Category: Blogging about blogging

Yearly round-up

Written by Gwyn Fisher

Flash publishes a traditional meme at the end of each year. She posts the first sentence from the first post of each month from the preceding year. Here goes mine, and I’m going to make a comment after each one… 

J: England was great, lovely to see all me nearest and dearest in person and share a pint or three. I shan’t leave it so long next time.

Can’t believe a year’s gone by without getting back 🙁

F: Well, what with having bought another car and signed a 12 month lease on our apartment, we’re here for the long haul.

So young, so naive

M: Yep the 3:17 vowel-consonant ratio means it´s Saint David’s Day again.

And it was lovely to catch up with Ian and Yuri and their kids

A: This blog’s been a bit abandoned of late more due to an overload of work and little time to update it but in brief, saw Carrie Fisher’s show Wishful Drinking last Thursday.

And blimey, it was bad

M: The problem with not posting for a while is that it builds a certain level of expectation that the next post will be somehow life-affirming and brilliant.

Then I went on to announce Sita handing in her dissertation. I really ought to consider newspaper style writing, most important bits first, details later…

J: I just passed the 10,000 photos mark on Flickr.

And I’m at: 11,290 items / 65,673 views, but who’s counting?

J: We interrupt this prolonged silence to recommend this course to you in the Fall Autumn… Check out the last professor on the Faculty link too… Sign up now!.

And who knew that 6 months later I’d have admin privileges to edit that very page…

A: Greetings from our latest ZIP code!

I’ve forgotten what Alameda’s zip was now… seems like a long time ago

S: According to Peter Trigg’s Calendar – “My kind of Somerset”, it’s the first of September, meaning we can look at a grainy picture of All Saints’ Church, Aisholt for 30 odd days
I shouldn’t criticise his calendar. I’m just jealous.

O: Posting direct from Flickr… Here’s Nostromoo’s 2nd batch of Welsh Cakes… and evidence of probably the first time anyone has printed my blog out on paper.

7 months after St. Dai’s Day, we were all getting our Welsh on…

N: I’m off to watch ‘democracy’ in action with DrSita in a mo…

And lo and behold, Obama was elected that very evening. Oregon had an impressive 86% voter turnout.

D: Word Magazine just published an advent calendar with links to videos and suchlike, I thought, I could do that:
Presenting Countdown to Xmas with ‘Cus

And a calendar was born. Hope you enjoy Day 24

When I get a chance I’ll do a first photo from every month type post too…

Vanity publishing

Written by Gwyn Fisher
All this could be yours to own.
All this could be yours to own.

Imagine if every day* you checked your email and saw you’d received an email from a friend with a lovely picture from round Portland way and a brief description of the photo.

Imagine how much easier it would be dealing with the other things clogging up your inbox if you’d first seen a picture of Oregon at its finest.

Imagine if in between the sea of Facebook alerts you had something that didn’t require you to sign into anything to be rewarded with a message.

Imagine that if you ever got sick of receiving said daily slice of the Pacific Northwest you could cancel at any time.

Imagine no longer…

Sign up for email updates from my photoblog:

Enter your email address:

It’s what’s known as a win-win situation… you get emailed a photo. I get a boost to my ego and a reason to keep on publishing the blog.

If boosting my ego isn’t enough motivation, think of the schipperke.

more subscribers = more photos = more walks and exercise for Atticus.
more subscribers = more photos = more walks and exercise for Atticus.

Real quotes from current subscribers:

“I like your writing and you take some nice pics too!”
“I like getting your daily photo in my inbox”
“it’s lovely to see your pics. they are fabulous.”

But that’s not all.

The next 5 subscribers win a 4×6 signed print of any photo from the vaults.

(present subscribers can have one too, hellz yeah, send me a link to the one you want, A, T, A & D)

If you’re all about the RSS, that’ll be: https://agaveweb.com/photos/feed the offer stands for feed readers too.

This’ll be the last time I nag you for a while.

* most days…

If you’d like email updates from this here blog then use this form 🙂

Enter your email address:
Delivered by FeedBurner

Here endeth the plug.

1ft of snow, with an icy crust. Video soon…

There are many schools of thought on blogging

Written by Gwyn Fisher 1 Comment

The vast majority state if you’ve nothing interesting to post, don’t post anything. But that’s only advice for professionals, I reckon. Amateur, personal blogs are exempt from golden rules like providing consistent, interesting content.  And with that in mind…

Schipperke bathing in the morning sunlight
Atticus giving thanks for the bright new morning...

