Monthly Archives: July 2007

I’d Starve in the Morning if it Weren’t For My Cat

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Yes, I would most assuredly starve in the morning if it weren’t for my “little buddy”, Dingo. One of our 3 cats that became my bosom buddy when he first arrived. He’s even more my bosom buddy during the mornings I work when I have my usual bowl of cereal (Honey Nut Cheerios) while sitting in front of my PC checking up on all things bloggish in nature.

As you might guess from your own experience, I have a tendency to become “lost in the blogoshpere” and finally returning to reality at hand only to find my bowel of cereal has returned to the original mush it once was during it’s manufacturing. No more though, not with my “little buddy” around. He has gotten into the habit of sitting quietly by my right side, measuring my frequency of eating IE; the wait period between shoveling spoonfuls of cereal into my mouth. If this period of time goes on too long then Dingo reminds me by rearing up, putting one paw on my leg and then tapping my elbow until I come out of my trance enough to shove another spoonful of breakfast into my face. Then he’ll sit back, blinks his eye’s at me the way cats do when they smile at you, as if to say “That’s a good boy. Eat it all up now”.

Of course the ultimate purpose of his morning compassion and companionship is to get what’s left of the milk at the bottom of the bowl but at least he pretends he actually cares about my health and welfare while he’s at it.

So now that I’ve eaten a proper breakfast and my “little buddy” has had his just rewards for his constant vigilance of my well being, he has wandered off to do whatever he does during the day (sleeping, so he can raise hell at night) and I shall proceed to wander off to work to do what I do during the work day (not sleeping, that’s for sure).

I wonder if any other folks have “breakfast buddies” like mine? Any mealtime buddies for that matter.

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Windows Live OneCare 2 beta. A (personal) First Impression

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WLOC 2

When Microsoft first came out with and being the old beta tester that I am, I decided to give it a (very) short trial period by creating a restore point on my computer at the time and giving OneCare a week’s worth of thrashing. It only lasted three days but it was enough to convince me that the idea of the maker of my OS developing an Internet security suite for that very same OS was an idea that appealed to me. For too long it appeared that no matter the brand the Security suite I was currently using at the time, it’s merging with the OS was not so much by a harmonious mutual consent but more rather by hostile take-over. There were always two distinct separate entities here. The OS (Windows) and the security suite whose presence it barely seemed to tolerate.

Now over a year later, (call it WLOC 2 for short) shows up on the scene and after surfing around for any initial horror stories and finding only the usual “it trashed my computer” and the ever popular “It hosed my OS! Thanks for nothing!” from those who probably didn’t have any control over their computers in the first place, I decided to give this new beta version 2 a try out. So I sent my regular Internet security suite off for a well earned vacation and let Live OneCare 2 beta take over the duties for the interim.

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Been a Busy Weekend So Far

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My two days as shopkeeper has come to an end. I’m proud to say that I sold six potholders and kept my peace while several customers did their best to ransack the quilt shop by pulling out various quilts, potholders and table runners, laying them about for all to see and then tossing them aside and grabbing something else that they could run their eyes over. After they left I quietly went about the shop picking up all the “tossed” items and putting them back where they belonged. I only missed one item–a green “Morning Star” cradle quilt that had been hanging on the wall by the door which took my wife and I (after she returned from the show) almost fifteen minutes to locate. It had been hung on another quilt rack that resided on the other end of the shop, way in the back. It has been since returned to it’s proper place on the wall.

I now call this type of ransacking “Being Walmarted”.

Tomorrow is Sunday and that means I have time to catch up on a couple posts I’ve been meaning to write so until then, thanks for waiting while I “minded the store” and wrestled with a cash register that has me convinced that it hates my guts.

Until tomorrow then…

Watching the shop this weekend

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This is not some sort of sponsored ad or anything. I just like posting about and supporting my wife’s quilting business. :D

Things around the home are continuing to be on the busy side as I’m spending the next 2 out of 3 days I have off at my wife’s while she’s attending an arts and crafts show this weekend. In fact when I got back up from the St. Johnsbury store (see previous post) I headed for her shop and we packed up my rig with what hadn’t fit in her car and off we went to set up for this show. Doing it like this was much better than packing up and having dinner first at home because we both knew that if we sat down there’d be no getting back up again if you know what I mean.

So now it’s off to play shopkeeper once again which, for me, since all I have to do is mind the shop (don’t even get me near a sewing machine…too dangerous) I have time to rest up some from this past week. And I also get to sit in my which we use for display over at the shop. (she’s a dealer for Cobble Mountain and we use my chair for the single model).

So it’s off to mind the store yo-ho. Have a great day.

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Changed the SEO Setup

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I wasn’t pleased with the way the WP-SEO plugin was handling things so I went back to my old way of doing it using the old Head Meta Description plugin along with Permalink Redirect and then added the SEO Title Tag plugin which will take time to get setup correctly. I have to admit I’m only half way SEO savvy since my time to work on the blog is somewhat limited.

