March 2, 2006

"Poems, Prayers & Promises"

I believe this is just outside Calistoga at the northern end of Napa valley. This was shot this morning from inside a speeding car! Hopefully the weather holds and there will be another picture tomorrow.

I’ve been lately thinking / About my life’s time / All the things I’ve done / And how it’s been / And I can’t help believing / In my own mind / I know I’m gonna hate to see it end

I’ve seen a lot of sunshine / Slept out in the rain / Spent a night or two all on my own / I’ve known my lady’s pleasures / Had myself some friends / And spent a time or two in my own home

And I have to say it now / It’s been a good life all in all / It’s really fine / To have a chance to hang around / And lie there by the fire / And watch the evening tire / While all my friends and my old lady / Sit and pass the pipe around

And talk of poems and prayers and promises / And things that we believe in / How sweet it is to love someone / How right it is to care / How long it’s been since yesterday / And what about tomorrow / And what about our dreams / And all the memories we share

The days they pass so quickly now / Nights are seldom long / And time around me whispers when it’s cold / The changes somehow frighten me / Still I have to smile / It turns me on to think of growing old / For though my life’s been good to me / There’s still so much to do / So many things my mind has never known / I’d like to raise a family / I’d like to sail away / And dance across the mountains on the moon

Words and music by john denver
(and a chunk left out)

Posted by Red Monkey at 1:20 AM | Comments (3) | Blog | TrackBack | Stumble

March 1, 2006

Somewhere Over New Mexico

I woke up at 3 a.m. eastern time Tuesday morning so that I could take a flight from South Bend, IN to Chicago. From there, we had about a 2 hour layover (little less) and caught a looooong flight in to John Wayne airport in Orange County. Sadly, the battery on my laptop died around an hour and a half into Lords of Dogtown. (Yeah, it was my fourth time to watch it in about a month, but still! lol)

I took several shots of the desert states as this was about the only time the clouds cleared up enough to do so. This particular shot out the plane window was about the only green we passed over ... I wish I knew where we were when I took this one!!

From Orange Country, we did some business in Temecula and then drove back to the airport and hopped a flight to San Francisco ... I had thought we were actually staying in San Fran, but we're staying in Santa Rosa which seemed to take an excessively long time to drive to after the San Fran flight.

I'm sure I'll be posting more pictures over the next several days as we wander around the Napa and Sonoma wine country through Saturday.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:19 AM | Comments (1) | Blog | TrackBack | Stumble

February 28, 2006

Guest Post for Animal Lovers

Hello there! Some of you might know me as B, Allnightorg, ANO or you might not know me at all. I'm here to let you know about a great cause that I'm trying to help out. On April 2nd I will be participating in a walk for the Maryland SPCA. It's a 1.5 mile walk to help raise funds for the local SPCA. The money will go towards the care and well being of the animals. As of right now I have $180 raised and I'm close to reaching my goal of $300. Of course, if I can pass that goal I'd be very happy! If you'd like to learn more about the MD SPCA you can check out their website and to donate online you can use my walk sponsorship link here. Remember any little bit helps and I thank anyone in advance who donates! If you choose to donate and have a website, please let me know and I'll email you a little badge I've made!

Last but not least I'd like to thank Ender for letting me have this little guest post!

Posted by Red Monkey at 2:38 AM | Blog | Stumble

February 21, 2006

Kitchen Sink

Oooooh, looky here! No more comment moderation!

It seems that the junk filters in the new Movable Type 3.2 (why oh why do I want to put an E in the middle of Movable?) work wonderfully. I hadn't really paid attention to this feature except in regard to the trackback issue. I had so much trackback spam, it was really driving me nuts. Upon upgrading, Movable Type 3.2 has (so far) caught all the trackback spam and isolated it for me to decide whether or not to publish it. So far, it's caught all the spam and nothing else. Then, the other day as I was randomly pressing links in the new GUI, I realized that there was also a "Comment Junk" setting. I clicked on it, and lo and behold! Movable Type 3.2 had already caught a few comments that were spam and isolated them. I reviewed them, found the filter to be very very good and deleted the crapola. (Of course, I would find these features faster if I would just RTFM ... details, details.)

