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1月30日 New Feature - Comment On Photos In The Photo Album
One thing that always annoyed me about my photo gallery is that to leave a comment you had to login to flickr. This is all fine and good, but I wanted a bit more of control over those comments instead of sending you to another site. I finally found that I could “hack” the plugin I was using to use Disqus, the same commenting engine I’m using on the rest of the site. Does this mean you will actually leave any comments? I don’t think that will change too much, but the overhead and change was so small I had to do it. So if there was any pictures in the album that you wanted to comment on, now is your chance. Something small, but a new feature to end the week on. Ender In ExileOriginal URL: http://creeva.com/2009/01/30/ender-in-exile/
About a month ago I sped read through Orson Scott Card’s Novel Ender in Exile. I was really looking forward to this book, but it wasn’t what I expected and not necessarily what I wanted. I really wanted Ender and Bean to meet up again, yet that isn’t what happens. This book effectively takes place immediately after the end of Ender’s Game. The main problem I have with Card jumping all over the place is it becomes a pain to tell someone which order to the read the books. I've Been Tagged On Facebook - 25 Things About Me
Image from here So one of my e-mail buddies felt the urge to add me to a chain letter in Facebook. I’ve been nice enough to my readers to rarely do these things (though if I do I do them on the blog). I found it odd that I was tag since I’m fairly transparent online. Here is the message I was sent:
Now I’m not posting this initially on Facebook so I’m not going to “tag” anyone else. So the chain dies with me - you have no reason to repeat it but if you do great - let me know. So, moving on, in no particular order (I thought I would use my Flickr photos for illustration):
1. I still play with Legos
2. I’ve worked at haunted houses in two states
3. My father saved me from being named “Christopher Robin” - yes the name of the Winnie The Pooh kid.
4. I still read comic books
5. I prefer Disney cartoons over Warner Bros. - Donald Duck for the win!!
6. When I was younger I collected Garfield books - I had a stuffed Pookie until an ex-girlfriend gave it to Goodwill 
7. My girlfriend dumped me shortly before prom - so I took a good friend instead.
8. My senior year in band I was only the fifty yard line as a featured section or player more times then anyone else except my prom date (we tied) - and I wasn’t even the best player
9. I’ve been outside the Goonies house
10. Reagan is my favorite president
11. I have a friend in Florida that still has the pony tail I cut off in 2001.
12. I arranged a small F-Body car event in Oregon - I didn’t know anyone that came but I invited everyone I could fine with an F-Body.
13. I have a psychotic dog (and another dog and four cats)
14. I collect retro video games - with a pretty extensive Nintendo collection
15. Thanks to my mother I loath decorating for Christmas
16. I think Crater Lake is one of those places everyone should visit once.
17. I’m hoping to build a voice dialing system for home with my grandmother recorded for the operator prompts
18. I’ve always had, and always will have horrible fashion sense
19. My mother thought it would be cute to tell Chi-Chi’s it was my birthday after I told her not to - on the way out of the restaurant I hung onto her like she was my girlfriend, embarrassing her all the way to the car.
20. I miss Satin Jackets, Michael Jackson Thriller Pants, and Hammer Pants (please reference no. 18)
21.I couldn’t sit up until I was six months old.
