Married In Ohio

I knew that it was only a matter of time; but whoever writes the spam robots had finally adapted to the anti-spam measures that I was using on the shoutbox. The funny thing is that I don’t allow URLs in shouts so there’s really no purpose. That’s the problem with spam. It causes aggravation for everyone even when the spammers are getting nothing out of it.

I know that there are online services that block spam; but I’ve never been comfortable sending comments and shouts that people have left for us off to a “big computer in the sky” to be checked. Maybe they delete them after they’ve been analyzed; but they’ve got to make a profit somehow so they must be doing something with all of the data they collect.

This site doesn’t have a written privacy policy; but, if it did, it would be simple. We don’t share information what we have with anyone. We don’t post the text of any emails that we receive (even if they are interesting). And we don’t reveal IP addresses. We do this for fun and would like for people to respect our privacy and anonymity. So we do our best to respect theirs.

I spent MUCH longer than expected upgrading to WordPress 2.6 so our Two For Tuesday post will not be available until sometime on Wednesday. California Girl and I really enjoy blogging; but the technical details can be a PIA sometimes. If you see anything broken, especially with comments or the shourbox, please let me know.

I helped The Boy set up his first web site today. I recommended that he use a content management system like WordPress or phpBB; but he insisted on doing it in hand crafted HNTL. I looks “primitive” compared to what you get with sophisticated CMS software, and the colors are kind of garish; but its 100% his. From checking the logs, it looks like he’s the only one who has accessed it; but it seemed like an appropriate supplementary birthday present. What better present for someone who enjoys doing things on the computer than their very own home on the web.

And, speaking of technology, I got a new gigabit switch to upgrade our home network. It’s not very exciting technology; but I was still waiting anxiously for the package truck.

California Girl’s watch died over the weekend. I’m almost certain that it’s the battery which is a nuisance since it has to be special ordered directly from Seiko. I’d like to get her a nice new watch; but, since we have his and hers watches, I’ll probably just get another battery. It was supposed to last 5 years; but, both this one and the original one lasted for less than half of that. If we had known beforehand that a replacement battery would be so hard to find, we would have never purchased the set. Unlike hers, my watch is still running on the original battery.

We like to have matching stuff. It’s kind of a trademark of ours. We don’t overdo it; but we do like jewelry and other accessories that remind us of each other. For example, we always have coordinating costumes at Halloween. If anyone has suggestions for a nice coordinated set of his and hers watches we’d love to hear them. We don’t want to spend too much money; but we’d really like a matched pair. After the “fun” we have had with batteries, we’re thinking that we would like to have automatic (self-winding) movements. And, or course enough water resistance so that we can swim in them. (It gives us a funny tan, so we don’t usually wear them in the pool; but, sometimes we do need to know the time). The only thing I can say is our next set of watches will not be Seikos.

Other than the battery being such an annoyance, we really like the watches. They keep very accurate time and are perpetual calendar models so we only have to adjust them when changing to or from daylight savings time. Even though they only display the date, they “know” what month and year it is and adjust the date accordingly. It’s a good idea; but poor execution. I guess the same could be said about many things.

We’ve got clocks all over the house; and we’ve always got our cell phones with us; so we don’t really need a watch to know the time; but it’s a touch of elegance that we like share. I’ve always thought that timepieces were symbolic of relationships. Hopefully we’ll be able to find something that is a suitable remembrance of ours.

After twenty consecutive weeks of six and seven day work weeks, I finally had a three day weekend. I really enjoy my Christmas and Independence Day vacations but five months is a long time to go without a break; especially since I worked so many weekends. My telephone did not ring and I did not even turn on my laptop. It was bliss. I just caught up on mundane chores and generally “decompressed”.

If you have a blog that I frequent regularly, I apologize for not visiting this weekend. I had planned to visit everyone on Sunday or Monday; but was too busy relaxing. Every year, it seems like Memorial Day Weekend takes longer and longer to arrive. I’m already paying for my three-day weekend at work; but it was worth it. I must admit that I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time playing computer games on our new widescreen monitor. The wider display made some older games seem new again.

