Recently in Blogging and Bloggers Category

Sorry if the site was screwed up for a little while. I managed to hose some of the code in my header and it caused everything to disappear. Shit happens. It's fixed.

I should be in bed by now but I made the mistake of lying down for a short nap around 4PM this afternoon. Apparently my ten year old came in and asked me at some point what time I wanted to get up and I must have told her not to wake me up. BAD mistake. She let me sleep until the phone rang at seven. I may end up drugging myself tonight just so I can go to sleep. As opposed to drugging myself so I can stay awake I guess :) You know what they say though, sleep is just a cheap caffeine substitute...

Yesterday evening I went and poured gasoline down the hole where the yellow jackets live in my neighbor's back yard. I figured since they weren't going to do anything about fuck if I am going to get stung again. I managed to get two stings yesterday when I was working in the garden and fuck if that wasn't enough for me.

Apparently it didn't work because the little yellow bastards were flying around my yard again today. This evening I snuck up on then and dumped enough sevin dust to kill a small person on their abode. Hopefully that shit'll do 'em in. I would love to have some serious damned bug killer. DDT or something. It's not as if my children are going to be up there licking the fucking ground anyway...

I've spent the great majority of the weekend working on another new site for the crime stories I post. I may or may not keep posting them here but they will definitely all end up over there. Sick Crimes is the name of the site. I will most likely add on a forum as well. I seriously considered using Wordpress for it but for right now I am running Movabletype. There are a couple of issues with the templates I'm using but everything should work fine.

In order to comment over there you have to sign in. You can either sign up as a commenter there or you can use Wordpress, AIM, Livejournal, etc...to sign in with. Basically anything that supports OpenID. The site isn't 100% ready but what the fuck. This way I get some user feedback before I go completely "live".

Oh by the way, I also finally met my neighbors on the day that we had our trees cut down last week. At least the father. He seems like he's a pretty nice guy after all, being a preacher notwithstanding. That and the fact that I am having to kill their fucking Yellow Jackets. I also had a new set of neighbors move into the other vacant house up the hill as well. I still don't know if they bought it or if they are leasing it though. The For Sale sign is gone but that doesn't mean a damn thing. Other than waving at them while they were moving in I haven't had the chance to go over and say hi yet.

I am getting ready to take another plunge and upgrade Movabletype 4.2 release candidate 2 to 3. I made a full backup of the system last night in case anything gets hosed so if the sites go down shortly, they'll be back up eventually.

Still can't get the friendfeed comment importer to work, I am hoping after the upgrade that it might...

After I strangle someone...

I know I haven't posted much lately, other than a few memes and some of the new pictures. I've been pretty busy at work since I got back from vacation.

I am also working on a new set of templates for the blog and since I really am pretty much clueless it takes me awhile. Shadowscope V4 will be rolled out at some point in the next few months. I am going to try and streamline some things. Really I just enjoy tweaking the place and changing it every once in a while. I have kept this theme longer than any other but I feel like it's time for a change. Once I have the site up and running with the plugins I want and everything working properly I will copy the templates over here.

It's not often that I skip days on the blog but it seems to be happening more and more lately. It's not that I'm burned out or anything but I just come home and there doesn't seem to be anything that I want to write about. I can only bitch about work so often and now that one or two folks that work for me have the URL I can't even do that. I do have another site set up for that but I haven't taken the time to do anything with it.

Blogging also has a time factor to it as well. Here it is after eleven pm and I have to be up for work in just a few hours. not much more is gonna get done tonight other than a nasty bowel movement. I'll take pictures if you like...

As a matter of fact, that's all I have. Have a lovely Memorial Day!

So we had a great time at the party yesterday. I grilled ribs, burgers, dogs and brauts and there were some great side dishes. Conch salad minus the conch (clams instead) that was terrific, corn salad and several other nice dishes. Plenty of chips and refreshments as well. I was a bit under the weather when I crawled out of bed this morning as a result but I think that might be more of the effects of staying up too late than alcohol.

When I went shopping Friday I stopped at the liquor store to pick up beer and a couple of other items as well, rum and vodka included. While there I noticed they had chocolate vodka and although I'm not a huge vodka drinker that stuff kicks some serious butt. I grabbed a bottle.

Elisson and his lovely wife showed up with dessert, a rum lemon rose cake. It was delicious. He also had thought to bring along a bottle of chocolate vodka as well.

Then Zonker showed up and along with a Key Lime pie he brought...Chocolate vodka AND cherry vodka. Holy crap!

