Tag: blogging

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.
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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)

Projects

March kinda sucks.

I go through this every year.  I finish my February music projects and then feel this gaping hole in the universe during March.  From reading blogs and forum posts on rpmchallenge.com I’m clearly not alone in feeling this way.

So what to do?

A few months ago I was working on a way to add the rest of my old myspace blog to this site.  I started up on that again last night.  WordPress.com is able to back date posts but it’s a royal pain in the ass to go back to 2007 and 2008.  Instead, I created a Blogger account and I’ve been posting back dated entries there.  Once I have them all I’ll export them to an .xml file and import them here.  That should work fine.  The myspace blog covered pretty much all of 2006 through November 2008.  I had pulled all of 2006 into my previous wordpress.com site so those are all here already.  As of last night the Blogger page has almost all of 2007.  I think I have about 75 more posts to go.

I’m still going with my Flickr photo-a-day project.  It suddenly feels difficult though.  It was easy last month.  There was always music happening so I could take pics of that, and Disney made things even easier.  Now?  What the hell do I take pictures of now?  Where’s the cat when I need her?

Back in January Jen and I did a tutorial for a javascript extension (I think that’s the right way to describe it… a scripting language built on top of javascript).  It was fun and interesting but my javascript knowledge is ancient and more or less nil at this point.  I thought I might have gotten more out of it if I did a javascript tutorial first.  I would like to try something like that in the coming weeks.  I would like to be a better all around programmer than I am right now.  My company’s development tools and programming languages are proprietary, so even if I’m firing on all cylinders at work it doesn’t really extend to the rest of the world.

Years ago I found a set of wordpress.com tutorials called Blogging University.  There are various beginner and intermediate level courses to help you get the most out of your wordpress.com experience.  There were classes for customization, writing, photography, and interacting with other blogs.  I might give some of those a try again, just for schnitzengiggles.  If I remember correctly they were mostly prompts.  Things like, today you should write a better About page, or today you should take a picture of water.  Stuff like that.  The photo stuff would be fine to redo, as I just said I’m always looking for ideas for photo-a-day.  The basic blogging stuff is probably too simple for this page, but there is always the lizardfishmusic.com page.  I could make some changes there.  I don’t think I’ve made any changes to the layout there since I first created it.  Maybe a face lift would be fun?

Exercising should be an obvious target for new projects.  I had a really bad night Weight Watchers wise last night and I’m feeling a little crummy about myself today.  I got home from work and just started shoveling food into my face and I really didn’t stop until I fell asleep.  I need to be better than that.  The gym might help in that regard, or at least minimize the damage of any future bad days.  Right now I am having a problem with one of my feet (again).  My right foot feels a little swollen and it hurts to walk.  It’s not the same thing I had a month or so ago, and it’s not nearly as bad, but it is slowing me down right now.  Once that eases up I need to get back to the gym, and I need to get into a regular routine.

There is always more music to record, and more songs to learn for Lizardfish, and more practicing in general to do.  Just because February is over doesn’t mean I can stop playing.  I was doing pretty well with finding time to practice back in January.  I need to keep up with it.  I’m tired of feeling like the weak link in the band.  I’m also thinking of trying something new gear wise.  I want to try to run a two amp rig in the band, but most of the amps I have now are way too powerful and if I paired them up I’d be unable to not drown out the rest of the band during rehearsals.  I keep looking at my 15 watt Fender Bassbreaker as the solution.  If I could pair that with another lowish watt amp that could work.  I am thinking about going to Guitar Center to inquire about trading my Fender Stratocaster in for a Vox AC15.  I think that might be the key to making it all work.  A Fender Princeton reissue could do it, but it’s only a 10 inch speaker and I’d prefer to stick to 12 inch speakers if I can.  I just like them better.  We’ll see.

Should I start looking into using in-ear monitors?  One of the guys in the band uses them.  One of the hosts of the Gig Gab podcast swears by them.  So much so that he’s always inspiring the other host to try them, even though he has a hard time with them.  I don’t really want to spend money on it, but we’re getting to the point where we’re going to be mic’ing the room during rehearsals and I always wear ear plugs anyway.  Is it time?  I’m trying to decide.  I’m definitely on the fence.  We’ll see.