It started off bright today and well nippy, Atticus’s water bowl had a thin layer of ice around the edges. I got a picture of the sunrise, but that’s nothing too impressive because it happens at about 7.15am these days…

I played about 10 games of scrabble in an hour with a 60% win rate, posted that I was going to post and nipped off round the ‘hood with my camera and brownie-starflex-pringles-tin contraption. Only joggers, dog walkers and the Starbucks crowd were about but I was afforded very nice views looking over the Willamette wetlands towards the town centre. For the record, those looking for American etiquette tips might want to take note that joggers ignore you. Dog walkers wish you Happy Thanksgiving. Starbucks only wants to know if you’d like room for cream.

We’ve got a friend coming over at 3ish which’ll give me ample time to fulfil my homework for the day. Make potatoes. DrSita asked me how many to buy and I said, get loads, and when you’re looking at them thinking did I get enough? Double the amount. So I’ve got a lot of spuds. Half are destined to be mashed and the other half will be perfectly par-boiled, rolled around the pan to encourage an absorbant outer layer, drizzled in olive oil, be-sprigged with rosemary and roasted to perfection. Probably. You can’t go far wrong with our tuberous friends. We started on the CostCo ham on Sunday and have been eating it every day, frankly I’m sick of the stuff now, though I’m looking forward to making a (split) pea soup with whatever’s left by the weekend. Still reading?

Erm… what else? Work’s been going grand. I’ve been adding intrusive javascript to several pages to make them fancier. Though an overhaul of the entire site is due in a few months to a tablefree CSS so it’s all pretty academic. law.lclark.edu is the site I spend .60 of my week on now. TV? Colbert’s Christmas Special was fun, but we’re discovering (8+ years later than most) Freaks and Geeks. I think we were in Spain when it was on telly the first time round, and it’s great stuff.  Music? Looking forward to getting hold of Guns’n’Roses’s 13-year-in-the-making album. I heard a track on the radio and it sounded great. The beginning riff is the same as The Darkness’s I believe in a thing called love, you know the one…

Forgot how much I liked that one… Also I’ve found I now fully fit the demographic for Chris Hawkins’ show on Radio 2. He plays a nice mix of music from when I were a lad peppered with the occasional new offering. Thanks to that programme I got into Elbow properly.

Books? Just finished Nick Hornby’s latest, Slam. It’s about a teenage boy who gets his girlfriend pregnant. And I get the impression it was also aimed at teenaged readers but was harmless entertainment. I’ll be nipping out and getting Making Money by Terry Pratchett tomorrow so I have something similarly lightweight to replace it.

Stylised autumn leaves
Autumn leaves through a transparent balloon with autumn leaves on it

Photos? I’m still obsessed with Through the Viewfinder shots and checking on camera prices and hoping the whole worldwide-economy-going-down-the-toilet has some kind of fringe benefit regarding the price of a Pentax KD20.

Films? Quantum of Solace were grand, I thought it was a leaner, better film that the last one. Hellboy II was also a treat and Guadalajara native, Guillermo Del Toro’s trademarks were all over the film. I watched From Russia with Love too and it holds up very well. I especially liked his miniature tape recorder housed in a camera not unlike my Kodak Duaflex.

Plans for the weekend? A drive to the country somewhere, it’s meant to be nice weather.

Alrighty, that’s it for now. Thanks for bearing with me as I find my blogging feet again. I’ve got competition from my dad now so I’ll try to post more regularly… hasta pronto 😀

Busyness Cards

Written by Gwyn Fisher

I never thought about the roots of the word “business” before. Busy-ness. Just thinking out loud, anyroad moving on…

My photoblog‘s getting revamped at the minute mainly because of the number of people asking about the vintage viewfinder contraption when I’m out. I’ve found a great template for it and have been tweaking it to my liking.

Still to do? The title (“Say Cheese, It’s Gwyn’s Photoblog”) needs rethinking… I need a proper archives page, more straightforward tag system, and to write some updated copy for the About Pages…

Might I implore you to sign up for email updates? Sign up below, confirm, then when I post a new picture it’ll wing its way to your inbox with the description too, never more than once a day. You can cancel at any time… I’m going through some of my older photos at the moment but I’ll soon be posting new ones.

Enter your email address:

and I can always cancel if I get sick of them

Any thoughts on the site or pictures are, as always, most welcome in the comments here or over at the phlog. And if RSS feeds is how you roll, it’s replete with that kind of nonsense too.

