the Post that Evens Everything Out

And so, with this, post 1 shall be number 300.

So, as suggested in the title, this is the post that will make everything even. Now, my first real post here, the next one here, will be 300. Woohoo!

I have a bunch of pics scanned in to put up in the gallery, but I can’t. They all have a big heap load of whitespace from scanning and I can’t edit it out. iPhoto crashes because I don’t have enough RAM and the rest of my editors don’t work as well. Soooo… until I get about $110 for a RAM upgrade, the photos will just have to sit.

I do have the Stories section up, and a few other pages. Also, I have a counter display on all my pages and a “Go 1 year back” feature installed in the blog, for when I get the old posts up.

So, I guess that’s it. No more posts here for about 2 weeks. Stay tuned to the old blog till then.

nick

3 Entries Left

The End, Dinner, Pasties, and Pics.

Yes, just 3 blogs remain after this one. It is coming upon us. I am antsy to get the switch over, but I still have some stuff to do on the new site before it’s ready.

We just had dinner, grilled lemon chicken and pirogies. Yum. Jenn is gone tonight at work, then off with some friends from work, so I’m all alone. Too bad Saturday TV sucks.

It felt like fall almost the last few days, which makes me want pasties. I like pasties. I either need to try making some, or just go to Yooperville.

I finally got all the pics from Mackinaw scanned. Will put them on the new site soon. They had good pasties in Mackinaw.

OK, I’m off to scan more.

nick

no quote today

Number 292, Part Deux?

Blog, BDay, Hahn’s, State Park, and Site.

OK, so this is post 292, after deleting 6, 2 from “info” and 4 from stories. Then you add in the upcoming posts that will be on the 20th, 23rd, 26th, and 29th and were at 296. Then, the 2 I already have in the new blog, plus another in the next few days is 299. So, my first real post in new blog, on Sept 1st, will be 300th.

Also upcoming is my birthday. September 8th, 3 weeks away. Fun fun.

We went to Hahn’s today to do a little work for a party their having.

Jenn and I went to state park yesterday. Was cool, but icky. We saw 3 deer, and a black squirrel, and a bunch of bluegill. Also, we walked on the beach, which was the icky part. The beach has about 10 ft of water access, the rest is a muck made up of zebra mussel shells and dead weeds mixed with some sand. The result is 12 inched or squshy spongy stuff that crunched when you step on it. Very odd feeling.

Afterward we went to Turkey Roost, but they were closed, so we went to Buffalo Wild Wings. Not bad, I wouldn’t get wings though cause their naked, and I don’t like naked wings. Boneless wings were good though (I think were thighs, maybe not, maybe just less-desirable portion of breast).

Hmmm…

So I have more up on site, going to go do a bit of updating now.

See you Saturday.

nick

What I need is a nice disease that causes money to chronically fall out of my ass.

17 Days to Go

Uncle, Yard, Lunch, and Site.

So, My Uncle Steve and his family went home today. He did a lot of work on the back entrance, and I thank him much.

We finished the neighbors fence, and should have ours done within 2 days. I also need to do the wiring for the shed and back entrance, finish insulating, and help my Uncle Mike with dry walling the inside of the back entrance. We are moving though.

Jenn and I went to Red Lobster today. They have an unlimited salad and soup lunch which is awesome because 1) the soup is WAY better than Olive Garden’s and 2) it’s the cheapest thing on the menu and definitely fills you up. The clam chowder was good, the bayou gumbo was also, I didn’t find out what the soup of the day was.

The new site is still moving along. I have a new main page up, have the counter fully working, and found out what the problem was that kept most of my site down for the last 24 hours.

OK, I guess that’s it. Back to working on the site.

nick

On the good side, it no longer causes anal leakage!

Status Update

An update on where everything is

So, a little update on where stuff is.

I have the counter working on all the pages I have so far. I also am applying a Creative Commons license to the site, and likely the blog when I figure out how.

The website template is coming along. It sucks because my coding abilities are more than what I would ever need (except php, still working on that) but my creative skills on layout, graphics, and color schemes are not what I would like them to be. Ohh well.

I will create a my own template for wordpress eventually, like I said above though, not great on php yet, nor do I know all of WPs own little codes.

On the blog, you need to enter an email address and name to comment. It will then send it to me for approval. Once you are approved once, you may comment all you want without additional approval. If you want to use a fake email, I don’t care. Just remember it so you don’t need constant re-approval.