Meanwhile, I have a recommendation for any southerners who might now be living "up north." In the south, the air vents for your heater and air conditioner are generally located up by the ceiling. This is because hot air rises and you want to combat the heat during the summer. Fine, great, who cares, right? Well, up north, these vents are in the floor since you want to retain as much heat as possible in the winter up north.

Might I recommend NOT accidentally (or on purpose) kicking or stumbling into one of these air registers? They're kinda sharp.

Sharp as in while going to bed Thursday night, I tripped over the dog's stuffed bear and kicked the register ... something I've never done before. I sliced my little toe. I mean SLICED it. As in I nearly took the tippy-top off the toe. It was painful. Quite.

And you know it's sharp when you not only slice skin but also get a free toenail clipping to go along with it.

Yet another reason that northerners are far more backwards than those of us privileged enough to have been born in the south. A southerner at least would have put the sharp-ass thing on the WALL where it can't be STEPPED ON.

Meanwhile, I hadda read the Wikipedia article on RTFM just because ... well, because. It was funny. And, it led me to a new line that I had not heard before: UTSL ... presumably if you want to know how someone did something on their website and had the audacity to ask, you might be told UTSL ... Use the Source, Luke. LMFAO
Aren't acronyms fun?

Maybe I'm just a geek. I don't care ... geekdom is all the fun I have left anymore.

Meanwhile ... just remember, don't kick any air registers on the floor. Sliced little toes are painful. (I tried to take a picture, but I just couldn't get it to come out well. Consider yourself lucky to have missed the blood and gore.)

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:35 AM | Comments (0) | Blog | TrackBack | Stumble

January 30, 2006

Blog Traffic Reviews

I thought I'd take a few minutes and give my impressions of the few blog traffic exchanges I've had some experience with. There's not a lot of them, but so far there is one clear winner ... and one up-and-comer who might create some competition.

In the order in which I discovered the site:

1) BlogExplosion ...
At BlogExplosion, you have any number of ways to garner credits ... and then you get to choose how you spend those credits. You can make banner and spend your credits on advertising, submit directory ads ... or you can "spend" your credits on renting space on someone else's blog (and thereby gaining hits), you can hit the "BlogRocket" which showcases 25 blogs on a single page, you can bet between 10 - 100 credits that you can beat someone else in a 15 vote battle ... or you can succumb to the weakness that is the scratch-off card. (1 credit buys you a "lottery" style scratch off card by which you could win up to 500 credits.)

I began surfing BlogExplosion in June of '05 and was surprised at the depth of the blogs I saw. There's a great feature which will let you block sites you dislike or find personally offensive or irritating for some reason, you can "blogmark" a site to come back to later on. You have to stay at each site for 30 seconds in oder to build up your credits for surfing. Of course, as on any blog traffic site, you will find a few blogs that do not load in the 30 seconds, which really ought to encourage more people to be aware of optimization techniques!

In addition, BlogExplosion offers a wide variety of distractions as well. There's the BlogExplosion radio, Sodoku, arcade games, a blog lottery and I'm sure there's more planned.

BlogExplosion does handle podcasts, but I don't really have any experience in that area. They also offer free blog hosting (templates, I believe, are done by Web Divas!!), a counter free of pop-ups and including some nice statistical counts and free picture hosting. Whew ... that's a LOT for one site to do! And I've left out things like the Flash application chat room (with audio and video capabilities!!!), the fact that you can ping your blog directly from BlogExplosion, review others' blogs, leave people comments through B.E. and more.

Literally my only complaint has been some iffy customer service issues. Then again, I think they have maybe 5 or 6 full-time employees serving I don't know how many thousands of members, so I'd be stunned if there weren't some customer service issues!!!

Rating:

2) BlogAdvance
I saw this site while surfing at BlogExplosion and signed up ... the more the better, right? Well, after finally logging in to BlogAdvance (I kept forgetting about it), I quickly discovered that I personally needed to find one traffic exchange program and stick with it. I don't have the ability to surf multiple windows ... I can multi-task with the best ADD-er, but that is not my specialty!

