It’s Harder than it Looks!
Posted on 13 January 2010 | No responses
I’ve been spending every night this week working on the new www.hankshomemade.com webs site. The good part is I’m at least in the same room as my family and not sitting in an office or away in the kitchen (although I need to go spend some time making product soon). The bad part is that, dang, this stuff is hard work. I tried to make it easy on myself and use the same system I use here for my personal site, WordPress. However, the integration of the pluggins, especially the main piece, the e-commerce plugin, has been a lot of work. Stuff like CSS drives me crazy. To add insult to injury, I’m having to lean on my awesome co-workers to help with some image editing, ’cause I SUCK! Seriously, I’m thrilled that people are so willing to help, I need it. As you cruise the web tonight, thank a web designer/producer, because behind every great site is a team of fantastic people who make it look easy.
Short and Quick
Posted on 10 January 2010 | No responses
Is it better to have larger, more in-depth musing, but posted less frequently or shorter, quicker thoughts more regularly.
I’ve always felt the idea behind the blog was to do both, but I’ve found that it’s darn near impossible to keep up with work, toffee, family, etc and in-depth written thought. I continue to try, but it becomes discouraging to open this page and see it hasn’t been updated since Halloween. Incredible. I’ve certainly had a ton of thoughts. Many things have happened with the family, but doing another large catch-up post is just cheating. Not to mention it minimizes all that has happened.
For those of you who are blog writers, how do you deal with keeping up on your blog and life? Where do you fit it in? Is it better to at least post something, even if small, then to leave the blog blank, but have more meaningful posts when they get done? I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for your input!
A Case for Candy Taxation
Posted on 31 October 2009 | No responses
For those that stumbled over here thinking I was going to addresses the government taxing junk food, I’m sorry, you might want to hit the back button. What I am going to talk about is parents taxing the candy haul on Halloween night. Taxing the kids? You bet. First, I’ll give you my method; one which I believe is fair to the kids, but still teaches some key lessons. Secondly, I’ll present my case for why.
I’m sure my kids are no different then yours, next to Christmas and their birthdays, Halloween is a favorite holiday. While the costumes are always fun, let’s face it, what they love is the candy. Lots of candy. Too much candy. Every year the candy haul seems to get larger. Of course, it’s not like we as parents have nothing to do with that. We buy more candy every year to hand out, and take our kids to more parties and more neighborhoods to trick-or-treat in. What started off as a small plastic pumpkin with 20-30 candies, has now become a pillowcase that’s 3/4 full of teeth rotting, sickness inducing, sugary treats.
I Got Bit by a Snow Leopard
Posted on 22 October 2009 | No responses
I’ve been using Snow Leopard for 3 days. I first upgraded my work computer. So far so good. I’ve been over happy with the upgrade. Two things bug me: no more Apple Talk and the new Expose. The removal of Apple Talk is an inconvenience at most. It’s a little annoying, as most of my printers at work don’t support Bonjour, so I’m stuck using the domain credentials for a windows connection. Like I said, not horrible. Expose is a little more of an annoyance because I use it all the time. I can deal with the blue box, which is really MS like and the title underneath is kinda cool. However, Expose making things similar height is difficult for my eye to deal with. I like ratios. If the window was small before it should be proportionally small when in Expose.
Heather’s computer was next. As far as I know, there’s been no major issues. It works as advertised. She’s only been on it a day, so I can’t say if she’s experienced any great feature or exciting speed increase, but now comes the reason for the lovely kitty in the corner.
Tonight I upgraded the family iMac. The install went fine and all proceeded normally. I downloaded updates, reinstalled a few programs… all looked good… until I noticed Connect360 couldn’t find my iTunes library. PANIC! Um, I have like 10 years of MP3’s amounting to about 70GB of music and audiobooks. I double clicked the Media link on my desktop and Mac said “No no… Can’t be found” OH CRAP… Media not only contained my audio, but video as well.
So what happened? I spent a couple of hours searching the interwebs for an answer and as much as I can figure, during the install, the /Volumes directory is wiped. Yep, I had the Media directory in the /Volumes folder. Media used to be an external drive, but when I didn’t need it any more, so I moved the contents and created a directory in /Volumes. It was probably a bad idea. Actually, it turned out to be a horrible idea.
The moral to the story? While Mac OS X is very powerful and you can do some pretty incredible stuff, don’t stray too far from the accepted Apple way of things or POOF. I don’t know yet what I’m going to do, but at least let my loss be a warning.
A follow-up to my post, I found a older external drive that had a backup from April of our music, and with Apple’s help have completely restored the iTunes library. Now, if I can just figure out all the kernel panics I might just be happy with Snow Leopard.
I’ve got myself a new goal…
Posted on 18 October 2009 | No responses
I’ve always enjoyed writing. Not that I feel particularly good at writing, I just enjoy it. I used to write short stories and poetry, sometimes even music. I even, one day, hoped to write a novel. However, somewhere along the way of life, I got out of the writing habit. Probably much the same way I stopped juggling, or sketching, or playing racquetball… Just life. Well, at 38 I think it’s time to stop letting the distractions get to me and take a little control of my day.
My goal? 15 minutes of writing a day. No matter what. It may be crap, it my be good, heck it may be a sentence written over and over and over… Let’s just see if putting the proverbial pen to paper helps uncork some of the thoughts and dreams stuck inside this thick skull of mine. Editing takes time, which is something I want to keep out of the 15 minutes, so for now, if I post some of it, it’ll probably be rough. However, I doubt much, if anything will be posted. But we’ll see.
