Just Installed a new Twitter Widget on the right hand sidebar. Now I'm awaiting an upgrade to my twitter account so that I can capture tweets and embed them with web actions such as; Reply, Retweet and Favorite, right from the embedded code.

Here is a screen shot of an example.

Been immersed in the world of HTML trying to complete some projects for school and friends. It's interesting that very consistently the first steps are the hardest. Once the journey has started inertia takes over and fills the time and brings you to conclusion. Then there are tweaks and bugs to look after. I enjoy handling the entire process from Internet service provider to designer, photographer, developer then quality engineer. Not rocket science but nice to have the skills to own all the steps. There are always challenges in my weaker areas but working those new muscles develops strength.

Tomorrow I will enter the world of Android when a Kindle Fire will be in my possession. I look forward to comparing it to the iPad. Amazon certainly has made this devise very focused on buying consumable media. After you have connected to the internet.: Step one - register device. Step two - set up payment method. At lea$t they are not ambiguou$ about what it'$ purpose i$.

"Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds."

Douglas Adams via Gene Fowler

Thank you, thank you, thank you to all the readers and commenters of this blog. It is a real lift to know so many of you follow along during this adventure called NaBloPoMo or National Blog Posting Month. This is the third year this blog has participated in the event. Coming along for the ride this year was an old friend from high school, Ken with his blog; A passionate Engagement, a new found relative, my wife's cousin Lauren; right brain dominant and a cyber fly fishing buddy John; Whiskey Creek Fly Fishing. They all participated and got their thirty posts up. I hope they had a great time too. I enjoyed reading all their posts an commenting when I had something to say. Ken sorta blew the doors off NaBloPoMo with over ninety posts and averaging three to four postings a day.

This year focused more on photography, because I thought it would be easier and save time. Not true on either account, but it was less angst ridden. Writing is very hard for me, so posting mostly photos this year was a nice respite. Going out and shooting and then processing the images was actually more time consuming. Total images posted for the month was thirty one. Of those seventeen were shot during the month. All the images were post processed in Photoshop Lightroom before being uploaded. Some had minor tweaks, while others had many adjustments made to them. I'm still learning but I know my former experience has helped in some ways.

Thanks again and I hope you'll be back soon.

Well folks, It's time again for late nights and remote posts. This year there may be a strong concentration of photography. I'm learning a bunch of new things and I will have to share them. I hope you will enjoy the images and feel free to give feedback. We'll see how it goes. I also want to invite and inspire a few more folks to join the fray. Happy NaBloPoMo everyone.

See. . . nothing here. Just this empty post. Move along now.

NaBloPoMo has come to an end. The marathon is over. I'm glad I joined again this year. It is very fun to do and it does feel really good to accomplish this. I might even get to take a night off now. A huge congratulations to Andrea for also finishing this year. I knew she could do it. I'm also curious to hear who will be my prize recipient. I donated a dozen fly fishing flies to this years prize pool. As always, thanks to Eden Kennedy for creating such a wonderful event.

I hope you'll never notice all the things that just went wrong with this site. When things go wrong they can go very wrong. When you have to repair about fifty images and you have made a backup of deleted files, just in case, you're thankful for the discipline your career has taught you. This is the beauty of the smoke and mirrors we call HTML, the markup language used to create all that is made on the web. Because I have upgraded the software and the add-ins for this site several times it has gone through a lot of churn. This has resulted in phantom pages being created, split comment entries and the several repairs resulting in the loss of many images. I think I just fixed them all. The phantom page still has an address but through the magic of PHP, I have redirected the user seamlessly to the correct page. This means that now everyone should literally be on the same page.

Huge thanks goes to my niece Andrea who helped with the EUEKA moment when she noticed a legacy menu item being displayed by the phantom page. This lead to the discovery that the web software does not clean up the server when you delete a page. This is probably an intended feature to protect the user from doing harm to themselves. Why a deleted page continues to be updated, I have no Idea. With a little HTML duct tape and PHP bailing wire, I think I can move on. No, it's not rocket science but sometimes I wish I could fix these things with a wrench, hammer and screwdriver. I'm much more comfortable with those kinds of tools.