I’d also like to plug Uprinting.com and the Web Resources Depot who are doing all these cards for free ‘cos I won their competition. Once the cards arrive I’ll say nice things in my professional blog too. Though judging by recent news I’m going to be a lot busier soon…

All the news that fits

Written by Gwyn Fisher 1 Comment

I’ve been posting about some of my latest projects over at agaveweb.com in the hope of drumming up some business and lending a bit more colour to the CVs I’m sending out to temp companies.

Other than that, it’s been pretty quiet this side of the pond/Rio Grande. It was frosty this morning and has since given way to glorious sunshine. I can see it through the little window in my underground bunker… I nipped out to the park yesterday with the PenDak Chimera and took a few longer exposure shots. I think I’d need some kind of retort stand to properly keep everything still enough for anything longer than 1/5th of a second, but I liked this one…

Exposed
Exposed

The next step is learning how to focus more ‘into’ the image, rather than on the border and dust particles. I might have to re-engineer the cardboard and I’m guessing there’ll be something to do with the aperture too.

Sally & Martin arrive tomorrow night. Driving from LA to here in 2 days is quite a trek.


View Larger Map

and a quick way to put a couple of thousand miles on the odometer. So we’re thinking of things to do (expect yet more waterfall pictures…) and where/what to eat.

Judging from the pageview stats, no one cares in the slightest about my lifestream… I’m not taking it personally, FSM knows I’m happy enough you keep coming back to read this nonsense. But give it a go, cos if this page hasn’t been updated there might well be something of interest over there. There’s a distinct bias towards photography tutorials and flickr activity, but once I find out how to put my reddit faves in there as well, there’ll be a lot of good stuff.

I won’t mention it again.

Gwyn’s (For-the-love-of-all-things-holy,-Get-a) LifeStream

Probably.

Unlucky in photo competitions, lucky in radishes

Written by Gwyn Fisher 4 Comments

So Atticus didn’t win a prize on the LA Times contest… I don’t know what he’d have done with a Nikon D300 anyway. But the 170+ “Best” votes are reward enough, t’was a fun journey and thanks, once again, to everyone who voted 😀

Yesterday I went to WordCamp Portland and it was a very useful day out. Normally when I go to a conference it’s to see family and friends doing Sociology presentations, or further back, about the finer points of managing a non-profit organisation, but this one yesterday was all about WordPress and blogging and I’ll probably write a techy what-I-learnt-thing post over at the business end of agaveweb.com when I get a moment. It’s definitely spurred me on to developing a couple of free themes from scratch and releasing them into the wild. Maybe a plugin too. It was cheap, cheerful, informative & well-organised. I am proudly wearing my free T-Shirt today. More conferences should have kegs of beer available from lunch time onwards too. Talking of which, I learnt about a Portland institution called Beer and Blog with weekly Friday meetups in PDX, so I might investigate that too. (actual group photo)

WordCamPDX
Me in the group photo. Looking a bit knackered. It's the first time in ages that I've been up at 6.30am without air travel involved.

Despite my disparaging remarks about my allotment a few posts back, I was thinning out the radishes today and pulled up what, to all intents and purposes, look like actual, edible, undamaged radishes. And they taste okay too. Most of them ain’t ready (ripe?- do radishes ripen?) yet but this bodes well… Have a photo:

Home-grown radishes
Simply radishing.

Also last night we barbecued, then finished off the last season of The Wire.

Today: heading out of the city to see if the leaves are looking properly autumnal yet.

Me blog. Now with added 2004-y goodness.

Written by Gwyn Fisher

Had a job interview this morning, there’s a few more parts to the process, but it’s looking good… News as and when. Also, I made another step towards demolishing gwynunlimited.

*TECHYness* There were a hundred posts or so originally written with GreyMatter’s quaint little blog engine, so I imported them into the old version of WordPress 2.0.3 that gate.com refuses to let me update, exported the MySQL database, imported it into a new installation of WordPress 2.6.1, changed a few variables, deleted the posts I already had in the WP admin panel, dumped them with WP’s export function, and imported them into this here blog.*/TECHYness*

So now the archives reach a little further back to my first blog post in April, 2004, where I reveal the manifest destiny of this whole enterprise: to have a go at this blog malarkey, and detail my eating and telly habits. I feel I’ve kept pretty faithful to my original objectives… It was DrSita’s vegetable soup and The Wire season 3, last night.

Masochists among you may now browse the archives with the handy little drop down archives menu on the right there…

Will this do?

Written by Gwyn Fisher

The problem with not posting for a while is that it builds a certain level of expectation that the next post will be somehow life-affirming and brilliant. But there comes a time when you just have to bite the bullet and shove something up so that rumours of the blog’s demise don’t get too out of hand. Consider this preamble a gentle invitation to lower your expectations, dear reader.

