A Few Good Memes

Whee! Karrie nominated me for Hottest Daddy Blogger over at the Blogger’s Choice awards. Thanks, Karrie! Flattery will get you everywhere I’m not much for awards, per se. I don’t watch the Grammys, Emmys, nor the Oscars. I used to look forward to the MTV VMAs, but only because I wanted to see what antics those ke-razy rockstars would be up to. I think that show jumped the shark with the Guns ‘N’ Roses reunion. Haven’t watched it since. But I am indeed truly honored that Karrie would nominate me, Eden would comment (thanks, Eden!) and 10 people would vote. I blog for my own sake, both to get it out of me, and to enjoy and grow from the conversations that ensue. It really is its own reward. Except that you all had better get your asses over there and vote for me so I win!

Lots of other cool bloggers over there too. Pretty much everyone in my “blogfriends” group in my blogroll. Go vote for all of them too. Early and often.

Sorry for all the comment woes. What a waste of blogwidth to keep you all updated with this crap. I think I have a working strategy. Now ya just gotta know my name.

Update: None of my attempts to thwart spam are working. I’m getting deluged with comment spam. One every minute or less. I’ve turned off commenting temporarily until I figure it out.

Update: I think we’re back. Using Akismet now. Should stem the flow to just a festering sore.

It appears that some people are having trouble getting past my “did you pass math” filter. Sorry about that. If you’re having trouble, leave me a comment and let me know

Actually, send me an email at jase@dufair.org. I’ll try and figure out the problem in the meantime.

Update: I think I have it working again. I installed the latest version of the Did You Pass Math plugin (thanks Steven!) and my server once again realizes 8 and 2 are 10 Yeah! I already got 2 spams in the few hours it was disabled.

Anna and I have kept a blog since 2003 mostly to have a place to write about cute or poignant kid stories.  We kept it behind a password since she was less comfortable letting it all hang out online than I seem to be.  I’ve merged that blog into mine today both to share with friends and family and so I have one less blog and database to manage.  It’s been simultaneously bitter and sweet to read through some of these old posts.  I found myself sitting at work today just staring at Anna’s picture today.  And then coming home and watching old movies of her with the kids.

I decided to add Anna as a author to my blog so you could see which posts she wrote (I now show the author by the post title).  All of these old (and not so terribly old) posts are in the “Old Family Blog” category which can be found here.  They’re probably more interesting to me (and to my kids someday) than to anyone else (perhaps excepting my brother who now subscribes and my folks who read on occasion, and any other family that reads - Hi Heather!  Marcie? Dan? Erin? Eduardo? Dunnes? - ok maybe some people will enjoy the posts).  Anyway, enjoy if you’re so inclined.

I host WordPress on my own site. I just updated it to a new version, thinking the post editor would be spiffier. Somehow, the spiff got missed on my upgrade. And I ended up having to update my stats plugin and reset all my stats. Sucky. But looking at my stats page, it got me thinking: I have readers from all around the world. See the pic on the right. And that’s just the last couple weeks. Yet I only have commenters from Canada and the USA. So this is my call to all of you lurkers in the rest of the world. All ya have to do is just leave an anonymous one word comment - “Hi” (or “Hola” or “Bienvenue” or “Marhaba” or “Ni Hao”). My spiffy new stats plugin will put your flag by your comment. Come on! And I won’t make you comment ever again.

Well, I figured out how to do hyperlinks in ink via imagemaps, but hooboy is it tedious. Write in OneNote, copy and paste into ImageReady, define image maps, save as html and gif, upload gif, open html in Emacs, copy and paste into WordPress, copy recognized text into WordPress, clean it up, create the same damn hyperlinks for the text version, publish.

Hopefully OneNote 2007 will have more seamless blogging. I played with Windows Live Writer with the ink blogging plugin, but I’d rather do it all in OneNote if possible. Seems like it would be a natural application if OneNote allowed ink hyperlinks.

Given that the size of my readership can probably be counted by Emma (who is 2 and currently counts to ten like 3..2..1..7..8..9..10), I suppose my experiment (a.k.a. my previous post) falls on deaf liquid crystals, but I thought I’d try exporting a page of my journal from Microsoft Office OneNote that I’ve become quite fond of on my Tablet PC lately to my blog. I like the idea that I can just write when I want to write and then export out blog-appropriate stuff as I like. I suppose it looks kinda cool and theoretically makes things a bit more personal. Then again, maybe it’s just lame or trying too hard or pretentious. But I suppose I’m lame, try too hard, and am pretentious. That sums me up pretty well.

Anyone of the 2 or three of you who might have an opinion on the previous post, sound off, ok?

I suppose if I’m going to do it right, I should figure out how to make ink words hyperlinks. Image maps? Yeek.

I’m pretty much down to using Rhapsody as my only music source and player.  I finally got Rhapsody To Go to work with my Dell Axim X30 and got a spiffy new cradle thingie for my car from Gomadic.  I even took my dashboard apart and ran the cables out of sight.  So now that I can listen to any music, any time, anywhere, I wanted to show what I’ve been listening to on my blog.  Rhapsody has an RSS feed of recent album listens (mine’s here), so I tried to put it on my blog, only to run into problems integrating RSS feeds.  Turns out that WordPress has new “gadget” support, so I upgraded, picked a gadget-friendly (and very clean!) theme, and put the feed there.  After a bit of hacking on the gadget.php file to get it to show the RSS summary entry, you, dear reader, can now see what I’ve been listening to (currently enjoying Ben Harper’s roots rock).