I was hoping that by this point in 2020 I would be able to do something to help out with the Warren for President campaign.  I guess that isn’t going to happen.  At least it seems highly unlikely now.  I can get behind Bernie Sanders, but the idea of a candidate in his late 70’s who has already suffered a heart attack during this campaign is a little depressing.  Platform wise I can 100% get on board.  Human wise… ugh.  As for Joe Biden.  He’s a great guy and I love him to pieces, but he’s literally my last choice of all of the candidates we’ve had.  Dead last.  Yet another guy in his late 70’s but this time one who just feels like a frat boy who got lucky.  He just seems a little too dumb ass for the oval office, and we already have a total dumb ass in the office now.  If he ends up with the nomination he’ll get 100% of my support… I was just hoping the rest of the country would jump on the Warren bandwagon, that’s all.  Yet another reason to feel let down by my fellow Americans.

There are a crap ton of TV shows that I want to watch.  February has resulted in me falling way behind on all of the CW super hero shows that I like to watch.  I’m like two months behind on The Flash, Supergirl, and Batwoman.  I’ve been trying to get caught up on Star Trek Discovery.  Season two is really good, I just haven’t had time to power through.  The last season of Star Wars The Clone Wars is either about to come out or has just recently come out.  I wanted to binge the whole series before I watched the new season but… Jar Jar… he kinda killed my interest in that.  I want to finish season two of You even though it’s definitely meh.  I want to watch Lock and Key and The Expanse and I still want to get back into Breaking Bad and Preacher.  I’ve started both of them, but just haven’t been able to keep going.  I’m not sure why, the are both good.  I’m caught up on The Walking Dead, and the second spin off is just a month or so away.  One show that I did not fall behind on in February is Star Trek Picard.  It is so good.  Just, so very good.  I wish it was going to be a 25 episode season instead of 10 (I think it’s just going to be 10).  I don’t want it to end… ever.

I’m sure there are other projects I can come up with that are just there for fun and a sense of creative accomplishment.  If we get lucky and Spring actually gets here there are always day trips up to the mountains that I can drag my beloved Mrs to.  There are so many waterfalls, and so many scenic views up there.  They are all just sitting there, waiting for me and Jen and my camera to come and visit.

There’s also always Disney World.  Or Disneyland.  Or Euro-Disney, if that’s even still a thing.  I’d say Tokyo Disney too but I have a co-worker who was supposed to go there next week and he told me it’s closed due to some global pandemic* thing.  Maybe you’ve heard of it?

On an unrelated note, I am trying a new browser again.  The same podcast that inspired me to try Brave has inspired me to try Vivaldi.  This post is the first thing I’ve done with it.  Isn’t that exciting?  I’m just glad that the Last Pass plug in for Chrome works in Vivaldi too.  That makes life a tiny bit easier.

 

*Go wash your hands.  Seriously.

Widgets

Check it out, nerd boy is messing around with the layout on the page again.  I had this goofy idea to add a music playlist to the sideboard.  Just a few things that I’ve been in the mood for recently.  I already forget where the idea came from (blame old age).  Did I see it on someone else’s page?  I think so.

Anyway, I went over to Spotify and started a new playlist and added a couple of Robert Fripp and Steven Wilson things because that’s where my head has been lately.  I added a couple of Rush tunes too because RIP Professor.  Then I went looking for a widget…

…and I couldn’t find one.  Google to the rescue.  While I was looking I found an Instagram widget too.  I have a love/hate relationship with The ‘Gram.  I love the idea of it, but I hate the shitty interface and the shitty algorithm and the shitty owned-by-Facebook.  Oh what the hell, thought the social media whore, and I added the Instagram widget and a text widget with a Spotify tagger that linked to my new playlist.  I then added a few more songs to the playlist.  Prog and Blues, mostly.  Not the most palatable of combinations, but screw you guys it’s my brain I don’t care, whatever.

You can see both things over there on the right somewhere.  You might have to scroll down a little.   >>>>>>>>

I also added a Flickr widget which didn’t work, and a twitter widget which reminded me that my twitter feed is almost entirely links back to this page.  Can you say redundant?  I can, and often do.  I removed them both and moved on with my life.