So, by the current plan, I will not make any other posts here until September 1st, so go back to the other blog until then, or August 29th anyway. I may make another status update here I guess. I will continue working on the template, then get up a new main page, followed by some info pages and then the gallery. My iblog posts will not be moved until August 30th at the earliest. May be longer depending on what else I am doing. I don’t want to transfer them now only to need to do a second transfer of posts made between now and month end.

OK, that is all I suppose. Off to see if I can reset the post count, since this isn’t really the 3rd post like it’s telling me (there was a default 1st post that I deleted).

nick

Emu Feel Funny

Fair, Yard, and Move.

Let’s see. Jenn and I went to the fair tonight. The livestock auction was going, so she got really excited about that. We went through the animal barns, then walked around and there were 2 petting zoos. Emu, camel, sheep, goats, cows, chicks, rabbits, donkey, and those humpback cow looking things.

The back entrance is re-roofed, sided, and will be insulated tomorrow. The fence is also coming along.

Notice the link above to the new blog, that’s where I going. Work is progressing OK for now.

That’s probably it. I can’t think of anything else anyway.

nick

I just wanted to know if you wanted another seaman on your poop deck?

Backyard Blues

Backyard, Oddly popular, Reformat, Wikipedia, and Move.

Well, my Uncle is back, arrived this morning, and he isn’t happy. The back entrance has not gone as well as it should, so today we tore off the week old roof and are fixing all the problems we have had. Scott, Todd G, Tim, My Uncle, and I were all on it, then my Dad came and we got ready to do fencing tomorrow. Oh, it will be fun.

For whatever reason, over the past few weeks one of my pages has become WAY too popular. It is titled “I am Bored”, and has moved up to #4 on a Yahoo search for that phrase, out of over 37,500,000 pages. The strangest thing is, it’s a post from January 2004, but wasn’t popular at all till about a month ago. I am considering changing the name, but maybe not.

I reformatted and reinstalled OS X Thursday night. It had bugs in it from some things I had been doing, so I felt it needed it. I was backing up everything to CDs anyway, so I had most of the hard part done (I backup less often than I should, but more than I used to, before my 7600 died).

Check out this Wikipedia article on .coms, including the list of 75 oldest still operating ones. I really like Wikipedia, you should browse around.

So, after contemplation, I have come up with September 1st as a likely moving date, for 3 reasons:

1) It is over 3 weeks away, plenty of time to work stuff out, and let everyone know.

2) It means 300th entry goes in new blog, presuming my normal schedule and 1 new poll before then.

3) You may remember my last move, 2 years ago Sept 3rd, hence repeating the saga of moving at the onset of September (hopefully I not moving again in 2 more years).

Also, yes, I have decided, and the new site is already on it’s way. Link will be in next post.

nick

You don’t have any mail! Our servers are feeling unloved.

First Post!

Ahh the Excerpt, the Abstract gone Wordpress

My first post in WordPress. Too bad I’m going to delete it in a a week or two. Oh well. I have some issues right now. It doen’t look like what I was promised. Which sucks.

I will figure it out.

OK, I got it fixed some.

Seems WP is not fully Safariable, but it’s Safari’s fault. Maybe will be fixed soon?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

I don’t like how it insets like 3 lines after a quicktag. It means I have to go down and delte three lines I shouldn’t have had to. No better than iBlog putting a space after every link.

Ohh well, I can always stay on iBlog if I decide I absolutely HATE this, or at least find it the greater of 2 evils. I need to leave .Mac though, I just can’t afford it.

Decisions Decisions

It’s really long folks, be careful.

Well, let’s see.

I have been thinking about moving. No, not my person, but my blog / site. I have reasons for staying, reasons for leaving, reasons against what I have now, and reasons for what I want to have. I even have a poll for you to help me decide. So, let’s get started, shall we?

First and foremost, is cost. My .Mac subscription is nice, I get an email address, 250MB of space, a cool automatic web page builder, free copy of Virex, Back-Up space and software, and some other stuff. Problem is it costs me $99 a year. Other problem is it’s a mac, there are no viruses to protect against, and I make my own web pages. So we are down to backup, server space, and email. Well, free email accounts are easy to get, I have a Yahoo, Hotmail, GMail, Excite, Netscape, Delta, and probably more somewhere, and can get another in about 2 minutes. Backup is nice, but I seldom take anything from the server, just put backups to it. I use my iPod as a hard drive, and CDs all the time to back stuff up, and that’s what I actually retrieve from. The one thing I would miss most, is that I can access my bookmarks anywhere, just go to the site, click a link, and I have a window with all my bookmarks right there, on any computer. Yahoo is making something like this available though, so I might be OK.