Did you know that when you mix chocolate and cherry vodka it tastes eerily like a chocolate covered cherry, with a bite? I only had one of those. Since I knew I had to work today I refrained from the hard stuff and imbibed enough beer to feel good but not get ugly. I'll save that for Oktoberfest. Speaking of which, we need to set a date. I have a week's vacation in October but I don't remember which week I picked. I'll have to ask my boss about that one.

You know it's going to be fun with the Big Bad Voodoo Daddy pouring!

Believe it or not but children are always welcome at our parties/barbecue. We don't get THAT trashed. Everyone is usually well behaved and as usual there was a trickle of children wandering around playing and generally having a good time getting to stay up well past their bed times.

...and if they misbehave there is always the dumpster behind RePete to toss 'em into and a roll of duct tape to keep them quiet. If you missed the party we are sorry you couldn't make it...cough...vman...cough...Perhaps next time!

Twenty years. Damn but time flies when you are having fun.

BTW, I only took a few pictures but they are all up at Flickr.

I got off on sort of a strange tangent yesterday morning. I have been pretty tired the last few weeks, working my ass off and I guess I just sort of got well away from what I had originally planned on posting. That's what I get from putting in the title first, although I've had some pretty decent entries after sitting down with only a title.

Anyhow, lately I have been getting more than my share of spam comments and MT isn't catching them all with the settings I have, so I end up manually deleting them (after flagging them). The same thing goes for trackbacks as well. I hate spam. There are some other options of course but I did away with the captcha because it's a pain in the ass and I don't plan on putting them back in, nor do I want to go to registrations being required. It's a fucking quandary I suppose.

I thought that I might have some free time yesterday to work on getting some new pictures online but it didn't work out quite as planned.

I had a pretty tough day at work but I did manage to get out of there at a decent enough time. Went straight to the gym and worked out with the weight machines for an hour or so. I'll tell you what, I can certainly feel the difference. I can't see it yet, although the wife says she can.

Once I arrived home I got sucked into watching Independence Day. No matter how many times I've seen that stupid-assed movie, if it comes on I will sit down and enjoy watching it. By the time it was over supper was almost ready. Man, that was good. Pan-fried fish dipped in corn meal, broccoli and green beans cooked in garlic butter and fried potatoes. Probably not so good for the cholesterol but it damn sure tasted great.

I just pretty much surfed the web after that. There were several things I wanted to write about, like the fact that nasty old global warming has caused Montana to get 16" of snow. In fucking May. 16". What's up with that shit? I though even in the rockies heavy snow was over early last month or even in March. Or how about the fact that Obama thinks we have 57 states in the Union. He must have missed the day on geography. I'll bet he thinks Chicago is the capitol of fucking Illinois too. That's something you should know without having to look it up.

Speaking of weather, we have had some pretty crappy stuff moving through west Georgia the last few hours. That's probably the only reason I got out of bed in time to post this prior to going to work. Most of the northern part of the state has been under a tornado watch all night and for a while the thunderstorms got pretty wild. What was possibly a tornado moved through my county, but south of here and heading toward Atlanta. It seems that the worst of it has passed through now. The power went out for a short time and I made sure to get clothes together for the girls in case we had to get in the basement quickly. They got to make pallets on the living room floor last night, which they enjoy doing.

I suppose that's about it this morning. Since I am running a bit short on time today I am just going to add my Green Thumb Sunday to this post :)

Maybe it's cheating but it's certainly expedient...

Join

This is one of the Bougainvillea vines that lives in my backyard. When I get home from work I'll see about posting a better photo than this one. I tokk quite a few pictures the other day and some video of the baby birds under my back deck as well. I just haven't moved them off of the memory card in my camera yet. Depending on what time I get home from work today perhaps I can get some of them online.

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

I'm getting ready to run an upgrade on the system to the next beta version. Things may not work right for the next little while.

So I was running my mouth about SocialSpark the other day. Sort of. I did get paid for it, so what the heck. At the time I posted it was still in "Alpha" status and was not open to the public but I got an email while I was at work announcing the public release. I guess it's in Beta testing now, but is pretty much open to the public. It seems to be pretty cool. I'm not so much into the social networking thing, but there are some cool aspects to it. There are also a couple of things about it that I like as well, one of them being analytics. Even if I never use the social aspects of it I will keep using the analytics portion for all my web sites.

They also offer the opportunity to have your blog sponsored so even if you never write any kind of paid post you can still make some money. It's not something I would use here but I am using it on my two tech sites, theapp.net and MyHTPC. Head over if you get the chance and tell me if you find it irritating or not.