I ask two favors of you my wonderful readers. If you have subscribed to the RSS feed for this blog prior to this week, please delete the subscription and re-subscribe. You can use the GIANT RSS BUTTON on my home page. Go ahead click on it, it will not bite you. Second, Please leave a witty comment so that we can exercise the the comment service and make sure it is performing well. I am now greatly indebted to you. Thank you very much.

This has been an easy start up to NaBloPoMo. I have been blogging pretty regularly the last two weeks. You may have noticed I even took down a couple of posts. Those reasons don't have to be vented here. But I'm revved up to post this month. There will be challenges for me this year since I'll be traveling for a period of time during the month. Hopefully I can find a connection easily. I'm also terribly frustrated with the comments issues I'm having. I deal with three vendors and no one has come up with the reason why some of my comments have decided to hide. I believe I've narrowed down the cause but I don't know who is creating the problem. If I have to dig deeper, I have the resources to help, but I was hoping someone would step up to the plate. I will continue to pursue this and hopefully there will be a happy ending.

Please let me know if there is something you would like to see here. I'd love your ideas. This blog has never had a narrow focus so almost everything is fair game except the usual taboo subjects. You know what those are. I'm sure there will be some fly fishing references, gardening, concerts or events and more on food. Maybe we can keep the car issues out of here this year.

Please come back often and try to comment. It will help me troubleshoot these issues.

Cheers!

I have a Twitter account as you can see over there on the right. Anyone else using Twitter?

I just can't help myself. I love to over commit! Another thirty daily posts coming your way in November. This year the NaBloPoMo prize list will be graced with a dozen flies I will tie for some lucky winner who successfully posts every day. I could even blog about the flies I make for the prize. I've got to keep the content fountain flowing. Already I'm armed with an ideas folder full of stuff to blog about and a huge backlog of things I should have told you about earlier, because I'VE BEEN SANDBAGGING ALL SUMMER. Additionally I have the remote blogging software Rapidblog set up. I did not have that wonderful tool last year. Rapidblog allowed me to blog from England earlier this year.

I encourage my blogging friends to try and participate in NaBloPoMo. It is really fun and quite rewarding. Find out more about NaBloPoMo 2008 and sign up.

Finally got a chance to do some upgrades this week. I'm very happy to see a few things in Rapidblog have been updated. Permalinks are now a hotlink in title again. My blog post editor finally opens with the most recent entries showing immediately. It was annoying having to scroll up to find my last words of wisdom. There seems to be a change in comments expansion. What this means I don't know until after I post and try it for myself. I'll make an addendum when I figure that out.

RapidWeaver has had a UI facelift and is much more Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) like now. It is much easier to edit image attributes with the media inspector button at the top. I used to have to double click the image. If there was a link assigned to the image it was a clickfest to get it to correctly launch what i wanted. They also shipped some nifty web badges so I guess I'll attribute RapidWeaver in the sidebar now.

I have company in the driveway. More later. . .

7/14 Much later. Things look good. Comments still popping up in a separate Haloscan window. This is frustrating. I'd like to have all comments read and entered on the permalink page. I'll fuss with more later. Upload performance also seems optimized. Nice!

I follow the blog of Andy Ihnatko. He's an author and the technology columnist for the Chicago Sun Times. I like geeky stuff, what can I say. As I watched the news this morning in bewilderment, I could not figure out a reason for what was going on. Andy's post puts it into perspective. Please note, I do not publicly endorse or discuss political candidates on this blog. Andy's insight was so clear that I wanted to share it with you. Maybe because I'm a geek, his pen speaks more clearly to me.

I just found this and had to share it with you. I'm glad it's not as bad the nerd score.

68%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Via CuriousMitch

I just read Death and Underachievement: A Guide to Happiness in Work by Ryan Norbauer over at 43 Folders. His compelling arguement, be happy with where you are right now, if you shot for the moon while setting all your goals, you may live a life of disappointment. He also reminds us just how small we are on the radar screen of life.

"each of us is one among 6.6 billion people (give or take), and that even if you were to attain a level of accomplishment that (let’s face it) you could never even dream of approaching—say, becoming prime minister of Canada—the vast majority of people now and ever living will never even have heard of you."

I guss this means not many people will ever read my blog. It's interesting, that I read this in anticipation of doing my annual review for work. Even more interesting is that Ryan is probably less than fifteen miles from me right now, a fact I discovered from his bio while creating his hotlink. By the way - Ryan is an overachiever as well as a very gifted writer.

This is day thirty and this is post thirty. You know what? I really enjoyed it. Thanks to Eden Marriott Kennedy for creating and managing this great event. It has helped me be more disciplined about what to blog. It's also produced a nice springboard for continuing. Being committed to a set block of time forced me to establish some practices and think of things that needed to be done to sustain the site. The great thing was that there was not much grumbling about what to post. I just did it. Some things that happened to me during the day made good material for a post and I was excited to get it here. Other days would be uneventful. On those days I would go to a list of ideas I had created. The list was made before the month started. It's is not used up either. More content is coming! On days when there were guests in the house or other work needed to be done, I was able to a quickly post a photo, a short snippet from the day's events or something I found on the web. Another byproduct, my niece and friend Sara were inspired from my participation in the event to invest in their blogs. I tried to read postings from other NaBloPoMo participants too. I was amazed at the variety of bloggers out there. THANK YOU to everyone who left comments. I appreciate them. Don't stop commenting! It felt good, . . didn't it? Keep doing that comment thing. You won't go blind and you hands won't fall off. Best of all you can do it in private. . . or in public. . . you don't mind if people watch, do you? I know some people like to watch. Return here often and look for more stuff in the future, maybe even tomorrow.

It started with this quote from iGoogle's Quote of the day widget I had on my browser homepage.

People often write me and ask how I keep my wood floors so clean when I live with a child and a dog, and my answer is that I use a technique called Suffering From a Mental Illness. - Heather Armstrong, Dooce, 07-07-06

I really liked this quote. I wanted to find out about this person. I thought I'd find a book or magazine article. It lead me to the Quotation Page. There I found 10 witty tomes from this woman who had the word Dooce next to her name. What's a Dooce? Her bio said "Blogger from Salt Lake City." I find her website and started reading, and reading, and laughing, and crying, and laughing, and thinking, my god! where has this woman come from. She has amazing writing skills. I find out more at her FAQ page. My favorite gem is #6. She speaks her mind, takes no prisoners and slaps people with reality about how silly and self righteous they can be. But the weirdest thing is that basically, this woman is a mommy blogger. There are zillions of these mommy blogs on the internet. Most of them are so colored in pastel and syrupy sweet that they make you want to puke from cuteness overdose. I found myself returning to her site daily. This woman was different. She was edgy, thoughtful and sarcastic. She also has this amazing dog named Chuck. No hot links for him, you can't miss him. He has his own annual calendar for sale on her website. Her husband Jon has his own blog. This sometimes makes for interesting blog volleys between the two of them. I could not stop myself. I was checking her site almost daily. Then it got worse. Jon posted this entry about a trip Heather was on. And then there were these pictures, and Heather names each one of these ladies with a hot link. I ask my self "there are more like her?" naaahhh. But yes she was cavorting with other mommy bloggers. This can't be. Of course I had to find out if they were as opinionated and funny as Heather and yes they were and very talented writers. The thing is, these woman don't sugarcoat motherhood. They tell it like it is, the good, the bad, the ugly. They seem successful and know the blogging world well. Alice, Eden, Maggie and Melissa all bloggers, and all hanging out with each other doing this. Oh my god! and I start reading more and more and subscribing to their blog feeds. Now I'm hooked.
Next thing that happens is that Eden has this challenge called NaBloPoMo and here I am. Good gravy. . . fifteen more posts till the end of the month.

I just Joined NaBloPoMo07 because Eden said to. November 1, 2007 was also drawing near. We will see if this lasts.



Last night I was inspired to post, because my niece felt she had to gush about the horseshoes. (Please wash your hands after reading the post). I had to reply. Some things just have to be stopped. That is why they invented Imodium. But today, in a benevolent mood, I bought the domain name that matched the title of her blog. I'm done being nice. Game on horseshoe fans!

Enough said.