Two items jostle for the title “News of the Fortnight” round our way:

Sita is handing in her first draft of her dissertation today. It’s sociomological dynamite. No, it’s more alliterative than that. It’s Social Science Semtex. It’s going to change the way people enjoy Mexican beverages both nationally and internationally. And then some. It has something for everyone and shall be available from all good university libraries very soon. Seriously, in my capacity as someone with a 2:1 from the University of Wales’ Hispanic Studies dept., let me assure you it’s an entertaining and academically thorough addition to the canon and would make the perfect late Spring gift. If you’re reading, Sita, you can use that on the cover. Pepper it with any of the following too: “five + years in the making” “tour-de-force” “you’ll never look at tequila the same way again” “Contains the unedited ¡Mary Poppins! ¡Mary Poppins! ¡Mary Poppins! anecdote…” “A sociological treasure you’ll keep coming back to…” & “I even read the foot-notes”

Can’t believe we’re this close to finishing… and I couldn’t be prouder of young Sita.

Big news #2: Return to Guanatos… This time it’s personal.

I’ve spent enough hours working in front of LCD screens to warrant a trip back to Guadalajara to catch up with my good friends who refuse to buy land line phones so I can ring them… I’ll be there from the 20th to 26th of this month and, frankly, can’t wait. I’ve had requests for “smuggled goods” and “weapons” in reponse to the question, “does anyone want me to bring anything down for them from gringolandia”. As of yet no one has asked for gringas, which is the traditional reply. But it’s probably only a question of time. So get your orders in now to save a few bucks and playing the Mexican postal lottery. Soonish I’ll post some kind of itinerary, but I think it’s safe to say Tuesday: La Fuente. 6pm to closing…

And now once again, back to matters more prosaic.

If you have a blog, I’ve found out you are contractually obliged to mention Vampire Weekend. Turns out I’m not the first person to notice the Vampire Weekend / Ski Sunday similarity, but I might just be the first to post videos of both songs for you to draw your own conclusions. Left: Vampire Weekend M79, Right: Ski Sunday (Bach goes Pop)

Can’t get enough of it. Thanks to another ongoing, but separate investigation I’ve got the theme to 80s/90s nonsense-fest, LoveJoy ringing round my synapses too. That glissando electronic bit gets me every time…

Newquay Steam Cider

Bert sent me a picture of our tipple of choice that he saved from 1993. It was one of the few vegan/vegetarian ciders out there and lethal at 8+% alcohol. I wish they still made it. Another thing that brought back memories of student life is a repository of Fruit Machine games you can download & play on your PC. Snakes and Ladders/ Andy Capp / Road Hog are the best. Anyone know if trivia games are available somewhere too?

Doc the big dog is with us for another 24 hours since Jerrod’s stuck wherever it was he went. Doc’s been pretty good on the whole though he’s a bit possessive of his food, but generally is a calming influence on our hyperactive little mutt. They certainly love their play dates at the dog park, and the other day it was actually nice to watch the sunset while they did their canine stuff. Here’s a picture…

[flickr]photo:2462934265[/flickr]

Mexico 501’s published another excerpt from my Moving to Mexico post along with other ex-pats, and is a nice read if you’re into that kind of thing. Still not sure why it’s called Mexico 501… Either it’s a directory enquiries reference or an invitation to a long darts game.

And that’ll be all for now. Though I’ve slacked off on this blog, I’ve managed a photo every day or so at me photoblog. So you can always check over there if this page offers slim pickings. Cheers!

And Jesse, let us know if you do ever get to place WAFQ or QFQQ or whatever it was in Scrabble. With a picture or screen grab please. And a photo of your opponent’s face as all hope drains from it. Ta 😀

Waqf WTF?

Written by Gwyn Fisher 2 Comments

It’s been an off week for the Scrabble, the nadir being this game where I was outclassed by a far superior player who nonchalantly placed WAQF on the board. I managed to pluralise it with a bingo (daisies, I’m in red), but still… It came out of nowhere and put me right off. I hope I can similarly demoralise my opposition with the same word one day.

wafq

Sita’s in SCruz again today teaching the younglings the basics of sociology. I’ve no right to complain about my commute to Santa Clara when she’s going the extra mile to Santa Cruz. Hopefully in September all this will be nothing but a distant memory and everything’ll be walkable or MAXable. Talking of SC, they just got donated a load of Grateful Dead memorabilia and stuff. “This is the first step toward having a library that is a destination for scholars interested in studying an important aspect of America’s vernacular” spluttered UCSC music professor Fred Lieberman. People will be studying tequila next… All a couple of days after another important Santa Cruz event. No relation I’m sure.