I found this ass-kicking meme by way of Rachel Lucas. Having had three children, the last of of whom is currently five, I know I could kick the little fuckers all the way into next week!

I mentioned a few days ago that I was dropping quite a bit of the advertising and the great majority of the paid posts. Not that I don't like the money, but some of the things I occasionally write about just don't fit. Not here anyway. Not only that but I was spending so much time worrying about getting stuff posted on time that I wasn't able to just enjoy writing about my day, my job, my children, whatever. I also said that I was going to keep doing some of the paid reviews. Like I said, the money's nice. I like having the extra spending money for vacations and electronic doodads. What can I say, I like my stuff.

Not only that but for a few months last year right before and around the time I took my promotion to my current job, I needed the extra money for bills and making that money doing something I already enjoy fit the bill nicely. Some of the folks I have written for are gone, some I still write for and there is a new addition as well. SocialSpark. SocialSpark is really cool. Think of a combination of social networking ala mybloglog and facebook combined with being able to bring in extra income online. Sweet! There are some changes from other services I use too, which should make it perfect for stay at home/work at home moms as well as those of use just trying to pick up a little extra cash. SocialSpark allows you a lot more freedom in what you want to post about for one thing. You only have to post about topics that interest you and each advertiser on SocialSpark has a profile there so you can see what their company is about and make sure they are above board. For instance, this post is sponsored by SocialSpark, which in turn is under the umbrella of Izea. I can get more information about both on SocialSpark and can also get enough there to do more investigating online and make sure that the advertiser I am writing for is reputable.

I've done sponsored posts in the past where I wasn't sure or even knew that the advertiser was not someone I would want to do business with and the feeling in the pit of my stomach as I publish those posts tells me all I need to know about what I was doing.

Anyhow, I mentioned how great of a service SocialSpark would be for folks that work from home. A few years ago I had thought about home schooling our kids. When I pulled my son out of private school I was very much against the idea of putting him or either of my girls into public school. I've since changed my tune but we just stay on top of things with them in school. I'm not so much worried about the education part. The fact is that public school has much better funding and the education level is usually higher. The part that I was worried about is the kids they go to school with and the behavior that they take part in. Anyhow, this really isn't meant to be about education. What it is meant to be about is that one of the reasons I didn't stay at home is that at the time I would have had no source of income. SocialSpark cures the stay-at-home-with-no-income blues by giving stay at home mommies (and daddies) the chance to make some money at home when they have the chance. When you take a particular opportunity you have a full twelve hours before you have to have it online, which is nice if you have small kids.

Anyhow, it's about time for me to call my stores and I need to get the Wednesday Hero post online as well, I'll be back later.

Movabletype also offers a plugin interface so that you can access the back-end UI from Safari. It actualy works pretty well although I type somewhat slow on the iPod touch. That's what I am using to post this right now.

So I have ditched most of the ads and whatnot here, at least the Google stuff. I figured I would give them a shot and although I get a little money, I may have made $300 off of them in a year. Not exactly enough to retire on.

I'm leaving the text-links as they bring in a respectable amount of money, enough to pay my hosting every month.

I will also probably continue to post the paid reviews here and there. Except for posting some with context links I haven't been doing a lot of those lately anyway. I do have a batch I have to write for several sites Friday but that's it for the foreseeable future. I just sent the guys I write them for an email letting them know I can't continue. If I were able to pick and choose them like I do with Linkworth or the reviews from PPP I might stay active but they automatically assign them to me weekly.

Why, you ask? Time. I sit here and spend more time getting less done on my computer and while the several hundred dollars a month is extremely nice and I like having the extra spending money, the money I received in my raise last May more than makes up for it. Unfortunately I work 70 hours a week which means that ALL of my spare time is spent blogging, and blogging about crap I don't give a fuck about instead of stuff that I do.

Does it mean that I am going to stop posting? Oh fuck no. I enjoy this stuff too much!

I ran across this over at Denny's site as well as Leslie's and the fact that Denny's showed zero cussing surprised me as well, so I decided I had better check it out.

Created by OnePlusYou

Yeah, that's probably about right :)

Apparently Elisson has it up as well. I just payed most of my links a visit to see what kind of foolish trouble they were up to today and everyone seems to be behaving. That's no fun :(

So I think I mentioned yesterday the Temple PD was out raising money at one of my stores this weekend. Either they must have hit the $5k mark or they just decided to throw in the towel early because they cleared out around 3pm today. If they just decided to shut down I don't blame them. The weather this weekend has been pretty crappy and it's been pretty darned slow this weekend as well.