Also, I totally forgot that you can’t actually play Spotify on an embedded playlist.  It links you back to Spotify itself (I think it tried opening the player app before proceeding to the web player) and I think you need to be signed in to hear anything.  Whatever.  It’s only there because I’m a nerd and like doing nerdy things.

What this means is that any minute now I’m probably going to be changing my whole page theme.  You have been warned.

HTML Restrictions Suck

Well that’s no fun.

Back in the old days when I was writing on Blogger I could embed all sorts of fun stuff into my posts.  Anything you can put together inside of an HTML tag was fair game.  I used to put all sorts of goofy mp3 players and countdown clocks.  With both a gig coming and RPM about to start I thought it would be wacky to find some countdown clock websites that generate HTML code and put ’em onto a blog post.

I looked at three or four.  No dice.  They all use an HTML tag that wordpress.com blocks.

Aw, fiddlesticks.

Two days and about 4.5 hours until the gig.

One day and 7.5 hours until RPM.

That would have been so much cooler if it was a countdown clock.  Bummer.

Oh well, have a flyer (again).

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Hypocrisy Continued

Call this one hypocrisy continued, or maybe SEO kinda works.

I’m referencing something like three older posts here, but to sum up:  I honestly do not care about how many hits this page gets, but I started using a couple of simple Search Engine Optimization techniques recently and it seems like it works.  Also, my job title is programmer/analyst and I do enjoy getting wrapped up in statistics, even when they are meaningless and show that I’m a hypocrite.

As previously mentioned more than a couple of (dozen, probably) times, when I first started blogging (on Google’s Blogger, 2008-2012) I was posting multiple times a day.  I then, for absolutely no reason, moved over to wordpress.com (2012-2016) and continued my ridiculous posting habits.  Next I moved to medium.com (2016-2017) and I think the frequency of posts started dropping before opening up a new wordpress.com account (2017-present).  At first I was posting a lot but it dwindled considerably over time until last June 1st when I decided I was going to post every damn day again, for literally no reason.  That has turned into multiple times a day, just like it was in the beginning.

While I was using the original wordpress account I started tagging posts.  I don’t remember why or when exactly but it seemed like a good idea at the time.  At some point, possibly when I started this account, I started using post categories as well.  As my interest dwindled between lets say September 2017 and May 2019 I stopped tagging and categorizing and just posted.  After reading a reddit post on SEO a couple of weeks ago I went back to categories and tags.

Just focusing on the current wordpress account, when I look at the numbers from the start (March 2017) there was a pretty small but steady stream of hits for the first few months.  As I started losing interest, the hits went down considerably.  The numbers in the Spring of 2019 were down something like 75% from the numbers in Spring 2017 (and lets not forget, 0.25 * 4 = 1, m’kay?  We aren’t talking about lots of hits here.  Not even close).

Last June when I started posting regularly (and writing longer posts, not just throwing up random pictures) the numbers went up again.  By the end of the summer they were back to where they were at the start.  Something odd happened in October though.  I had one post (I don’t remember what it was, but it was just a random picture) got a ton of hits.  There was one day where my numbers skyrocketed (again, for me skyrocketing doesn’t mean the same thing as it does for let’s say Mashable, or the New York Times, or any real site that isn’t just some stupid fat putz mouthing off).  The counts for October 2019 were the highest they had been since the account was created.

Two days ago January 2020 passed October 2019.  There are still 2+ days to go this month and I’m already quite a bit over that previous high.  Again, before you start thinking ol’ Robbie should monetize or any bullshit like that, we’re only slightly above single digit numbers here, m’kay?  Never lose site of that.  It’s pretty important.

So there I was, looking at the Stats and Insights page (wordpress.com users know what I’m talking about) and seeing the current month as my most viewed month in almost three years.  Cool!  Then I thought to myself, I wonder how the numbers on the first wordpress.com account looked.  I logged out and tried to log back in as the original user.  I couldn’t remember the original user’s email address (I don’t use my main personal email address for any of my wordpress.com accounts).  I had to dig through my email to try and find the right user name (I don’t use my main email address, but I do forward all emails from the burner accounts to my main email, so they were there for me to dig out).  Once I found it I had to trudge through the depths of my pea brain’s memory to find the password.  I found that too, eventually.  No need to reset it.