22. I once tied my sister up and hung her sideways on a doorknob for about a half hour.
23. I owned a Back to the Future Skateboard - and I miss it - you can kind of see it the picture
24. I still own the above shirt (fifteen years later) - and my wife hates it
25. I can’t believe you read this whole list Now I hoped you are enlightened or at least amused. 1月29日 People That Don't Call BackOriginal URL: http://creeva.com/2009/01/29/people-that-dont-call-back/
You ever had one of those incidents where you don’t really want to call someone? It can be the person, the time you have available, the circumstance, or the resolution - whatever you don’t really want to call. I had this the other day. So I receive this message via Myspace from a friend that another person I know wants me to call them. In the quick message it left a phone number and something about getting computers or doing some consulting work. I thought as long as it fit within my schedule I was game. The person I was supposed to call was someone that I’ve said less then a dozen words to over the last seven years. This person also used to live with my wife and myself, and the communication stopped when I asked him to leave. From his point of view I was in the wrong and should apologize, I on the other hand just wish him a good life. That information is only to give you background on the situation, someday I’ll write up that whole story and he can show up and refute any claims on it he may like. He was always my little brother in a way you think brothers should be, my actual little brother and I didn’t nearly get along so nicely. So happy life to him, I hope he does well. So this is why the Myspace message was so odd. First it’s out of the blue, and second the guy didn’t contact me directly. Let’s be honest for a minute, it’s not like I am very hard to find on the intrawebs. Heck the girlfriend he lives with has me on her Myspace friend’s list. I’m still puzzled by the intermediary maneuver. I know I have certain skills and knowledge based out of his friends that he talks to, but I don’t think I’m entirely unique unless it’s something specific or security related. That’s another thing that I find strange in this whole process. Since it was a chance to make a few extra dollars I made the call. I received his voicemail. I left a message and my call back number, giving him my Grandcentral number to call me back on. So far it’s been two days and no return call, and he didn’t just call and hang up since Grandcentral would have logged that. I guess I’m more curious on why me then anything. The ball is in his court though. I left a message, so he has my info. I guess tomorrow I’ll give the intermediary the message that it didn’t seem that important. Mundane story? Yes it is. It just popped into my head so I thought I would write it out.
Testing Your Internet Connection To See If Your ISP Is InterferingOriginal URL: http://creeva.com/2009/01/29/testing-your-internet-connection-to-see-if-your-isp-is-interfering/
Everyone else is writing about network neutrality today (here, here, and here), so I’m jumping on the bandwagon. Actually I meant ot write this last night, so since I’m slow and lazy the others beat me to the punch. Late last night I saw the first posts about Google’s MeasurementLabs sneak across the RSS feeds. What the tools you can get from that web site do is find out if your ISP is doing any funny stuff to your internet data. I highly recommend so they can get the broadest picture possible running these tools. It makes you a good Internet neighbor. The Freaking Mile Long Pier in Huron
Image from here The stupid mile long pier. It’s located in Huron, Ohio and at the end of the pier is the Huron Lighthouse. Growing up in Vermilion, Ohio there wasn’t much to do that we didn’t do on a regular basis. One of the odd-ball things we did was go out to the mile long pier. The official name wasn’t the mile long pier, but it is supposedly a mile long - so the local nickname stuck. For some reason the trips were a bit more frequent once I managed to get the woman who would one day be my wife. My wife always enjoyed the mile long pier, except when she managed to get to the end of it she had to use the restroom. This almost always made it a pain since as soon as we made to the end of the end of the pier we immediately had to turn around and head back in most occasions. When a group of us wanted to head out there we started making her use the restroom at the Riverview Bowling alley just up the street from the pier. It was one of those places that youth go and hang out in groups. Usually the minimum number of people we took was three, but I can think of a couple times it was almost a dozen of us. Climbing from rock to rock to make it to the end of the pier. Since most the time it was in the evening or close to it, we watched the sunset down. Otherwise we just headed out and stared into the darkness that was the water of Lake Erie at night time. Was it a fantastic experience, not in anything that I say that you must do. It was a time period where the friends and the memories make it important. Too many times the pier started off as a springboard for other activities. Whether it was friends in high school or friends from my early twenties. It was a gathering spot of sorts. Eventually I’ll get around to heading back and taking some pictures - for now it has to exist solely in memories. 1月28日 Chain Mail of The Day - The Proposal
Image from here Today’s e-mail come from one of the people that sends me political e-mails, I’ll let you read it before I comment.
This is one of the few I get that I can’t refute with a quick view of snopes. I’m going to trust the numbers in this case. While I do believe in smaller government the changes above are just about the absolute last changes I would make to government. I would get rid of most of the government agencies - especially ones where private business could do it better (IRS I’m look at you). I would have a smaller military and I wouldn’t have them in wars that have no good resolution or just cause for starting. Finally I’m a constitutionalist so that means changes the number of people in the senate or the house would requite changes to the constituion - which would require all fifty states to ratify. First good luck on that, second NO. The constitution is just fine, leave it how it is. Do You Like Food and Humor? Then Read Chomple.com!
