I have to say goodbye to an old friend. We have been together for a long time. Probably 20 years or so, a good run. Alas, all good things must come to an end. All the cans we have opened. All the meals we shared. You have been reliable and faithful. Always there when needed. You never demanded much, but always ready for an adventure. Lately, you have been slipping your gears. No longer able to...
When I was growing up, in a suburb of Sunnyvale, the neighborhood was typical. Single family dwellings, clean yards, lots of grass, and busy professionals who worked at Lockheed or Westinghouse. There were a couple of enterprising youths who leveraged this situation by mowing lawns. $5 a week, they had their own power mower and edger, and would come and keep your lawns in good shape. Just about...
I have been working on a fun project lately, creating a website and online personas for my adopted greyhounds. Since I started the bit of an advice column for how to create a website, and what tools to use, I figured that I would try one of the simple builder sites. The two I played with are Weebly, recommended by my friend David Kendall Grant, and Virb, a spin off of the hosting I use, Media...
After my first “So you want a website” post, one of my faithful readers, David Kendall Grant mentioned that Weebly is an awesome, free, and very flexible website creation option. I recall hearing about them in the past, but thought nothing about it, so I thought I would give it a try. First, a basic setup is free. Like WordPress or Blogger, you can easily get a site up that is...
Yesterday I talked about the different avenues to putting up a website, and mentioned some of the pros and cons. Today, I will talk about some of the mechanics. It will be boring, because you aren’t doing anything, but planning at this point. What sort of site do I want? Ask yourself what you intend to do with it. Are you a photographer and want to share your portfolio? Do you want to write...
To there are a few things that give me guilty pleasures in life. One is the BBC comedy show “Absolutely Fabulous”. It is a ridiculous series, introduced to me by a long forgotten ex-girlfriend, but it never fails to bring a smile to my face. The tales of Edina Monsoon, Patsy Stone, and Saffron always put me in a happy mood. One of the best episodes is “Small Opening” a...
I get a lot of people asking me how to create a website. They see this page, or the site I run for the Southern Arizona Greyhound Adoption group, or my professional site, and wonder what they need to do to play. It can be confusing to a neophyte, but hopefully I can clear the confusion. First, you need to honestly assess your technical ability. Do you view yourself as a bit of a nerd? Are you...
Back in 2003/2004 I lost a ton of weight. I went from a peak of about 265#’s to ~185#’s where I stabilized for a long time. I did it the old fashion way, by eating less and exercising more. I counted calories, targeting ~ 1,400 a day (give or take). I started exercising in a gym (because I was really out of shape, it seemed the safest way to get serious), but graduated to running and...
I have a few websites, and I have all of them (except this one) in my Google Analytics account. I don’t obsessively watch it, but I keep track of trends. My main site, Tralfaz, I run on Joomla! which does a pretty good job of internally monitoring the page visits. I find that on days where I make a new post, I typically get 100 – 130 page views of that (mostly from the Product...
I have been trying really hard to use my Nexus 7 as my tablet and media consumption device. In general, it is a worthy competitor to the iOS based iPad’s, but there are some notable differences. 1) The built in Safari “Reader” function is something I use heavily. If you are unfamiliar with it, it takes a web page, strips out all the marginal things, formats it in larger, more...