Two things surprised me.  First, despite not having touched that account since 2016 it still gets occasional hits.  Not a lot, just a couple each month.  I didn’t expect that though it does make sense as I can see some posts that were ported from that page to this one still get hit here.  Whatever.  Second, the numbers from 2012-2016 weren’t all that different from my numbers over the last seven months.  On average they were higher back then, but not too much higher.  There were outliers though.  January 2020 is the highest hit count for any month on the current account.  There were 4-5 months on the old account where the hits spiked in a gigantic way.  We’re talking triple the hits we’re seeing today.  More than triple.

The moral of the story is, sure it’s fun to see the numbers on this page growing a little… but don’t get cocky, kid.

QED.

Two Instances of Hypocrisy

I’m a hypocrite.  It’s official.  Pull up a chair and I’ll bore you to tears with two stories of hypocritical hypocrisy.

First: When CBS released it’s streaming service I said no.  No way.  Even as a lifelong Star Trek fanatic I couldn’t do it.  I waited until the first season of Discovery came to iTunes and I watched it there.  I did the same thing with season two.  In fact, I just watched season two, episode four while eating my dinner tonight.

But… Picard.  How can I possibly live in a world where there is a Star Trek TV series about Jean Luc Picard without actually seeing it the second it comes out?  I can’t do it, I just can’t do it.  I promised myself I wouldn’t watch the trailer because it would make me want to subscribe.  It didn’t work.  I subscribed and then watched the trailer.  Hypocrite.  Hypocrisy to the max.

Second: I posted something not long ago about how the number of visitors to this page had doubled when I started posting every day (1×2=2).  I said I didn’t really care if anyone visited the page at all because that’s not why I do this.  I do this to yell at the universe.  It’s not Facebook, I’m here with the expectation that no one is paying attention and I like it that way.

Then last week I read a post on reddit where a user in the blogging subreddit mentioned that their traffic increased by a factor of 10 after they started employing some simple SEO techniques.  They started tagging everything and using categories, things like that.  Blah, said I.  I bet if I did the same thing it wouldn’t change anything.  For the last couple of weeks I’ve been tagging the crap out of stuff and I started using categories again for the first time in ages.

Well… ummmm… traffic hasn’t increased by a factor of 10, but it sure has increased.  Ummm… woops.  Hello to all you new folks who have stumbled on my hypocritically hypocritical stupidity.  Thanks for stopping by.  Donald Trump is a fascist… anyone still left?  Okay.

I like interacting with people on Facebook.  I kinda like interacting with people on Twitter, but I usually don’t.  My twitter is about 1/4 bitching about that fascist, Trump, 3/4 links back to this page, and a few random Bruins and Red Sox posts for flavor.  Tumblr… hehe, just kidding.  This page isn’t for anything like that though.  This is a blathering idiot blathering.  If you’re cool with that, fine.  I’m thinking about looking into turning off comments because 99% of them are spam and the wordpress.com spam blocker catches them all.

Whatever.  Get off my lawn, you nasty kids!  The hypocrite is hypocriting, or something.

Addendum: Good at hypocrisy, bad at SEO.  After all that I forgot to add tags to this post.  You can’t see me laughing at my own dumb ass self, but trust that I am.  Also, I think I need to add a television category.  Should I go through the previous 11,555 post (that number is actually accurate) and search for references to television so that I can add them to the category?  No.  The answer to that is a solid, hard, definite no.

So Much for That

I told myself that I was going to keep this new account clean.  I was going to start from scratch and forget about past stuff.  Then I was poking around the settings page and saw that they had a function for importing Medium blogs.  I didn’t know that WordPress could do that.  So I popped over to Medium and found the export function and then popped back to WordPress and imported it.  So much for a clean start.  If I was going to do that, then I had to pull in the last WordPress account too, and that account includes all of the Blogger posts and a bunch of Myspace posts too.  It took a while, and a lot of it is littered with broken image links (thanks a ton, Posterous) but it’s all here.  Again, so much for a clean start.

