Posts Tagged Meta

Rebooting the Blog

The blog has been out of action for about 10 months or so, give or take a post or two.  Competing in IFComp 2010 took an enormous amount of effort, and I burned out hard after the competition was over.  I let pretty much all of my creative activities drop, and am just starting to put the pieces back together.  This blog was the last piece of creative expression to go and will be the first to come back, but I’m going to pace myself this time.  I’ll start with a post a week, and if I can sustain that I’ll try to move back to two or more posts if I have sufficient content and time to write.

It’s not that I lack for material — far from it!  A lot of things have happened in the intervening time.  We’ve had wild and wooly changes with Katherine’s autism — most notably, she now has diagnoses for autism and Tourette’s Syndrome, and is on medication to help with the severe tics she has as well as the anxiety those tics create.

I’ve read tons of good books, seen a lot of good (and bad) movies, and have played some of the most cinematic, richly-produced, narratively advanced PC and console games I’ve ever seen, all of which I’d like to discuss and review at more length as the weeks go by.

On the personal front, I injured my knee (again) and recovered, got back playing racquetball regularly, and started lifting weights, which puts me in probably the best overall physical shape I’ve been in for years.  The kids continue to grow and develop.  Thomas continues doing well in school and competing in various sports (flag football is the newest addition).  Jonathan has developed into a little charmer, talking constantly and grinning at you with his winning smile — at least when he’s not throwing a full-bore terrible twos tantrum.  Robin continues to do the impossible on a daily basis, keeping the kids and Katherine’s staff organized and productive.  When Jonathan goes to school and she’s ready to work, she should be able to step right into a CEO or COO position without blinking an eye.

And, of course, when October rolls around, it’s going to be IFComp season once again.  I don’t have a game in the Comp this year, but that means I can write reviews while it’s in progress, and I’m planning to cover every entry this year.  I can’t wait to see what returning veterans and new authors alike have for us this year!

Finally, I’ve also linked the blog to Facebook, to provide folks that prefer social networking an easier portal to see content here.  I hope it works properly — let me know if something seems messed up.  So watch this space in the coming weeks for more updates.  We’ve got a lot of catching up to do!

Tags: , , , ,

Slow Update Frequency

I’ll probably be dropping down to one post per week until the end of September.  There are a couple of different reasons for this, but the main one is that I’m trying to finish up my entry for IFComp 2010.  There’s a lot of work left to do, and I’m really needing to use as much of my time as possible on this to ensure it’s a top-quality entry this year.

Once that’s been released I’ll try to pick the pace back up again.

Tags:

Here Goes Nothing

WordPress 3.0 has been out long enough that I’m feeling guardedly optimistic that all the major upgrade issues have been found. So I’m going to upgrade immediately after posting this!

With luck, you won’t notice any differences. I’ll edit this post with my impressions of the new upgrade…

… and yeah, no visible differences in the theme (as it should be) and really not that much different on the admin pages either.  The upgrade was clean and fast; another good rollout by the WP team.

Tags: ,

(Short) Hiatus

Sorry for the lack of updates this week.  We’re leaving town for Memorial Day, so I probably won’t post again until next Wednesday.  I actually have quite a lot to report, including Thomas’ birthday to our air conditioner woes and Katherine’s adventures in “cooking”, but I need to get the pictures downloaded first, and get my life back under control.

Have a good weekend!

Tags: ,

Lost Domain

Due to a SNAFU with Namecheap, I lost my domain for a day.  Combined with a power outage due to a storm here, we were left with no webpage, and when I got the computer back up, still no webpage and no mail forwarding.  So I quickly re-upped the registration and got everything set up, but I had lost the post I’d sent to my email account.  I should be able to retrieve it tomorrow.

Tags: ,

It Seems I’m Actually A Woman…

I had not come across this before, but there is an online analyzer for prose that purports to determine if the author is male or female, apparently by counting the frequency of certain keywords in your text.

So I scraped the front page of my blog and fed it into the analyzer.  Although the count was close, my “female count” was about 10% higher than my “male count”, so their algorithm guesses that I am female.

As a control, I also fed in the only actual female-authored text on the site, the post I Want Glue Teeth, which was written by Robin.

I’d love to be able to report that it thought she was a man, but actually the female/male ratio on that article was about 2:1, so at least Robin is more of a woman than I am, which is as it should be.

Oops!  Gotta go!  Gloria Steinem is guesting on Oprah today!

Tags: , ,

Work Overload

No update today! Catch you on Wednesday!

Tags: ,

Posting Schedule Change

clock_screen01[1]With Jonathan’s arrival and the attendant extra work (and reduced sleep) I think I’m going to once again change the posting schedule of this blog, so as not to have to generate filler posts just to say I posted something.

I’ll be posting Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from here on out.  That should be a more feasible schedule and I should be able to come up with more substantial posts.

Tags:

Post Cop-Out Today

lazy-cat5[1]Sorry, nothing of much note to report.  I’m rust-stripping the eaves at home; that’s about it.  I’ll upload some more pictures for tomorrow.

Tags:

Happy Labor Day!

p_31413_41230P_023_ferretMy no-weekend post policy will now officially apply to holidays as well.  Enjoy the extra day off!

Tags:

The Quern is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache