Category: Weblog

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If you look to the right —>
You’ll see a search box. You can now search through the annals of Cruft history easily. I’ll pretty it up when I get time. So if you are getting here via an external search engine, you can try finding what you are looking for via my search box.

Power Tools

In my last post I mentioned how great my wife was for squeezing in painting when the girls weren’t home. This morning I walked out back and caught a glipse of a familiar blue color. Yep, it was a blue Makita tool case. Hrrm, I own a few Makita tools, but I don’t have a case like that.
I walked over and noticed my Black & Decker sander next to the blue case. It’s the sander I used to redo the spa a while ago. I opened the case to find a new Makita sander just like the one we already had.
I asked Michele if she bought the new sander. I knew she had, but I wanted to hear her reasoning. She said that Len and I had ‘runined and broke’ the old sander and that she needed a new one. I asked her how she could have bought a new power tool without me. I mean c’mon of all the shopping we do about the only thing I like to shop for is electronics and power tools. She gets to make all the other choices. She told me to shut up and go to work.
Now I’m at work and I don’t know which sander she bought. I bet she didn’t even know how many choices she had…

Three pictures

Michele’s been busting her ass in the house. The kids are going off to camp during the days, leaving time for Michele to do what she wants. What she wants to do redo the girls room.


She’s been painting the girls room as part of the redo. The kids leave the house around 8 AM. Once they leave she them moves most of the furniture out, masks off the room and paints. She has until the afternoon to get it painted, clean up the mess, and put all the furniture before the kids come home.
She painted half the room on Wednesday and the rest of it today. She rocks.

We harvested a few carrots from the backyard garden last weeked. Their size is fairly small. I’m hoping the corn does better than this. it’s about two feet tall at this point. Time for some miracle-gro.

Also on the weekend, we saw this. I had heard jokes about this but I didn’t really believe it. Yes, that’s braille instructions on a drive-up ATM. You’d have to be in the driver seat to touch/read it. WTF?
Today at the office I was in meetings from 9Am to 5:45PM. 5 different meetings. I didn’t even get to read my work email today. I’m sure it’s going to be a big pile tommorrow.

Back to business

So a while ago I was walking in beautiful downtown South Pasadena on my way to the school board meeting when I saw this…


Holy fuck. It’s a real live warchalking symbol. An actual specimen found in the wild. Sure enough, 60 feet up was Cafe Pop, the same place I connected to while sitting in my car previously.
I guess some this stuff I read about on the net is real…

FAQ

So, I’m going to rewrite the FAQ. But I need to know what questions are frequently asked. I know there is concern over such monumentous issues as how I order the links to the left. But I feel there are other questions just waiting to be asked out there, hovering in cyberspace.
Please let me know what other questions you have. The comments thingie should work just fine for this.

Rebecca Blood’s Weblog Handboook

I was pondering a few things about weblogs and wrote a couple emails off to Rebecca Blood and Matt Haughey. They are fairly well known experts about weblogs.
After exchanging a few emails, I decided to buy their books on weblogs. Rebecca’s book, The Weblog Handbook, came quickly from Amazon. Matt’s book, We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs, comes out this week and has not arrived
I took Thursday off for my aborted geocaching trip, so I was happy when The Weblog Handbook arrived in the mail. I grabbed a soda pop and began to read. The book is only 160 pages so I was able to read it during the day. I’m a fast reader and I was familiar with the material, so it went quickly. Here’s my book review
Rebecca’s book has some really good information in it. At first, I thought, is there enough info about weblogs to write an entire book about? After reading it, it can definitely say there is.
The book goes over the origins of weblogs and identifies the different types. I’ve been on the web a long time and thought I knew everything there was to know about weblogs. I wrote my first weblog type post back in 1997. The first couple chapters go into good detail about exactly what happened.
I disagree a little about the origins of weblogs though. I’ve been wasting time on the internet since 1991. Back in the day, everything was text based. To learn about someone else on the net, one of the first things you could do was to ‘finger‘ them. When you fingered someone, you’d get a basic set of info they had written to identify themselves. One of the files that could be used was known as the .plan file. The plan file was a relic of the time when the net was primarily an academic place. A .plan would be used to describe the plan of study. As the scope of the net became larger, the plan files became something that people could change a bit more regularly to reflect what was going on. Before there were webcams, you could finger devices on the net, like a coke machine, and the .plan would describe their status.
In my mind, these .plan files were the true origin of weblogs. It’s a bit of a stretch to see it if you have never lived in the pre-browser internet. But trust me, it’s true.
Enough of my navel gazing, back to the book. Rebecca has some sound advice for someone wanting to start a weblog or make their existing weblog better. I thought the chapter on Finding an Audience is great. She is absolutely correct that regular visitors are the currency of weblogs. Whether people like to admit it or not, what people are craving with weblogs is attention. Everyone checks their referrer logs. If someone doesn’t check their referrer logs, it’s because they don’t know how.  She lists several good and practical methods to get people to visit your site and what to expect when they eventually do come.
The chapter on Weblog Community and Etiquette should be required reading before you can join blogger.com or start any other form of weblog.  I think the idea of having an ethical code for your weblog is a good one.  Since my weblog is kinda fluffy, I don’t really run into these issues much.  But there are many people who write about serious issues and they should at least attempt to have a code that they try to adhere to on an ongoing basis. I have read many sites that post anything without the least attempt to verify it’s truthfulness.

On a more practical note, the book is full of helpful tips and how-tos for someone learning the basics of weblogging and online community.  It’s long enough to be worth the money, but it’s short enough to finish the whole thing in a couple sittings.  The three appendix sections do a good job of explaining the basics of creating a weblog, creating hyperlinks, and using third party weblog software.

I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone that finds weblogging interesting.

Happiness

In a test of TrackBack, I refer to my brother’s post Dot-coms to hot-dogs? on his site.
He’s talking about how many previously rich dotcommers are now finding jobs in less high tech, more service sector areas like selling food. Matt seemed to think this sounded gloomy.
My response was:
“Well I don’t think it’s so entirely depressing. America is unlike the rest of the world where wealth often takes precedence over personal time.
The rest of the world seems to be having much more fun and taking many more vacations than us.
The real question is are the people happy in their new jobs. If so, then it’s probably a good thing. Life is short. Far too short to waste most of your time focused on a bank balance instead of a balanced life.”
Maybe I just need a vacation…