So it’s St Patrick’s Day.  Are you having a Happy St Patrick’s Day?  My go to line is always that I don’t have to wear green because my red hair is proof enough of my Irishness.  Har har har very funny.  I don’t drink, so I don’t really celebrate outside of eating some boiled dinner.  Corned Beef and Cabbage, hold the cabbage please.  Today though, I did something fitting.  Netflix released the new Marvel series, Iron Fist.  The traffic was light enough that I got into work over an hour early, so I watched the first episode on my iPhone while sitting in the car.  The jury is still out on the show.  I don’t really like marshal arts stories.  This feels like that kind of thing after one hour.  The interesting thing though was when I went looking for podcasts that cover the show and found one that seems to cover all of the Defenders series.  They published an episode today that discussed the first episode of Iron Fist.  That was exactly what I wanted for my evening commute.  The cool thing?  It was three Irish guys.  They wished us all a happy St Patrick’s Day.

My wife and my step daughter are going to the movies tomorrow.  My step son and I are on our own for the afternoon.  We have to come up with something interesting to do.  I have no ideas at this point.  I’d be up for an Avengers movie fest, but we should do something that doesn’t involve melting our brains in front of the tube.  I’ll let you know what we come up with.

Know What I Hate?

Do you know what I hate about this time of year?

Everything.  Absolutely everything.  That’s not what I am talking about though.  I mean something specific.

I’m working from home today.  I’m taking my lunch break, eating a sandwich and sipping some soda, checking my work email so that I don’t find myself 50 messages behind when I finish my lunch.  I look out the window and the sky is blue and the sun is out and the reflection of the sun off of the snow that kicked our ass two days ago blinds me.  That’s what I hate about this time of year.  Snow blindness.  Looking out the window at the sunny almost-Spring day should not hurt, but it does.  Now my eyes hurt and reading those work emails is painful.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again:  Screw you, Mother Nature.

Why did I start this blog?  Can anyone tell me?  I can’t remember exactly when it happened.  It was either Monday night just at the moment when I was dropping off to sleep, or Tuesday morning just at the moment when I was coming out of sleep.  The thought popped into my head, I should go back to wordpress.com.  By the time I was up and about on Tuesday the idea was solidly in place and would not go away.  Damn it.

I posted on myspace and then myspace went away.  I posted on blogger for years and then suddenly switched to wordpress.com for no apparent reason.  I posted there for years and then switched to medium.com, again for no apparent reason.  I think I lasted about a year or so on medium and now I’m back to wordpress.  Why?  What’s wrong with me?  Why do I have this need to start over?  Why can’t I just start an account and stick with it?  I drive myself nuts sometimes.  I feel like such a tool, bloggily speaking.

I will get this page up to speed, it just might take me a while.  Last time I did this I was full on psyched about a new blog account and I was throwing widgets and crap onto the screen like they were goin’ out of style.  I was a madman.  Now?  I’m just gonna take my time.  I’ll have a set of links that might include the old blogs, and Flickr, and Alonetone.com and all that stuff.  Maybe a list of podcasts that I have been listening to.  I’m all about podcasts right now, because how can some one who is an insufferable nerd start doing things that could make him even nerdier?  Right now I have a hockey podcast playing and they are ripping the NBC hockey broadcast team with a ferocity that is almost but not quite frightening.  I agree with every word.  In other words, podcasts are good.  I’ve been thinking… if I start a podcast, what would I talk about?  Nothing work related, obviously.  Cover band behind the scenes stuff?  That topic would dry up in seconds for me.  Guitar gear?  Only if I could get free stuff to review.  Yeah, I’ll be a shill if it gets me new fuzz pedals.  Oh yeah.

Back on topic.  New blog.  Do I want to do anything different this time?  Based on the last couple of paragraphs, maybe I should go all stream of consciousness and just throw out disjointed word associations…

Naw, I’ll just post pictures of my cat.

No “Now What” This Year

Every year when March comes around and RPM ends I feel compelled to ask myself (publicly, via blog), “now what?”

Not this year.

Musically speaking, of course. This year I am not really in that space. Maybe having to rush the RPM Challenge process at the end has taken the air out of my sails. I don’t know. I have started messing with one new song idea this month. The idea is to write a song that the band can play, but every time I do that it falls apart and none of the guys show a lot of interest.

It doesn’t matter.

As of tonight the RPM process is officially complete. I uploaded my project to the RPM website’s jukebox, and I also uploaded it to bandcamp.com.

https://robertparker.bandcamp.com/album/foaming-at-the-mouth

Posting to bandcamp is always the last thing I do. It marks February as officially over.

Musically speaking, of course.