I would use a better picture for Chomple.com, but Yod hasn’t made logos in easy to resize bites. The above picture will have to do until he does. Before we dig to far into this I will say while I enjoy Chomple.com Yod has been an “Internet Friend” for awhile. He gained quite a following on his Vox blog and I think this was the spring board for Chomple.com. You can get a sense of humor in the blog just reading the staff page. The main staffers are Yod, Actual Girlfriend, Sushi Girlfriend, and Work Girlfriend. They give their own views, reviews, and pictures of the restaurants they eat at, and whether they merely endured it or if they enjoyed. The only problem I see for me personally, I’ll probably never be located where I can eat at any of the restaurants they review. I also don’t like sushi. I am waiting for the Twitter famous Ebby K. Grumpletail to do some reviews. I wish them the best of luck and I thoroughly enjoy reading it, maybe you will to. My Flash Gordon StoryOriginal URL: http://creeva.com/2009/01/28/my-flash-gordon-story/
When I was four years old I really wanted to see Flash Gordon, even at that young age I was a sci-fi junkie. Neither of my parents however were too keen on seeing this, I think the answer was always no. I’m not sure why - I think Queen was still popular at the time. I know that it was based on pop ideals and all in all it wasn’t that great of the movie - but geeze when your four year old is obsessed with something this small and it isn’t going to hurt him in anyway, indulge him. My grandmother in Greenville seemed to agree with my modern view point on it. We were down visiting and she agreed to take me. We only managed to get down to see my grandparents in Greenville a couple times a year, so my grandmother spoiled me when she got the chance. We went to the movies and I loved it, to this day I still immensely enjoy this movie, more now because of the memories then the movie itself. After the movie my grandmother took me to McDonald’s and I had a hamburger and french fries with lots of ketchup. What I have outside of memories is the rest of the story that I had forgotten over the years in direct memory, my parents in later years filled in the blanks. My grandmother originally was going to get me some food during the movie’s intermission. It had been so many years since my grandmother had been to the movies, that she thought there still was intermissions. By the time the movie was over she felt bad that I hadn’t eaten and taken me to McDonald’s. This grandmother died when I was young, so I only have a few vague memories and stories about her. I’m sure the rest I have will make it to the blog eventually. The interesting side note is my wife once criticized Flash Gordon, I relayed this story to her, and never since has she bad mouthed the movie. Sometimes I'm Too Much Geek - Or What I Want For Christmas I am so sad. I think this jacket is awesome. Well it would be at least awesome to own, I’m not sure how much wearing it in public I would do. I have an NES backpack with the same design I don’t really use. I caught this from my Engadget RSS feed, I do agree better looking people could of modeled this. That being said I don’t think I would have looked any better. 1月27日 Consolidated CategoriesOriginal URL: http://creeva.com/2009/01/27/consolidated-categories/
Image from here Yesterday to help ease navigation around Creeva.com I consolidated my categories. I went from over one hundred to just having twelve. I used categories kind of like tags, but not really. I was using them for specific organization methods, but over time that becomes unwieldy - especially when certain categories are not relevant or used any more. So yesterday was a big consolidation that literally took hours. One side effect I noticed that alot of old articles managed to get re-crossposted. I’m not sure why since nothing I did should have called that function in wordpress, but it did. It honestly is as much of a pain for me the author as much as you the reader on this different sites. Hopefully though you will find it easier to navigate different categories around the blog. I also added a ton of tags yesterday so articles should link together better and keyword search should be stronger. Created a Youtube Channel For The VCMA
I managed to get the Winter Concert chopped up on a per song basis and load the videos up on YouTube. So if you are following me with any interest in the VCMA - you can go here and view the videos. More are coming. 1月26日 Happy Birthday To My Brother
My next in-line brother turns twenty-seven today. A very happy birthday to him. Overprotective On How I Set Up Wordpress
This is more a short confession then anything else. I’m a creature set in my ways. I can work inside the rules set before me, and I’m also capable of bending the rules of what is possible. That being said I have had a hard time setting up and working with Xie on her blog. It’s been an on going project for over a year now. Sometimes things need tweaked outside of my ability. Sometimes she wants things that are not possible, or there isn’t a plugin written for yet. It’s frustrating for both of us. We both have an ideal we are shooting for when setting this up. I configure it for what I’ve learned is best overall use. She wants to configure it for what works for her. Neither of us however are very good at explaining our side it seems. She is going through a complete overhaul of her blog, hopefully she will start actively using it. I’ll help out where I can, but I think this time around I’m going to be taking a very hands off approach to the problem. I’ll be willing to work on specific issues and feature sets, I’m just not going to do an overall architecture for her. I think it’s better for our relationship that way. 1月25日 The First Time My Brother Drove A Car
