japanese news aggregator site, the link back to my site was from this page: http://hot-news.dreamhosters.com/anna-david. Following the link, it goes to a page that highlights Anna David, the author of several sex advice columns. I had mentioned her as one of the hosts on a show I was trying out called AOTS: In Your Pants, in my post “Podcast reviews – what’s on my Mac and iPod” I’ve had plenty of spam ping-backs, but at least this looks like a real site; it appears to be more of an informational site than anything else though – the name “Hot News” is really disingenuous – it barely looks like it’s even edited by a human being, probably another spider scraping other sites for content. (I wonder if this increases their search ranking in Google?).

Oh – and the reason I thought it was a Japanese site is because when I followed the link from my WordPress Admin, all the Google Ads there were in Japanese! (weird), subsequent ads were in English, I wonder why a referrer from my domain brings up Japanese Ads? I’m not even Japanese… :P If anyone has any ideas, could you please leave a comment?

The Hot News Page with Japanese Ads

 

The Hot News Page with English Ads

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Tags: Anna David, Hot-News, Japanese, pingback

Cover images too long for article templates

Friday, September 12th, 2008

I had these nice long strips of image I used for the manual “Excerpt” of the Caricature section.

They were the same width as the header of the section on the home page, so they added a nice bit of design to the whole thing. Trouble is, this theme also uses the Excerpt in the article template by default and the image overlaps the content. From what I’ve read so far, if you leave in images in the Content the default theme would take the first 55 characters for the excerpt by strip out all images for you. Here’s examples of the type of images I’m talking about:

David Patterson

Howard Stern

My next task is to learn a little php and see if I can figure out how to use those cover images, but have them hidden in the articles pages.

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Tags: images, template pages, theme article content excerpt

Overstand theme

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Guten Tag.

So now I’m jumping into themes, this one called “overstand” is nice a clean and has an old-school magazine type paradigm I like. I’m trying to resist switching the look of my blog too often, as I really *don’t* know what I’m doing. I did it once too often on my previous blog (which only had two posts anyway) and it completely ruined it, I had to scramble to get it back to a default appearance again.

Hopefully, things will turn out better this time, over time I will change the text in the original template so it isn’t in *GERMAN*. somehow I picked up that version instead of the English one.

Before I sign off, I did remember what the other topic of my previous blog was – it was Howard Stern, because I work at Sirius. (now “Sirius XM”!) This really doesn’t belong in the :”Mac” category which is where I’ve put this and the previous post, I’m probably going to change it retroactively at a later time. I’m thinking maybe having a “meta” category, that would make sense…

Toodles

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Tags: appearance, customize, overstand, skin, WordPress Theme

My switch to GoDaddy

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

So I finally switch hosting providers. Just when I started using WordPress on my old service (Uplink Earth) which they provided with a very easy to use management dashboard, they yanked the chain and switched to a different platform. It was a horrendous, slow, unintuitive interface and the same boilerplate copy was on every page in their new management pages. It was difficult to do anything, I couldn’t set up test email accounts as easily as before and it seemed like you had to be a real geek to understand or configure anything.

I’m a Mac guy, I’m not that good at all of that kind of fiddly diddle stuff, I want quick, intuitive, easy to understand interfaces that even I can manage. They were more expensive than other hosts, and I stayed with them for years because it was worth it for me because they were so easy to use. When they switched to the new platform, they were no better than the worst commodity hosting service out there. So I decided, why not have GoDaddy host my domain, I already had registered through them, they were much cheaper, and I could also use the promo codes on all the shows I listen to. It was a pretty smooth switch, but I had to make a choice between Windows or Linux servers to host my site. I finally decided on Linux, even though my previous site was .asp. I don’t really program, so it’s kind of moot, and there are just more things available for this platform than on the Windows side.

I couldn’t save my old content, but I had just started, so it wasn’t that much anyway, I’ll post what I could remember of them, I know one was about David Patterson, I think the other may have been about Martin Luther King, just can’t remember….

anyway, this is my first post to this new Blog, hope this one lasts more than a month… :P

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Tags: GoDaddy, hosts, Linux