Things may get hard to find for those of you who who tried to get here from a search but hopefully things will get straightened out as time goes on. If anyone has some useful SEO advice they might want to pass my way I definitely won’t mind listening. In the meantime, I’ll be working on getting things right.

So what kind of keywords would one use for a personal type blog anyway? :)

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I’m a BAD blogger. A call from Liz Strauss

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Yes folks, I had a call from the one and only Liz Strauss the other weekend. A week prior to that I had decided to take her up on the “” “challenge(?)” she’s had going on her Successful Blog site for some time now and sent her her the “Call me a BAD blogger” email then settled back to whatever I was doing before but with a strong sense of an interesting conversation to come.

I wasn’t disappointed.

Did you ever come across someone that you never met before and just seemed to pick up some “never ending” conversation that has been going on as if you’ve always known each other? That’s what talking to Liz was like. And whatever I may have expected the conversation would turn out to be, perhaps the kind of formatted, sort of scripted , interview type of thing where I was asked a lot of typical questions that I had to come up with answers for…I was delightfully surprised and should have known better for that matter.

For over period of an hour our conversation ranged from one thing to another, rambling here and there like two friends out for a day in the woods heading off every which way to marvel at all the great things they found hiding behind the trees and underneath the leaves and such. Then dragging each other hither and thither so they could see what they had discovered. From our running wheelchair joke to where we might be in a year or so as far as our respective blogs are concerned, we spent most of the time talking and listening at the same time as if we knew our visit would be a short one and had to make up for lost time (and that ain’t easy to do believe me). I had a ball. heck, I even showed up on one of her “” posts along with Kent Newsome of . Good company all around and although I haven’t had the chance to wander through Kent’s blog yet, I definitely intend to.

In the end I was sorry that our conversation had to come to it’s eventual end however, because Liz doesn’t like to leave any conversation finished (and she does this so well as anyone knows who has ever stopped by one of her blogs), we ended our conversation unfinished as well and open to continue at a later date.

And I sincerely hope it does.

PS: As I said I would I put up the BAD logo in my sidebar but of course I had to add my own twist to it. After all…I never really excelled at doing anything “typically”. Have a great day!

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Three From The News…

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So what else is their to do on a relaxing Sunday afternoon but peruse through the news? And what else is there to do but put up a another post about certain stories over the past week that hit a nerve.

To wit…

>>So Bush doesn’t like Vermont?

Not VT Well, it seems to me he has good reason to. From our local news station:

Associated Press – July 20, 2007 7:35 AM ET

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Bush visited his 49th state last month, with a stop in Rhode Island. There’s only one has hasn’t set foot in during his nearly seven years as president — Vermont.

A White House spokesman isn’t making any promises about a presidential visit during Bush’s last 17 months in office, and some see some reasons for that.

Vermont is often rated as the most liberal or among the most liberal states in the country, where Bush’s approval rating is among the lowest of any state.

Garrison Nelson — a University of Vermont political science professor — says there would be no point to a Bush visit, that the president would show up and get booed and yelled at.

Bush has visited 49 states — but not Vermont

So my personal thanks to President Bush for staying away. I really don’t think a visit from him would do anything more than irritate the natives and scare the cows anyway. And scared cows don’t give no milk now do they?

>>And that Ipod and lightning thing… Lightning strike

“I think the message should be that, in the event that you’re jogging and get caught in a thunderstorm, make sure your iPod is not in contact with your skin and remove the earphones from your ear,” Heffernan said.

iPod jogger burned by lightning still at it – New Zealand’s source for technology news on Stuff.co.nz

I think the message should actually be; Don’t jog in a freakin’ thunderstorm, period! okay?

What do you think?

In the meantime, hope all is well with our rockin’ jogging friend.

>>Checkers code finally cracked?

checker 18 years they’ve been working on this. 18 years! And numerous research scientists.

To solve the game, the team had to sift through an astronomical number of checkers positions and analyze the best way to move the pieces. Almost continuously since 1989, dozens of computers have been working on the problem, constantly updating Chinook’s database with more and more positions.

Canadian scientists crack Checkers code

Okay, I understand that something has to be just for the sake of doing it and who knows? Many of the great discoveries in science and technology have been brought forth strictly by accident and/or from another totally unrelated experiment. So through some funky twist of logic I can actually see the purpose in all this. At the very least there will be some checker fanatics out there who will spend the rest of their lives trying to prove them wrong (no offense to the checker players of the world).

Perhaps sometime in the future there will be an “On This Day In History” article posted somewhere that states that history was made on this day when computer technology took a giant leap ahead due to winning a game of checkers.

Of course this checkers “breakthrough” has graced the pages of Google News for the whole past week of course and that’s a bit much in my estimation.

And that’s the news according to me. :P

Ain’t life grand though?