Category: blogging

More Stuff

Not to be left out of the birthday fun, my nephew is 10 today. Double digits. He’s a mini-me. He’s lucky in two ways. If you’re going to have the misfortune of looking like me, it’s good that you didn’t lose your curly hair the way I did, and also it’s extra lucky that you’re skinny while I was already well on my way to being a fat ass by the time I was 10. He is keeping all the good stuff that I had when I was little. He’s also hysterically funny and he’s not afraid of his own shadow. Two things I didn’t have at 10. So basically, if you eliminate all the stuff that I was bad at when I was 10 you have my nephew. He’s awesome and I love him and I hate that I haven’t been able to visit in forever. I am so sick of the pandemic. It’s killing me.

My father showed some improvement on Tuesday. On Wednesday he seemed to take a bit of a step back but was still better than he had been. Today the word is he seems to have improved a little bit again. We have tentative plans for next steps starting next week. It’s all scary.

We should have the bedroom done tomorrow night… assuming we don’t come up with any new ideas. The mattress is going to be the killer. We have plans in place though. The kitchen stuff starts coming next week. Next weekend is going to be another crazy furniture assemble-fest.

I made a works in progress playlist for RPM. Still not 100% invested yet. Maybe if I can get some guitar parts down it will trigger me. Maybe.

https://hearthis.at/roberjames1971/set/rpm2021-works-in-progress/

I haven’t played with blog themes yet. I browsed a little before bed last night. We’ll have to book some time soon. I have so many reminders in my phone right now. I have to schedule everything with myself or I forget everything.

I’m tired and sad and I want everything to go back to normal and I want it now.

I Jinxed It

Yesterday in my sadness I posted random stuff to this page. One thing I mentioned was how my page views count on the blog had been trending way up, and how in January I had more views than I knew what to do with.

Yesterday was one of the lowest view counts in like three months. I guess I jinxed it. Well, thanks for coming everyone. I hope reading about someone awful boosted your self esteem. If that happened then my work here is done.

I also said there wouldn’t be any visible changes to the blog after upgrading to a new package. I had forgotten at that time that the new tier includes truck loads of new built in themes I could use. At some point, everything here is going to change. There will be a day soon when I’m at lunch, or everyone is busy doing other things and I’m alone and free where I am just going to tear through some of those suckers and mess this whole thing up. Count on it.

Is there anything lamer than a blog post about blogging? It’s like writing songs about writing songs…. and I’ve done that a whole bunch of times in the past and likely will do it again.

I suck.

Stuff

I had that magic moment when I woke up this morning and for an instant had forgotten all of the awful shit. It was nice.

I don’t know what to do.

I upgraded my wordpress.com account. Does it look different? I don’t know if there will be any noticeable changes. Probably not. If I need to upgrade again (no) I will have to go with a business account.

We had a huge storm yesterday and we’re supposed to have a mattress delivered today. That’s called piling on, if you’re curious.

The hit counts on this page have gone up in a pretty major way. Granted, 1+1=2 is a huge increase in terms of percentages. That’s the kind of number we’re talking about here. Tiny increased to slightly less tiny. Still, I don’t know what I did. The monthly count for November was my highest ever, but it wasn’t too much higher than the year leading up to it. December beat November pretty handily, but nothing surprising. January squashed December like a grape. I don’t know what I did to deserve it but hey, welcome to the fun. I hope ya’ll like lots of depressing shit because that’s what we have to look forward to in the future.

RPM started yesterday and I couldn’t care less.

Out of Space?

I tried to post an image off of my phone earlier today and it failed to upload to WordPress.com. I tried a couple of times without success. I eventually uploaded it to Flickr and pulled the link in from there. That worked.

The last time this happened to me it was because my wordpress.com account was out of storage space. I just checked the media library and wouldn’t you know it, I am out of space again. I cleared off about 1% by replacing hosted images with the same images from Flickr so I can upload stuff if I need to, but grrrrrr.

I already have a paid account. Last time this happened I didn’t want to upgrade to the next highest tier account. This time I might do it. My available space will more than double. I don’t want to, but I am sick of this crap. I might just do it. Grrrrrr

What Was That?

I think that’s the first time it’s ever happened. At least since 2012. WordPress.com was just down! I couldn’t post and I couldn’t access my page. It was terrible! I started sweating and shaking and seeing little blue men with no feet who were pointing and laughing at me and Tracey Morgan yelled out, “Blue Man, where your feet at!” It was awful!

Anyway, I wanted to make a 50/90 update. I only have three songs left. I did so much work today I actually lost track of it all. Tomorrow I will add lead guitars to the final three songs and then I’ll mix ’em down and then I’ll be done and need to figure out what I want to do in October.

This song is the clear winner for the whole project, even if the guitar is a smidge out of tune:

Two May Songs

I wasn’t going to share these songs because there really isn’t anything interesting about either one of them Then I remembered we’re stuck in a global pandemic lock down so why the hell not.

Also, WordPress.com has released their new editor today and I need an excuse to try it out. It’s very similar to the mobile app and it’s okay so far. One small item of note so far is that I don’t see a way to switch to an HTML editor. I’m sure it’s out there somewhere.