Two Facebook Posts and A Funeral
Posted on 29 September 2009 | No responses
It’s odd to be talking about Facebook, or social medial in general when in the past I’ve been so against it. Yes, there are fun things happening, and connections from long lost friends, but it is also a time sink and in some ways, kinda creepy. Sure, reconnecting before the high school reunion, or just knowing the daily ins and outs of friends and family is great, but more importantly, social media crosses life networks.
What are life networks? For myself, I have a work network, a church network, a school network, a personal network, family network, well, you get the point. However, how many people in my work network know people in my church network? This separation is normally a good thing. I don’t necessarily want work to cross over into my “normal” life, but what if something happened to me? How would my loved ones contact each of my separate networks? This situation recently happened and Facebook became a tool for good.
Flash back a few weeks ago. Two people whom I know through work, went out on a motorcycle ride at lunch. One of them never returned. News reports started coming in. Phone calls, forum posts, all were a buzz with information, but they were all very light on details. Names hadn’t been released to the press, but there were those of us who knew people out that day and wanted, no, needed to know what was going on. A few hours after the accident, a shared friend and one close to the situation made a post that would forever change my view of social media when he posted a “good bye” on our friends wall. That good bye said everything I needed to know. What would happened next was even more profound.
Within an hour, other friends, some shared, some not, posted good byes and condolences on the lost riders wall. Over the next few days, the heart felt sorrow and out pouring of grief was stunning to watch. Daily, sometimes, many times a day, I would refresh to read the good byes. Finally, one of the most amazing uses of social media I’ve ever seen; my friends mother and sister posted on his wall the details of his funeral. His family lived in a different state, and certainly had no way of contacting all the people that crossed all of his different life networks… except for one: Facebook.
In that wall post, his family was able to bring together all of his different life networks under one roof to say good bye. To get to meet so many of the people that mattered to him, where he spent his life, where he worked and the people he hung out with made Facebook priceless to his family, and showed me it’s not all about the games or silly posts, but real life happens happens on those pages as well.
Favorite Non-Alcoholic Drink
Posted on 3 September 2009 | No responses
My department went to lunch today to celebrate a birthday, which is always exciting. Unlike many places I’ve been, work picks up the tab. Yay for that. Half the time we seem to end up eating sushi (always a good thing), the other half is pretty random. This time we ended up at Thai-Rrific Restaurant. I haven’t eaten there in forever and that was just silly. The food is really good and well priced, but the discovery of the day… Thai Iced Coffee. Right, yeah… Coffee.
I know and love a good Thai Iced Tea, but had never seen a Thia Iced Coffee. The drink still has those yummy spices from the tea, but the coffee seems to complement, instead of over power the drink. Of course, if you’re sensitive to caffeine, you might want to save these for lunch only. It’s definitely my new favorite non-alcoholic drink. So next time you’re eating Thai food, consider a Thai Iced Coffee and let me know what you think!
Heavy Heart
Posted on 2 September 2009 | No responses
A buddy, and fellow motorcyclist, passed away today at a spot I know very well. I ride it virtually everyday I go to work. In some ways, it scares me. I guess it should. As a rider, I know every time I get on the bike, there’s a chance that things don’t go well. However, that chance exists in a car, or walking across the street, heck, even sitting at work things can go terribly wrong. Things do go wrong. I guess that’s why we wear our gear, our seat belts, buy cars with air bags… to reduce the chances, but we never eliminate them. We each have a number of days allotted to us; use them wisely.
Wicke, I’ll miss ya buddy. Shiny side up.
14 years… and counting
Posted on 19 August 2009 | No responses
Today marks 14 years of marriage. Absolutely incredible. It’s hard to imagine it’s really been that long, and yet, it doesn’t seem that long. First, I’m thankful Heather has put up with me all these years. Secondly, I’m so very thankful she said “yes” to begin with, and finally, I’m thankful she took a chance all those year ago while we were still in High School. 14 down, many more to go!
I knew, due to my work schedule and school starting tomorrow, that today would be a difficult day for celebrating. Which is one of the reasons we took a motorcycle ride and had such a nice dinner on Friday. However, we did head out tonight as a family and ate at Chili’s. The food is normally pretty good and tonight was no exception, but what was amazing was the manager. We had mentioned that it was our anniversary tonight and the manager came by and spoke with us. It was a great conversation and he shared with us some wisdom of his 27 years of marriage… “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” Most amazing was when the bill came… he gave us a huge discount on our bill! We were not expecting that. Major props.
Thanks to everyone for the well wishes and thanks to the manager at Chili’s!
Too much for one post, but I’ll try
Posted on 17 August 2009 | 1 response
Meeting Cole
The most important update of them all is the meeting of Cole Ian Wethington. Yesterday, we got to spend some time seeing my brother and his family, including his newest addition Cole. What a beautiful baby boy, and a definite Wethington! Of course, while Cole was the star, Ava had us smiling and laughing the whole time we were there. She is such a joy to be around. And seriously, the curls are way too cute. Everyone is doing well and we never get to see them enough. You can see more pictures HERE.
Along with my brother and his family, we spent lunch with my in-laws. Not only was this an opportunity to pick up the kids, who had spent a week having fun with in Los Angeles and San Diego, but we were able to celebrate Heather’s Dad’s Birthday. He’s now 40 (in Hexidecimal… you do the math). We really didn’t do much other than hear about the weeks adventures and have lunch together, but it was a nice to see family.
Since I seem to be going backwards through time here, I’ll be careful not to mess with the spacetime continuum.
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