Image from here I’m going to go out on a limb and call out ages here, I could be wrong. The first time my brother operated a vehicle he was four years old, which would make me around nine at the time. The location - my grandparent’s house. My grandparent’s driveway used to be on a hill. I always enjoyed just speeding a bike down that hill - if I had to guess it was probably about five cars deep. So it was about fifty feet long with about twenty of that being mostly flat. We were getting ready to leave my grandparent’s house and my mother sent my brother and myself out to the car. Now since this was along time ago (in a galaxy far far away?) some details on which family car this was has been lost in the ages. I remember one car and different parents remember others. I’m fairly sure at the age my brother was he doesn’t remember which car it was at all. What I can tell you is that it was a stick shift. I was sitting in the back seat of the car and my brother was climbing around the front of the car. I was reading a book or comic book in the back seat of the car and I noticed my mother coming out of my grandparent’s garage and walking towards the car. At some point in this my brother had removed the parking break and managed to get the car into neutral. The car started rolling down the hill. My mother saw this and started running towards the car. She made it to the driver’s side car door, but she couldn’t open it. Somehow my brother had managed to lock the car door. I was in the back seat frozen in fear (shock?) at what was going on. My mother was yelling at me to jump in the front seat and stop the car or unlock the door. I just couldn’t move. Down and down the hill we went, I know that it took less then a minute or so , but at the time looking back it felt a lot longer. We passed the end of the driveway and were moving into the street. We crossed the street and ended up in the yard of the house across the street (luckily my grandmother lived in a cul-de-sac and there was no cross traffic). In the yard across the street my brother managed to scratch the side of the car across a telephone pole, just missing hitting it by inches. Since he didn’t hit the pole I guess you could say his first experience was a success. That isn’t what it felt like for me sitting in the back seat. 1月24日 The World, The Flesh, and The Devil
I just finished watching The World, The Flesh, and The Devil which starred Harry Belafonte as a black man struggling with racial in a post apocalyptic world. I don’t want to go over the full synopsis since you can get that here and here. Overall it has the feel of The Omega Man and I am Legend - though it predates The Omega Man by twenty years (I Am Legend by over fifty). The difference though is this movie has no zombie like creatures of any sorts. It deals with the racial issues of the time combined with dealing with the loneliness of living in such a world. If you wanted to look at the actual issues of loneliness and society at the end of the world I can say you should defintely hunt this movie down and watch it. My Hosting Debacle and Resolution
Last Saturday morning my blog was down for the count. I had received an email from Are My Sites Up stating that Creeva.com was down. It told me that my blog went down late night on Friday. I verified on Saturday that it was still down, and I had wanted to do some writing on it. I waited. I attempted to call tech support but after being the first caller inteh queu for over an hour I surrendered. Saturday came and went and no blog. Sunday morning site was still down. I called into tech support again Sunday afternoon. I was fifth in the queu and I was moving forward about 15 minutes at a time. Either people ahead of me were getting help, or they were giving up like I did the day before. I held on and finally managed to get through to a person. Upon talking to the tech support I learned that my hosting server had moved. Not only had it been moved, it was moved back in October. I had known that they were going to move servers, but the e-mail announcing this stated that most people would not notice an changes. What this says to me is that a new server will be put up with the same IP address with very little down time in the migration. This however was not done, so all of my data was moved to a new server. Since October I had been updating my information and blog on the old server. When I managed to correct my DNS entries at my registrar, I discovered my blog was out of date since early November. I was missing literally hundreds of articles once you take into account my lifestreaming posts that don’t make the front page or RSS feeds. I was livid. I called back and they stated they would get it synced back up off of the old server. Ten hours later there was no change. I waited until Monday when I knew there would be more then just support in the office. Since I’m a reader of the Consumerist I followed on of their recommended ways of dealing with this is, I sent an executive e-mail carpret bomb here is what I wrote:
I sent this e-mail out to the American general manager of the company, the consumerist, the European Executives, and support. I received an e-mail from the general manager and he got a technician working on the issue right away. The issue was resolved in a couple hours. They pulled my data off the old server and synced it to the new one. There was still some minor issues that I had to correct - wordpress needed to be re-upgraded, but all my SQL databases were up to date. They also kept me informed during the whole migration. I really wish I could have had that level of care taken of me on Sunday, or at least a time frame when the data could have been restored. When they try to equate a blog with a normal static website, it just shows ignorance on their part. It does show the problem I have with doing regular back-ups - which is in the architecture stages right now. The only thing I ask of my hosting provider is to live up to the promises they have given me. I don’t open tickets - really I’ve talked to them only about 3 times in the last year. The first being a simple problem I had while waiting for my account to activate, the second inquiring about the share SSL certs, and the third this issue. I’m glad even though I “yelled” across the Internet more then I should have, that they came through and everything is now working. Free Software on Craig's List - Should You Trust It?