So, Server space. I found Nearly Free Speech.net. They charge $1 per gigabyte of data stored per month, and $0.01 per megabyte of data transfered. That means my 5.4MB of monthly transfer (an estimate, but I think is pretty close), and 25MB of data will cost me about $0.26/month, or $3.06 per year. Thats almost 97% off! Even if I went WAY up, from 300 to 3000 visits a month, I would only be at $3.63 a year. Or, if my site grew (which it always does, but this is extreme) from about 25MB to 250MB, it would take me to $30.06. Now, as you can see, space will be my concern, but thats still only about a 3rd of what I pay now, and for the same amount of space. I would need to put 700MB on the server to match what I pay now. Sounds like a deal, huh?

So, next issue is iBlog. Yeah, it was better than Blogger, but it has it’s issues. For one, I kinda settled for iBlog. My .Mac account doesn’t allow php, which is what most blogware uses. That’s why I need a FreeFind search bar, a SiteMeter counter, and a Haloscan comment system. Good php blogware has this either built in, or available as php apps that I can add to the server, rather than relying on some other guys server. (By the way, php is a scripting language for servers, it’s similar HTML or JavaScript, just different, and more powerful.) Next, is the fact that since I started with iBlog, what, almost 2 years ago now (Sept 1, 2003), I have been promised a version 2, with all these new features. Yet, here I am with v. 1.4.3, because 1.4.4 is too buggy. Nice.

Over the time I have had iBlog, I have looked at alternatives, like BlogWaveStudio, Tangelo, and RapidWeaver, but they are all still .Mac, no php, need other companies and more usernames and more reliance on other servers for comments and counters type Blogware. But now, no, if I am going to save myself a heapload of money and move to a server, and it supports php, why not look at GOOD Blogware, POWERFUL Blogware. Yes, that’s what I shall do.

My first instinct was for the Blogware I wanted 2 years ago, MovableType. Now, back then, MT was free, and was a good choice. But since then, WordPress has come along and matured. It’s open source, free (yes, I know, I can get MT free, but I get no support, and I may need it), and very customizable IF I learn php, which I probably will.

So, I can move to a server that will cost me less, and lets me keep iBlog or move to a more powerful Blogware, add my own service apps like a wicked cool tracker that kicks what I have now’s ass, and yet I am hesitating? I have my reasons.

First of all, it means a new address. That means I need to let all of you, and all those that used to read the blog know that I moved, meaning a big top-entry post, and emails, and such and such. Then, I come to the hard part. If I switch Blogware, I loose my old posts until I redo them all. I did this once, when I moved from Blogger, but I only had 4 months worth then, now I have 26 months to convert. Plus, all comments would be lost. This means paying $10 to Haloscan for Premium membership, exporting all my old comments, and retyping them as you into the newly transfered post, making sure they all go to the right post etc… Is it worth saving $97 a year? Yeah, probably.

Then, though, that new address thing hit me. Yeay, I would have a cool address like nslyax.nfshost.com or something equally no better than what I have now. What if I wanted something actually cool though? Not just sarcastically cool, but actually geek cool, my own domain. Yes, at $3ish a year, I could afford a domain, and it would only be another $15.75 a year for registration and hosting. That means you could go to blog.hooji.net (hooji.com was taken, but has expired, but was then bought by advertisers that just have redirects on it, and will be available late 2006, but I don’t want to wait) and view the blog. Now that’s cool.

So, I have till October 1st to decide (I think) as that is when my .Mac expires. It would certainly but a lot of work. I may just move iblog to the new server, but that still means comment transferring, and whenever I moved to WordPress I would need to retransfer. I may switch to WP and leave the domain alone for a while. I don’t know. Leave me your opinion, and i will think it all over.

Addendum:

In the 2 days I have thought it over (it was really wracking my brain Wednesday afternoon, I couldn’t wait) I think I have came to the conclusion that with a $5 minimum, I wouldn’t loose much by at least trying it out. No domain or anything for a while, just a trial run. Still though, let me know in the poll, comments, whatever.

nick

It’s conjugal visit day, and you know how I like doing a chick in the can.