The girls have left for South Carolina. I spoke with the wife shortly after I left work this afternoon and they had just gotten to Bluffton. I guess they will be back later in the week. I have Friday off so I think they are planning on being back by then.

I unfortunately have to go back to work tonight. I was supposed to be working a double shift today but with the wife and kids leaving town I decided to come home for a while to let the dog out. They are fine anyway and don't need my non-smoking stressed out personage up their butts all evening.

I think I will spend some time surfing a couple of blogs I haven't had the chance to visit in a few days. Speaking of blogs I like to visit, if you go to Parkway Rest Stop on occasion tell the guy with the big hair my fucking IP address is banned and neither myself or my wife can get to his site from here. I need to just get Jim's email from someone else I guess and send him a not but I just haven't had the time.

Hmm, I just upgraded the version of Safari on my computer to 3.1 and I seem to be able to type entries just fine with it. I normally use Flock, a derivative of Mozilla when I am blogging, so my problem with typing entries using the web UI must be related to Flock and perhaps Firefox.

At least that narrows it down for me and will make it easier to figure out what the problem is.

It's not that I don't like using an offline editor, I do. The big problem is that Windows Live Writer is buggy with the way it handles javascript and it seems to be the best I have found so far to work with. Zoundry has a beta version that may be out, I may head over and try it out. I used to use Zoundry blog writer but WLW seems to do a lot more, which is why I switched.

I never did get to go to the gym today. I had every intention of getting started, I even got there and two women were already there using the equipment I was going to get started on. Rather than hang out as well as being embarrassed because I really don't know what the fuck I am doing I feigned a cell call and beat it.

If I can manage to get my ass out of bed on time in the morning I will try and get there between five and five thirty tomorrow morning, that way I can get a shower in afterward, prior to heading off to work.

Speaking of getting out of bed on time, I didn't wake up until shortly before seven this morning. That's like two hours later than normal. I think part of it is because of my sun burn and the rest is due to the fact that my body is just pooped. I have worked something like six weeks with five days off, maybe six. I am supposed to be off Thursday and Friday this week and had planned on being off two days the next but since one of the other district's and myself seem to be overlapping again I don't think I will get both Friday and Saturday. I have already told her I am willing to give up my Saturday that week but I get the following weekend off. We'll see how it goes I suppose.

That's about it for tonight. I spent a few minutes working on this logo creator thingy that I have to write a review for on another site, that was pretty cool. I'll post some screenshots later. How about some of these taglines...

Shadowscope...better than the bomb

...sleep is just a cheap caffeine substitute (of course I've been using this one for several years anyway).

Shadowscope...better than a fart in a hot tub!

I have written some posts over the last year or so for ReviewME. Nothing major, I don't make most of my money through them and I seem to be relying less and less on writing them. I still do the occasional post for PayPerPost but mostly it's just text links inserted into my posts or writing a post around a certain text link. That and the occasional REAL product review. Those of course are the ones I like best.

Anyway, I wrote a post yesterday about a GPS tracking key. It's actually pretty cool product. I like the idea, particularly since I have kids. I love gadgets anyway, so anything that I can play with like GPS gets me all excited. What can I say, I'm a cheap date.

Anyhow, I forgot to stick the link in the post (it was a paid one) and rather than sending me an email saying "hey dumbass you forgot the link, stick it on in there" I get an email about an hour ago stating

Well, duh you fucking dumbass, 3/19 was YESTERDAY. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. I'm through dealing with the assholes at ReviewME.

I enjoy what I do on the web but make no mistake about it. I don't consider myself a serious writer. I suppose if I were to take the time to reteach myself the rules of grammar and then find something that would catch the audience's (YOUR!) attention, then I might be able to write something a bit worthwhile. There are a few bloggers that are actually worth reading though. I have links for two of them here.

One is Eric. If you haven't been to Straight White Guy and read a few of posts then go check it out. Definitely worth the time spent and you may even get caught up reading and wonder where the time has gone. Apparently he's had a piece published in A Southern Journal. That was a story I had not heard yet so it was fresh for the mind when I came across it last night.

Earlier this week my brother sent me a link and I have been remiss in posting it here. If you haven't read his book, Republic, you are missing something. He is in the midst of writing the sequel and the first three chapters are online. Bear in mind that they are a work in progress, and as so some of the details may change and they still have to be edited for grammar and spelling. He also sent me a couple of links to the podcasts as well.

You can check it out at YouTube or subscribe through iTunes.

Podcasts are OK but I much prefer reading for myself and so spent the other evening reading all three chapters when I should have been writing about them instead :)