Welcome Back

Jumping right in…

Wrist News

(see Pebble on the Wrist)
It is presumably no surprise that I replaced my Pebble with an Watch pretty much immediately. The biggest thing I miss is being able to swim with the Pebble and have it (sort of) track laps. Having given up this functionality has resulted in giving up swimming as well. This is somewhat compensated by an increase in playing racquetball. 

The other feature I miss is the sleep tracking I’d started using via the Misfit app on the Pebble. Yesterday, I installed Sleep+ to attempt to track sleep with the Watch, but my first impression is that it doesn’t do as good a job. Also, the shorter battery life presents a potential challenge. Time will tell.

Completion of Mac Journey

(see The Long way Home)

Before my long hiatus, I think I may have still had a Windows system at home that got little to no use, a Windows laptop at work, and a Linux server hosting this blog along with a few other services. Since then, the home Windows system has been retired, the Linux system has been supplanted by an old MacBook Air with a broken screen, though the services have mostly been moved to various “clouds” (such as this blog being moved to WordPress.com), and the work Windows laptop went through a couple of years of being relegated to secondary status to my old 17″ MBP (as a BYOD at work) until recently being replaced entirely by a new work-provided 15″ Retina MBP.

Appalachian Trail

My friend Travis is a couple of weeks into a planned through hike of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. It’s over 2000 miles and will take him around five months to complete. In about a month I’ll be joining him for three days of hiking, though no camping, and expect we’ll hike almost 50 miles. I do a reasonable amount of running and walking, so I’m not overly concerned, but the first day is probably going to be a 20-miler, so I figure I ought to do some training. 

I’ve purchased some gear, including a small backpack better suited for this task than any I already had and a set of hiking poles. I’ve never used hiking poles before, so I watched a couple of YouTube videos and took them, the backpack, and a pair of trail shoes (because I definitely needed more shoes) on a trial 6-mile trail hike today. Well, yesterday by the time I post this.  

It took a few minutes for me to work out the rhythm of the poles, but after that, I really liked them, particularly for getting up and down the rocky micro-hills on this trail. I also appreciate that they moderate my typical pace. I’ll probably head back to this trail this weekend and aim for a 10-miler.

Dearth

Thanks to Wayne (@whall) for resurrecting my blog’s DNS entry. Now, who do I see about new content??

Browser ABC’s

I don’t typically jump on board blog meme’s, but every once in a while one hits just the right notes to pull me aboard. I saw this one that  B.E. Earl created and decided to give it a go.

His description is, “you type in a letter in the address box of your browser and mark down the first site that pops up in your browser history.  Could be dangerous, could be boring…let’s find out!”

Yes, let’s! (Note, I am using my personal browser on my work system, which doesn’t actually have all that much history.)

A – Google (accounts.google.com)
B – Blogography
C – Citibank
D – Google (docs.google.com)
E – Evanson Asset Management
F – Facebook
G – Google
H – Huffington Post
I – Instapaper
J – JP Morgan
K – kickingbear (read one article there recently, via a link)
L – LeSombre
M – Google (mail.google.com)
N – Google (news.google.com)
O – Capital One (onlinebanking.capitalone.com)
P – Wellness for Life (pvsso… health benefits related)
Q – Quantshare (was looking for investment tracking software)
R – Renagerie
S – some survey site
T – The Daily Show
U – US Inflation Calculator
V – Vonage
W – The Daily Show (www… probably the site I visit via URL the most)
X – no “top hit”, first hit from history is a site explaining Excel’s XIRR function
Y – Your Roth IRA (information resource, not account management)
Z – no “top hit”, first hit from history is a MtG article on a Zombie deck

Hmm… interesting. Or not. By the time I got to “N”, my expectations had been raised to the point that I expected 1/4 of them to be Google. I may do this again from my home system; I’ll just post anything interesting as a comment here as a whole ‘nother post seems ridiculous. 🙂

The Rumors…

…of my blog’s death were exaggerated. A little bit. Maybe. If anyone actually tried to access it in the last week or so that it’s been offline.

We’ve been having intermittent trouble with our Internet access, but it’s been up most of the time. However, coincident with one of the outages, my Linux server seems to have lost its ability to communicate on the network. I fought with it for a while from a software perspective and pretty much determined that there was a good chance that it was a hardware problem.

Rather than chase the problem further, I’ve decide to simply move everything to my iMac and get rid of the Linux box. Marci wants to get rid of the old Windows box as well, which is probably a good idea as I don’t think it’s even working at present and sits unused. Santa brought Brittney a MacBook Air for Christmas (I don’t know what dirt she has on him; I should grill her about that.), so we now have three Macs. Since Marci pretty much uses her work laptop for everything, that will still leave enough computers for everyone.

Moving the blog over was fairly painless once I realized that my IP address had changed and I needed to get the DNS settings updated. It seems like everything is working pretty well. I have yet to move the other web services over, most notably my photo albums. Since the Linux box has no network access, moving data requires an external drive and I don’t have one large enough (and available) to move all of the images at once. Besides, I already have all of the originals in Aperture on the Mac, so I may just re-export the entire library. Or something.

Texas Independence Day

174 years ago, Texas declared independence from Mexico. If you’re curious about it, I found this to be an interesting read.

Last month marked the 5-year anniversary of my blog and, just like last year, I completely missed it. Anyway, Happy Blogiversary to me! 🙂

(OK, so perhaps not totally unrelated, as they’re both anniversaries.)

Well Hello There!

You don’t have to tell me twice. OK, maybe twice, but that’s all!

Delurk and say “Hi”, won’t you?

A Year in Photos

Today marks the completion of a full year of pictures on Glass Renagerie, my photoblog. What a year it has been. I’m happy to be at the end of it, because it ended up being more stressful than I had expected. From the beginning, I didn’t require myself to actually take a picture each day, so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem coming up with pictures from my archives. However, a quick scan shows that a large majority of the images were taken in 2009:

2000 – 1 (In Rememberance, for 9/11)
2002 – 3 (A few shots from our Hawaii trip of that year)
2006 – 1 (Today’s UT Tower image)
2007 – 11 (Some from my Australia trip and a few others)
2008 – 12 (various)
2009 – 333 (see what I mean?)
2010 – 4 (likewise)

This is probably a significant source of the stress I’ve felt with coming up with an image for each day, so now that I’ve completed a full year, I’m going to back off and just post images there haphazardly. After all, I still have Macro Monday and the new Diptych project.

Here is some more information about the year’s worth of photos. Trusting my tags, which probably aren’t completely consistent, my most popular subjects are:

Flowers – 66
Clouds – 41
Sky – 19
Sunset – 17
Bird – 15
Food – 13
Building – 13
Tree – 11
Waterfall – 11
Water – 10

Just for fun, here’s a clickable montage of the entire set: (due to some technical difficulties combined with having already spent way too much time on this, there may be a few that do not link correctly)

Vegas Trip in Pictures

I actually wrote up part of a trip description, but I just didn’t like it. So I’ve decided to just post a picture summary — which morphed into a Flickr set.

VegasBB Flickr Set

Please Look Right Here…

The studio shots from Avitaween are now available.

Happy Birthday, Hilly!

All hail Queen Snackiepoo! Have a great birthday, Hilly!

To all you citizens of the PRB, go give her some comment love!