The Redheaded Penguin

Wow.. it’s August and the summer session is almost over. It has been a longer summer than I expected with the 10 week methods course and then the 5 week I/O course the second half of the summer. The methods course did work better in the 10 week format (rather than having it condensed down to 5 weeks as well), but it has been an intense past few weeks. Needless to say, that’s kept me from posting here (I still resist using the term “blogging”). I’ve come up with some new ideas for the methods course this Fall (the only course I’ll be teaching this coming Fall and Spring). And, related to that is a possible new direction I might be taking here as well.

I’ll still post my random comments, thoughts, etc. as time permits, but I’m going to add something a little more “work” related as well. With my new position at work, I’ll need to be doing a lot more in terms of staying current on research in a few different areas. So, I’m going to try and post comments, thoughts, etc. of various articles I’m reading related to those areas. Since I’m hoping to integrate discussion of these articles into my methods course, what I write here will also help me in preparing for my classes based on what I’m reading for my research projects. Essentially trying to kill 3 birds at once, so to speak.

I’m still following a handful of other blogs, so I’ll probably be posting comments from time to time in relation to those as well… and trying to find a way to make posting things here a little easier/quicker for me so I can do it more often…

Well, guess that’s it for now since I do have to make sure I get to work in the morning…

Okay, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m using the Google Reader to manage my subscriptions to more RSS feeds than I probably should. Anyway, one of the nicer options about Google Reader (at least in my mind) is the ability to “share” items that you find interesting. Basically, Google Reader creates a page especially for you that contains the RSS stories that you choose to share with the world. Well, that’s all well and good and stuff, but it means that people have to know where that page is in order to find things (or be your “friend” in Google… but that’s another story/issue). Well, luckily they have a way to put a “clip” of shared sites on other webpages. I wish I could modify they color scheme/layout a little more than the options they give, but it’s better than nothing. Anyway, now available on the left hand side of this page is a list of the 10 most stories that I’ve most recently marked as “shared” in Google Reader. There’s also a link at the bottom that will take you to the “full” page of stories I’ve shared, if you want to see other stories that I’ve shared in the past…

Well, I accomplished very little in my time off between semesters, but at least I got some much needed rest. Although I haven’t posted them yet, I do have photos for day 1 and 2 of the Photo 365 project, so hopefully I’ll get those posted in the next couple of days. I’m also going to do my best to post at least 4 times a week in the new year, in addition to the Photo 365 posts… we’ll see how close to getting photos posted daily I end up with…

Anyway, for those following politics at the moment, the race in Iowa has gotten interesting with what is being called a 3-way tie for the Dems between Edwards, Clinton, and Obama. Also heard today that Clinton is slipping in NH polls, so there’s an increasing chance that the Hillary Express might have been derailed before things really get started. Still, Real Politics has her in the lead nationally and she’s still a leader in some other national polls.

And on the Republican side we have Huck still leading the pack and his “interesting” press conference to reveal the negative ad that he was going to pull… in other words, he said to the press “Please run the content of this negative ad right next to me saying that I’m not going to go negative… that way I can get the negative ad out there without having to actually release it…” and the press has, to some extent, happily agreed to do it. He keeps his hands clean in that he never ran a negative ad, yet he was still able to get the negative attack out there. And, unlike the Dems who are spending money to buy time on news casts in Iowa this evening, Huck decided to head out to CA to welcome Jay Leno back to the airwaves and pick up some air time on a national scale. (Rumor has it that Clinton will be doing the same on Letterman, though not sure if she’ll be there in person or not…) I think this might be a sign that Huck is feeling a bit over confident with his lead in Iowa and hopefully others will get the turn out needed to put Huck down a little lower in the final results. Right now I’m leaning more towards McCain and Giuliani in the national race, but am a little concerned over the Huckaboom… still predicting the Huckabust to be coming in the next few weeks though as other states don’t find him as appealing, despite having Chuck Norris in his corner.

And why am I following politics so closely going into the primaries this year? I’m really not sure but it has been fun… we’ll see if I can stick with it over the coming months as the semester starts up and I have to actually do job related work… more on that in the coming days… (have to save some things so I have more to post about later)

Okay, I couldn’t resist going ahead and posting one version of the new penguin… still not happy with it, but think I’m getting closer to what I want in a general sense… then I’ll have to work on smoothing out the lines and such, but hey, I never claimed to be an artist…

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Well, Ruth got her new phone a few days back and simply loves it. She got a fancy red phone that does all sorts of neat stuff. For the price, I wanted it to make toast too, but apparently they haven’t added that feature to it yet. Still, it’s a really nice phone and I’m glad she likes it (It does make sounds like a video game at times though…)

I’ve been drawing some different penguins and think I’ve finally settled on a version that I’ll be happy with. It’s pretty different from the ones I posted previously. I might post one or two in the next day or two, but still have to wait a week or so before I’ll have time to redesign the site to work with the penguin theme. (Chances are the post with the penguin(s) won’t be here, so be sure to check out my blog to see if I post it!) Who knows, if I really like the theme when I get done with it I might submit it somewhere to become an official WordPress theme. Of course, then I’d have to support it for other people, which I’m not sure I want to commit to doing at this point… maybe if I win the lottery…

Now, I’ve got a big stack of papers waiting to be graded that I have to get back to. The end of the semester is here and I’m ready for it to be over…

When I setup this blog a few weeks ago I really didn’t have any ideas on what to call it. I thought about “Marc’s Corner”, but that just didn’t sound right to me. Plus, Ruth felt it sounded like I was in trouble and had to go stand in the corner all the time. Then I came up with something about “rambling” because anyone that knows me is aware that I can start rambling and going on and on and on about things. So, “Marc’s Rambles” was there as a placeholder… but I still wanted something more “original”.

And so now we have the new name, at least the new name as of tonight: The Redheaded Penguin.

Now, with the new name in place, I don’t think the current theme is going to continue working as well as I would like, so once the semester is over in a couple of weeks I’ll begin tweaking the theme more and more to fit what I want. I’m also working on developing a “logo” to go along with the whole redheaded penguin idea… here are a couple of that I came up with tonight (well last night since it’s now early in the morning technically). I’m not “happy” with either, but then I never really considered myself much of an artist. I’ve got a few more ideas to try and sketch out as well, so we’ll see what happens… my goal is to have it all done and ready to go by Jan 1… we’ll see what it finally ends up looking like… click the “thumbnails”t the right if you want to see them “full” size…

And, as always, comments are welcome…

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…

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…

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, 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.