Image from here The other day I was browsing Craig’s List and noticed a listing for some free software. It wasn’t anything I was interested in, but I did stop an think about it. We talk about all the time about verifying where you download software from. We hear all the time about pirated software that looks the same as legitimate software. So why would you take free software from Craig’s List? I guess this is just more an observation. I’m just pointing out common sense that people should be thinking. I’m just trying to point out that there is no such thing as a more trustable anonymous source. It would be easy to compromise a computer by offering free software on Craig’s List and manipulating it before handing it out. I’m not saying not to take - just think twice. 1月20日 Features Google Reader Needs to Add
Image from here Google reader, I love you - I also hate you. You are like a bad relationship that I can’t break. You save me so much time on the web since I no longer have to jump from site to site. You however do not give me any good reason to use you and save items. You are a cruel mistress who mistreats me and wastes my time. Here are things you need to work on. The first and only thing you need to work is how saved “starred” items work within your interface. I have been trying to clear out “starred” items since the list was getting unwieldy for me. Let’s start off by how I use starred items. I use it to save personally interesting stories that are not relevant enough for me to share the story. They are also too mundane in most occasions to e-mail to myself. Yes I know this is in essence using you as a bookmarking service - a service mind you that Google has not officially ventured into. You are designed to display information rapidly from multiple sources and your saved items is really an after thought. Or it it? You attempted to rectify some of this with tagging, the first problem I have with tagging - is other then by using search I can not find a way to find the “folders” made by creating a tag. It’s all fine and great that we can create tags, but if you can not quickly get to them, what is the point other then to give me hope. Maybe I’m just retarded when it comes to tags, but tags do not answer the second problem I have, only the bookmarking aspect (and answers it extremely poorly). The second thing I use you for is saving stories that I can come back and read later. I get in on Monday morning and I have 367 unread items that have shown up since Sunday when I cleared them out. I don’t have time to leisurely read the stories, instead I go through and star the ones I want to come back and read later. By Friday I have over one thousand story I want to come back and read, but who has the time or effort. The other day to get back to my oldest starred items it took me over 5 minutes of scrolling all the way down and waiting for you to load. There has to be another way. A few methods I came up to help the starred overload issue: Saved feed items by date - if you could categorize items in folder by month/week/or even day that you starred them that would be fantastic and save on a hell of a lot of scrolling. Starred item by feed it came from - by being able to filter our starred items by source feed would also be awesome. This would allow me to quickly dig into the stories I want to read when I sit down. Sometimes I don’t feel like going back to starred items from feeds 6, 5, 89, 90, etc. - when all I want to do is read stories from feed78. There should be a simpler way to do this then forcing me to tag or search. I can set up labels and see them on the left in Gmail, why is the reader data so different? Well next week I plan to publish articles of some of the saved links I have saved by subject. I’ve been working hard, but like they say you go two steps forward and you end three steps back. We’ll see how it goes. Love, Creeva VCMA Winter Concert 2008 Video Now Online
The above picture was from the VCMA’s performance of the Christmas tree arrival. I don’t have a video of that performance, what I do have is a video of the VCMA Concert Band’s performance at Kingston of Vermilion which took place on Dec. 11. 2008. Enjoy!
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