BlogAdvance claims to be a community built by bloggers for bloggers. Unfortunately, I can't tell you if that's true or not. I can't hardly navigate this site. I currently have over 200 "manual" credits in my account ... and I have no idea how to spend them. Normally I'm pretty quick and hunting around a site and getting it figured out, but BlogAdvance completely stumps me. As such, many of the features they undoubtedly have are simply beyond my access. (Know B.A. pretty well and want to leave me some instructions in the comments??? I'd welcome the advice!!)

I have heard that they also offer free blog hosting and image hosting.

Rating:

NOTE:
There is something of a war between B.E. and B.A. ... I don't understand it and have little information on it. All I know is that I originally signed up for both, saw some public behaviour of a B.A. administrator over at B.E. and decided that I did not appreciate that kind of unprofessionalism. I took my referral "sticker" to B.A. off my site and I think I've only been back there once or twice since. I've heard lots of good things about them ... I don't know.
I've mostly rejected their service simply because it's too difficult to use (and that administrator made me mad).

3) BlogMad
The third traffic exchange site I found was BlogMad. This site *sounds* wonderful, but it's easy to sound that way. BlogMadis not open for public use yet, but is in beta testing at the moment. I'm really hoping they open soon as they seem to have a great deal of promise. They will offer a "cage fight" similar to BlogExplosion's Battle of the Blogs as well as many of the other features at B.E.

But ... we haven't really seen anything yet. If they prove to be as un-navigatable as B.A., then there's little hope for them.

Rating:
????

4) BlogSoliders
A great basic blog traffic exchange. Unlike some of the other traffic services, BlogSoliders does not accept websites which are not actual blogs. No site that just offers a web or blog service, no completely advertising "blog," no make-money-instantly sites ... just blogs. Right now this seems like a really solid basic exchange site ... is easy to surf, but the blogs there are somewhat limited in their topics. Hopefully as they grow and gain more members, the diversity of the blogs will increase. Right now, BlogSoliders is just a little too thin on blogs to hold my interest. Surfing time is only 20 seconds, though, instead of 30. Definitely a plus when you come up on a blog that won't load or that you've seen 20 times in the last two hours.

Rating:

Results:
Despite what some folks thought about my previous post, BlogExplosion is still the clear winner in traffic exchange for me. Unfortunately there's been some community issues lately, but that can happen any time you get a diverse community of people together in one space ... be it real or virtual.
Because of community issues, there is little for me to do at B.E. that I have enjoyed doing up to this point beyond just surfing and spending credits on traffic. That's okay! That's the main purpose of BlogExplosion!!! I don't *have* to have Battle of the Blogs ... I merely have enoyed this feature in the past and hope to enjoy it again in the future when the current hullaballoo settles down a bit.

Meanwhile, if you use another blog traffic site and would like to add your two cents about it -- or about any of the ones reviewed here, please leave a comment!!
(I moderate for spam only.)

Posted by Red Monkey at 10:06 AM | Comments (6) | Blog | TrackBack | Stumble

January 25, 2006

MT 3.2

Well, I made the jump today, finally. I've been putting off upgrading the blog from MT 3.16 to MT 3.2 for months now. I've heard so many horror stories about upgrading ... whether you use MT or WordPress or whether Blogger upgrades for you.

But, with my usual blog-traffic site somewhat impaired at the moment ... and with a tedious case of "what shall I write about now that I've posted all sorts of serious crap," I thought now was the time. It only took me about 3-4 hours this evening to set up ... despite much cursing when things didn't upload properly and particularly when I thought I corrected the file permissions only to find out the ACLs didn't take after all. (Don't worry, it's g33k speak.)

Anyhow, if you see any weird glitches or find that you can't comment, please use the Contact link at the top fo the page and let me know.

kthxbye ... couldn't resist.

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:32 AM | Comments (2) | Blog | TrackBack | Stumble