Anyway, two songs. Neither is all that good, but they are both done. Two down and eight, maybe nine, to go.

I wonder if any of this stuff worked.

‘Member Hockey? Yeah, I ‘Member!

Sometimes I like to look back through this blog to see what happened on this day in history.  I’ve got posts going back 14 years now so there is the potential for a lot of stuff.  This morning before work I did exactly that.  I read every post (well, I skimmed every post) made on the 10th of April in each year from 2006 through 2020.

One thing of note was a post in 2010 where I mentioned the Bruins scoring three goals on a single penalty kill.  I did not remember that at all.  Let me rephrase to keep with the South Park ‘Member Berries theme, I did not ‘member that at all.

Wouldn’t you know it, some one posted this video onto the Bruins subreddit today.  It recaps all three of the goals.  It was an NHL record, as Jack Edwards will tell you in about three and a half minutes.

So, do you ‘member hockey?  Yeah, I ‘member!

Myspacey

All of those 300 or so blog posts from myspace from March (I think) 2006 through November 2008 have all been imported.  Finally.  All (almost) of my blogging history is now included on this silly little site.

Having said that… don’t go reading them.  They are awful.  It’s all broken image links and me bitching about minor league hockey.  There are a few cool things.  Our engagement is there.  My first two years with the kids.  A bunch of Rush shows.  My first attempt at live blogging is there.  It was a Mission of Burma show at the Paradise in Boston.  It was only two or three posts, and one of them was me complaining about the opening band.  Whatever, good stuff.  There is also my Uncle’s death.  I came across that one today as I was porting them and I didn’t read it.  I can’t.  Most of the posts though really are about minor league hockey.  The Lowell Devils and the Lowell Lockmonsters and pre-Jen Rob driving to road games because he had no life yet and that’s what he did.  Loser.

I know a couple of people get emails when I update the site.  Hopefully they didn’t just get 204 emails.  Yikes, I didn’t even think of that until just now.  If so… sorry ’bout that.

No School for Me

I tried signing up for a wordpress.com Blogging University course last night.  Nothing happened.  I tried again today using Chrome because maybe it had something to do with click functions in Vivaldi.  Nope.  Same nothing as before.

I was going to have veggie burgers for lunch today but I bought a different brand this week and they need to defrost.  I don’t have time for that.  Crud.  I bought a package of veggie (imitation) chicken nuggets too.  Maybe I’ll have some of those.  Maybe I’ll just make a chicken sandwich and pass on the veggie meal of the week for now.

Senator Warren dropped out of the Democratic Presidential primary today.  If you didn’t see that coming then you weren’t paying attention.  The thing I didn’t see coming was her not running the table.  I really thought she would be the one.  Now I’m looking at Senator Sanders and thinking Senator Warren would be a really good running mate.  Probably not though.  Ideologically they are too similar.  I don’t know.  Maybe if Biden tagged her as his VP it would be a better mix?  I don’t want to have to vote for Biden.  I absolutely will, but I don’t want to.  I really don’t want to vote for Sanders either.  I will, but I don’t want to.  Warren was my choice from day one.  Hell, I wanted Warren to run in 2016.  Oh well.  I guess she has to go back to kicking fascist ass in what’s left of the US Senate.

A new episode of Star Trek Picard came out today.  I watched it before work.  I was hoping the Troi-Riker family would have had an easier go of things, but it was nice to see them.  Have I mentioned this show is fantastic?  I am pretty sure I have.

Apparently there was a suicide at Disney World yesterday.  Some one allegedly jumped from an undisclosed location at the Contemporary resort.  I’m glad this didn’t happen when we were there, though there was an incident during our stay.  We had gone out for something one evening and when we returned there were insanely well armed cops stopping everyone at the entrance to the Yacht Club driveway.  Our Lyft driver was stopped and asked if she had received any threats that day.  No, she hadn’t.  It turned out that the Yacht Club/Beach Club area was on lock down while we were out.  As we were going into the lobby I asked a staff member if anything was up.  He had no clue, or at least he told me he had no clue.

We found out the details the next day and it was all nothing.  There was a report of a suspicious, armed individual wandering around the Beach Club parking lot and everything was locked down as a result.  It turned out that the suspicious, armed individual was neither suspicious nor armed and it was all an overreaction.  I wonder what he was doing to scare whomever reported him.  According to the news it was nothing at all.

Fortunately our stay at the Yacht club was undisturbed, apart from having our Lyft stopped, of course.
DSC_0188

Blogging University

Is Blogging University still a thing?  I clicked a sign up button and the button label disappeared.  I then reloaded the page and the sign up label was back.  Hmmm.

Next I logged into the Lizardfish page and tried again.  Again… nothing.  I’m thinking maybe the first email will come out at midnight?  Maybe?  Assuming the site is still active.

On a side note, I installed Vivaldi at home.  It seems to be pretty good on the Mac.  I hope we don’t find it doing anything silly like spiking my CPU the way Brave did.

I also added about 20 new posts to the myspace reclamation project.  There are 55 more to go.

Projects, babie.  Getting stuff done.  Who needs RPM?  (I do)