Last Sunday I went on a Flickr tour to the local abandoned Naval Base, and here’s the photos I took. They’re a bit abstract cos it’s not the most exciting of areas, but there was a nice light which I think I captured in one or two. My favourite is the interior shot of a warehouse and since it’s in portrait orientation, I’ll post it here because I’ve yet to configure my photoblog to display them right.

[flickr]photo:2429553001[/flickr]

Sita’s folks have just made a big purchase in North Downey… email if you’d like more info on that teaser. And CONGRATULATIONS if you’re Martin or Sally.

And that’s the news. File the rest of this post under geekery.

New features on this blog:

Due to public repridemand you don’t have to risk losing your comment and swearing at your computer any more when the “enter these squiggly letters” spam detector is playing silly buggers. However, if you want to write a comment and have your own icon appear rather than Atticus staring lovingly back at you, you can sign up for a gravatar. Then any comment you left in the past should display the picture too. And not just in this blog neither.

Apparently video comments are going to be the next big thing, but I don’t think any of us are ready for that just yet. Meanwhile, as a stepping stone or gateway drug, if you prefer, upload yer avatars and make the comments look even nicer than they already are.

The top emailed articles list on the left is probably going to be replaced with a “Most Polemic” list, ie. posts with the most comments, as, understandably, people are not rushing to email posts to each other. I think it’ll stay on the photoblog though, which I’m starting to really like. I might get round to making themed e-cards for birthdays, weddings, bah-mitzvahs, quinceañeras…. and maybe branch out later into printed cards. Just ideas, just writing them down. May not happen.

Alrighty, thanks for stopping by again, now go off gravitarise yourself. Cheers!

Skip the first 5 paragraphs. Skim the rest.

Written by Gwyn Fisher 4 Comments

I finally got round to updating the many WordPress blogs on this site to 2.5. Somehow along the way agaveweb.com‘s database disappeared, but luckily google had cached the site and copying and pasting was ridiculously easy in the visual editor. The pagerank might suffer, but it’s better than total collapse.

Anyroad, while updating I added a couple of new features to the blog. Namely the “email this to a friend” link at the bottom of each entry and page caching for faster loading. Also my photoblog is probably about another week away from being resurrected, plastered with more google ads than before and with smaller pictures!

[flickr]photo:2420485044[/flickr]

Now I can insert photos from my Flickr stream with a great little plugin which also uses lightbox… Go on, have a click on the chameleon car above and thrill to the ajaxy goodness… That’d be a good scrabble word.

I had to transfer the links in the blogroll by hand, so if I’ve missed you off, it’s by accident and shoot me an email and I’ll add you right back. On the plus side, there’s now categories once again.

I’ve been using FireFox 3.0 Beta 5 for a week now and can’t recommend it enough. It’s faster, stabler and altogether more of a gem. Favourite feature you ask? The address bar and its in-built search function. Once Firebug works on it I’ll be uninstalling FF2.5.

Sita’s had some big news lately which may well necessitate another move later in the year to a place beginning with P. Get in touch if that sounds intriguing. We’re still in negotiations but it’s looking very promising.

Yahoo! can’t make their mind up as to when they need professional English speakers, so unless I get yet another email I’ll be in Santa Clara next Monday…

We’ll probably be going to Downey in a week or so to catch up with Sita’s dad who’s had a very painful run in with gallstones and a spell in hospital. He’s on the mend now though, but we wish him all the best.

Just came into a load of new albums. In no particular order: Goldfrapp, REM, Portishead, Vampire Weekend, & Hot Chip. Most of which I’m enjoying no end and it’s reassuring I haven’t stopped liking new music just cos I’m 33.

While I’m youtubing… here’s Vampire Weekend

And another photo!

[flickr]photo:2420478618[/flickr]

You’re forgiven if you choose not to send this post to a friend. Cheers!

Anyone know of a Flickr wordpress plugin to display photos and recent activity?

Written by Gwyn Fisher 2 Comments

pampas_pcI’ve been scouring the intertubes trying to find a plugin for the blog that’ll display the my latest 5 photos from Flickr that have been commented on, to no avail. I was going to replace the film reviews box on the right (unless you’re an IE user) with it. I installed a Flickr photo album, but all it’s done is create a mirror site of all my Flickr photos. Still if you find that Flickr is too clean, intuitive and well designed, you could do worse than browse using this new section of the site…

So anyone happens to know of such a plug in, please comment it. Muchas thanks.