The Redheaded Penguin

Well, I took the picture of Ruth’s cell phone screen in a hurry, so sorry it’s a bit blurry. But, as you can probably tell, things don’t look good (or right). She takes good care of her phone and is super careful with it, so it was a bit surprising to see it with a broken screen today. And, this is the 3rd phone that she’s has since we got new phones in June(?). The first 2 died with some error about a fatal dog. It was a really sad message and the only solution was to ship the phone back and get a replacement. Well, now that this one has developed a problem as well, it looks like we’ll be going to get a new phone in the morning. And, as you might guess, since we just got new phones in June, we’re not eligible for the “upgrade” or “new plan” discounts. This means we’ll end up paying full price for it… She’s already picked out her new phone though, so we’re going to get it in red and consider it an anniversary present.

Now, if she gets a new phone, I wonder what I get for the anniversary…

Okay, been a couple of days since I posted anything, so taking a quick moment to do so now. Not that anyone is actually reading this other than me, but you never know…

For those that don’t know, my current “work” consists of:

• Teaching 4 college courses (statistics, research methods, that sort of thing)
• Supporting technology in the department (website and web-apps, servers, desktop machines, etc., etc.)
• Developing/maintaining web-apps for some of the colleges on campus

That’s the “paid for” stuff anyway… I won’t go into all the “unpaid” expectations I have at work because that’s a story in and of itself…

Anyway, this week so far has been one long work day. I put in several hours earlier in the week on a project, and then today found out about several more changes that need to be made now. Nothing like project creep to keep an amateur programmer employed

Trying to get caught up on classes, but students keep emailing me with questions Actually, not that bad, but do feel like I’m slipping a little on getting some feedback to them and responding to questions as fast as I would like.

And, in part 3 of my work life, I’ve been troubleshooting some server issues… and the more I get fixed, the more I realize is broken I’ve actually got a list of updates and changes to make, but think those might have to be put off for a couple of weeks until the semester is over. Hopefully it won’t crash between now and then

Well, that’s the work update for the week… in between all of that I try to do some “non-work” related things. In fact, I’m forcing myself to spend some time on “non-work” things now to help avoid burn out… balance and moderation is the goal of the day I think… we’ll see if I can stick to it or if work will consume me before it’s all said and done…

And while on the subject of being consumed by work, came across this cartoon link from another blog I’ve started following… (yeah, part of my “me” time is now spent reading thoughts and opinions from other people… not sure exactly how that’s “me” time, but anyway, here’s the link…):

http://www.wetherobots.com/2007/11/14/not-unexpected/

For some reason, our site has been running really slow the last couple of days, especially today. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but it is making me wonder if switching web hosts was a good move or not. Well, I do think moving away from my former host was a good move, but not sure if my choice of new providers was the best. It was motivated in large part by the free year of hosting. I’ll give it another couple of weeks I guess and then go from there. Don’t really want to switch again so soon, but might have to if the slow performance keeps happening…

if all goes well with this post, then I`m set for my Project 365. And yes, I did post this via my cell phone.

After looking around at a few sites, I’ve decided I’m going to try to do my own Project 365 in 2008. For those that aren’t familiar with the concept, it’s basically a project to take a picture a day for an entire year. I might take some pictures before the start of the new year to get into the habit and to practice how I want to get them posted easily to the site, but starting Jan. 1st, you should see at least one picture a day start appearing. Right now my plan is to use my cell phone to capture the pictures since I tend to have it with me all the time anyway. The quality won’t necessarily be great and there’s only so much that I can do with the 1.3 megapixal camera phone. But, if things go well, I should be able to email the pictures and have them automagically appear on the site each day. I can then go back and add a comment or two when I get home. Who knows, it’s possible that there will be some days where more than one photo will appear because I can’t decide exactly which one really stands out the most. I don’t plan on these photo’s being anything artistic or award winning. For me, this will be more about documenting and sharing things from my daily life. I’ll try to keep them interesting though… and if I can stick with it, then I know that I should have at least one new post on this blog everyday…

Turkey Day has come and gone, so even more progress has now been made on the site, and I’ve learned more about the inner workings of WordPress. I think I’ve finally gotten the main page of RM-News.Net working the way I want it to. Basically, both Ruth and I now have our own blogs setup, but we still want to be able to post things on the main page of the website. To accomplish this, we both have a special category in our blogs for posts that should appear at RM-News.Net, and through the marvels of internet and WordPress magic, I’ve found a way to pull the appropriate posts from our blogs and include them on the main site. Of course, these are not always the “most recent” posts, so be sure to check out our blogs to see if anything else has been added!

Okay, until recently I didn’t pay much attention to blogs, bloggers, blogging, etc., etc. So, what changed? Well, every now and then I would be sent a link to a random blog that I found either interesting, funny, or down right irritating. Occasionally I might want to add a comment or two, but often wanted to say more than a “comment” could really capture. And, after realizing how work was overtaking my life, I realized I needed an outlet for creative expression, or at least a place to post my comments about things in the world. Around the same time is when the Lunarpages 404 fiasco happened and I decided to switch web hosting companies.

Well, the switch in web hosting companies gave me a chance to redesign the website and to make things easier, I decided to try out WordPress, which is primarily a blogging system (with lots of additional features that make it boarder on being a content management system). As I was setting up the site, I started looking at more blogs and actually finding more people that I both agreed and disagreed with. Some, even those I disagreed with, seemed to have some decent idea. So, I thought “Hey, there’s this nifty blogroll thingy in WordPress, might was well make use of it.” Well, after I realized that most of the links I added were to political blogs, I decided that I needed to break it into categories.

I’m still working on deciding exactly what categories I want to add, but should have that decided pretty soon. Then it’s just a matter of finding the “right” links to add into each section. They should be appearing over the next couple of days. I might not agree with everything that’s posted on these blogs I link to, but something at some point caught my attention enough to make me want to go back to them.

So, after a few years standing at the edge of the blogosphere, looking in and occasionally testing the water, I’ve now dived in headfirst. Only time will tell for sure what it will bring, but it should be an interesting ride…

Okay, I’m making some progress with WordPress. Still not happy with the current theme, but will probably just make minor modifications and move on with things. I’m also working to find out a little more about the inner workings of WordPress. Chances are I’ll probably remove some of these older posts once I get things worked out, but we’ll see. And yeah, this post is really more so I can test some things related to the inner workings of WordPress… For example, I’ve worked out a way to pull individual posts from a specific category to appear on a different page, in a different style/format than they appear in the blog.

Okay, this is the first post to my new blog… well, what will eventually become my new blog. I’m still deciding on a base theme which I’ll probably end up modifying to make it what I really want. I originally setup a test/demo site to play with to try and get things figured out, but then realized I’d never actually get around to setting up my blog if I did it that way. So, I decided to just go ahead and set this up now and will work to make it into what I want as time permits…