Category: Generic

Good, Bad, Both?

In theory I stuck to the simply filling weight watchers plan today.

In theory.

The reality isn’t so clear. Simply filling approves of snacking on peanuts. Today while I was working I emptied a jar of peanuts into a bowl and sort of forgot about it. Next thing I know I’m reaching into the bowl and it’s empty. What What What???

Once my brain realized that I’d eaten the entire bowl my stomach decided it was clear to start hurting. Not a lot, but enough to make me uncomfortable.

After a couple of hours worth of being a chauffeur for the kids, my stomach had returned to normal and all was relatively well. Then I ate dinner. The discomfort is back with a vengeance.

I’m seriously trying to be good. Really, I am. I think though that I should tweak my goal a little for the short term. I should just focus on maintaining until the holidays are over. Don’t let yourself cheat, Robert. Don’t worry about losing, just try to stay level for the next five weeks or so.

I absolutely have to go to a meeting on Saturday.

An Unusual Thursday

Today has been a weird telecommute day.

I came home from dropping the kids off before school and put on a load of laundry and filled up the dishwasher.  I made myself a little breakfast and sat at my computer looking into blogging options (svbtle isn’t a free service?  It used to be free, wasn’t it?).  I read a news story about Pixies front man Black Francis.  I read up on the Orion launch situation.  At about quarter to nine I logged into work for the morning.

At lunchtime I made myself a half cup of quinoa and a bowl full of green grapes.  I also took a shower.  I usually sacrifice my morning shower time slot to my step daughter on telecommute days.  I then told a Comcast door to door salesman that I wasn’t interested in switching off of FiOS and folded that morning’s load of laundry.  Now I am writing this in the last few minutes of my break before getting back to work for the afternoon.

Now you may be asking yourself, what’s so weird about all of that?

Well, I’ll tell you.

I haven’t tried to write or record even a single note of music.  Since February 1st all of my free time at home on telecommute days was spent working on a music project.  It’s December 4th now and I haven’t started a new project.  December has been free of original music so far.  I don’t know if it’s going to stay that way or not, but it might.  I have a left over song from November, another from October, and that big 20 minute sucker from September.  Maybe I’ll finish those this month.  Maybe not.  I’ve thought about re-recording a couple of songs from the distant past.  I’ve also been thinking about covering a Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd song.  Maybe I’ll do it.  Maybe I won’t.

Maybe I’ll take December and January off from writing projects and stick to learning songs for the band.  We’ll see.

Orion

Today NASA is launching what I believe is the first actual field test of the new Orion capsule. If you haven’t seen Orion yet, it looks a lot like the old Apollo capsules that the lunar astronauts rode to the moon and back except it’s bigger and awesomer.

The countdown was held at three minutes and change for some reason, but the folks in charge are working on clearing whatever it is that’s holding things up.

Fingers crossed that all goes well. A successful test today brings us a step closer to Mars.

Still Looking at Blogging Platforms

I’m not planning to leave wordpress.com.

I think.

I spent some time digging into Medium today and I have decided that I absolutely love the way it displays images. They just look really good. After using ello for a while, the Medium editor doesn’t piss me off quite as much as it did initially. I still don’t see a way to pull in images from other domains. That means no using Flickr hosted pics. That was completely offensive to me at first, but since I started messing with ello, which like Medium also forces you to upload images you want to display rather than hosting them on other sites, it doesn’t seem quite as insulting.

Still, it doesn’t seem to have a way to display audio files. That’s a deal breaker if the question is using Medium exclusively. Again, ello is the same way. Hell, technically wordpress.com is the same way too, I just found a work around. Maybe I’ll find one for Medium (and ello) as well.

I was also planning on spending some time with Roon and Svbtle, but I guess Medium bought Roon and is about to shut it down. Ghost is the talk of the town right now, but it does not have a service that is both hosted and free. It’s only one or the other. Maybe I’ll look into free hosting (does that even exist?) and see what’s out there. If I were to go that route though, why wouldn’t I just switch over to wordpress.org?

I’m still not even sure why I am suddenly interested in all of this.

While I’m here, let me try something. Earlier tonight I decided that I was going to play around with Gimp. Think of Gimp as an open source alternative to Photoshop. I’ve had it on this machine for quite a while (it’s free) but I have never actually even opened it. Tonight I picked an image from Flickr and pulled it into Gimp to see how big of a mess I could make. I included it in a post on ello. Now that I’m thinking of it, can I pull the image from ello into this post? It should work. I have a valid url. But does ello block hits from within image tags? Let’s see…

Did it work?

Cross Post from Medium

I am trying to see if I can cross posts between wordpress.com and medium.com. Medium has a nice import function that will pull a single post from an outside source via a url. I tried it with a couple of posts from here and they’ve worked.

Now to try it in the other direction. I wrote a post in medium. Can I use the embed code to post it here as well? (I’m guessing no)

Guitars

Addendum:
That would be a no.

West Coast Games Suck

The only thing worse than a 10:00 start for a Bruins game is a 10:30 start for a Bruins game.

Both Monday and Tuesday nights I went to bed with the radio on, hoping to catch some of the game before zonking out. Monday was a complete fail. Last night I did catch a few minutes, but not from the beginning. I woke up, couldn’t tell what period it was, shut it off, went to sleep.

Oh yeah, they lost both games. Hooray. One more California game to go, on Thursday, before they have a more palatable 8:00 start in Arizona on Saturday.

West coast road trips suck. They are just the pits.

Blogging Platform Options

What is it about December that makes me start thinking about switching blogging platforms? Actually, I am not really thinking about switching anything, just curious about what’s out there.

I posted this to ello today:

I have a blog on wordpress.com. I post to it multiple times a day. I used to use blogger, but I made the switch about two years ago. I use tumblr too, a little, but not really.

I don’t want to go to the full wordpress.org, at least not yet. I played with Medium a little bit, but it seems like a pain to use it for multimedia (I post tons of pictures as well as the odd video and some audio).

I’m not really looking to change platforms, but if I were… where should I go? What other free blogging platforms are worth trying out?

Note, ello won’t be an option until I can use images from Flickr and audio via direct links from alonetone.com, and video from either Vimeo or Youtube.

What do you think?

Granted, I wrote that on ello so I don’t think I’ll get any responses. Just curious what services are out there that I haven’t heard about yet. Let me clarify, what free services are out there that I haven’t heard about yet. Blogging is a hobby that I really don’t want to have to pay for. That’s one of the reasons I don’t use the full wordpress. I don’t want to pay for hosting. I don’t actually want to even have to spare one single thought ever to hosting.

Anyway, I might pose this question to Twitter and Quora too. That will make four online communities that I ask that result in zero responses.

Cool.

Deer Count

Once again, only a single deer this morning. I didn’t really have time to look too terribly hard, but there was definitely only one doe out there wandering around.

Where are the others? Where is the rest of the herd? Is herd even the proper word to use for a group of deer?

No!!

Going to work yesterday after the four day weekend was brutally difficult. For some reason though, going to work this morning seems 100 times worse.

I need a vacation.
I need a long vacation.
I need a 60 year long vacation (at least).

Where is that Powerball winner I’ve been promising myself?