If possible, I have also developed even more distaste for spammers. On Saturday I inadvertently deactivated the spam filter for comments. In a matter of minutes, the moderation queue was overflowing. It’s a nuisance for real people, but the CAPCHA (code words) stops thousands of bogus comments on every post. I wish they would go away. Their advertisements never show up. They are just a waste of bandwidth and processing time.

P.S. California Girl is taking The Boy to a pre-graduation event. We plan to have our photo session when she returns.

We’re finally moving into the 21^st century and getting an LCD monitor. We’ve been using the same CRT for five years. That’s one of the reasons that the colors of our photographs may seem a bit “off” to some of you. Even though most computers these days have LCDs we’ve been do all of the editing on an old CRT. I don’t blog from work, so I seldom view our blog on and LCD. When I have had the opportunity, the difference in the appearance of our photographs has been very noticeable. It should be delivered early next week so the pictures from our next photo session should look a bit different/better.

California Girl and I are really looking forward to reclaiming our lost desk space. It’s really shrunk over the years as we got bigger and bigger monitors. Our first computer had a 13-inch monochrome monitor which was considered oversized since many computers in those days were only had 12-inche monitors! Nowadays, something that size would considered small even for a laptop.

The kids have had a flat screen LCD for years, so we’re finally “catching up” to them. Until their last computer, they’ve had a lot of hand me down processors; but, they’ve always had newer monitors and good video cards. They can get by with a slower system; but they spend so much time online researching and typing homework that California Girl and I always felt that a good monitor and keyboard was important; especially since they still have good vision. No, we’re finally taking our own advice.

Question: Does anyone else still have/use CRTs or are we the last dinosaurs?
For the non-technical, LCDs are the thin flat panel displays that you see sold with new computers and CRTs are the big boxy things resemble old-style TVs.

Update: The monitor has arrived and it is sweet. Photographs look great on it.

Several people have asked how to play the videos. We don’t use an embedded player since we need to conserve bandwidth and media player always downloads WMVs whether or not the play button was pressed. To play a video, click on the smallish photograph that follows the post in which the video is mentioned. Our movies are usually 320×240 so look for a picture of that size. I probably should put a frame around them or something; so it’s more obvious that it’s a link to a video. I rather find something similar to the Flash players that works with WMVs. IF anybody know of anything please let me know. BTW: I have considered just switching to Flash video; but the convenience is not worth the larger file size (and the corresponding increase in bandwidth.)

P.S. For a variety of reasons, we are not comfortable with external hosting solutions.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a good M4P to MP3 converter? Good as in free. I’ve been looking for two days. The Girl wants to use some songs I purchased as ringtones on her mobile phone; but it only uses MP3s. This hasn’t been a problem until recently. We used to buy WMAs which were easily converted into other formats using the tools available at the time. But the program I have been using to convert M4Ps to M4As (and then to MP3s) after we switched to iTunes doesn’t work with our latest music purchases and I can’t find an update or another similar program. I guess I could burn them to CD and then re-encode them; but I’d like to find an easier way. I know there are tools which streamline the process using virtual CD-R drives, etc. but I’ve tried two of them so far and neither has been able to encode more than a few seconds of audio. It shouldn’t be so difficult to use legally purchased music. Being legit is way harder than it need to be.

I did some more tinkering underneath the covers to the website this weekend. It should have resulted in a slight increase in speed for you and a small bandwidth savings for me. That’s one of the fun parts about hosting your own blog. You can try things out and not worry about needing technical assistance from a M-F 8-5 support organization on a weekend. I hate waiting for “technical support” to return my emails. Right now, I’m waiting to hear from several people for simple administrative tasks regarding products I’ve purchased. It will take them minutes once they get to my request; but who knows when that will be. So, I really enjoy being able to do everything myself. It can be a nuisance to do upgrades; but otherwise it’s quite nice doing things on my own schedule.

Please let me know if the blog seems faster (or at least not slower). My informal speed tests say that pages load 10 -15% faster and are up to 25% smaller. Not a big deal; but every bit helps. Now if only I could find a way to post a full size, full length movie.

I updated the shoutbox so that comments that are moderated are shown to the original author. That should make it more user friendly and, hopefully, won’t confuse people as much as its previous behavior. It’s a shame that it has to be moderated; but I can’t think of a better mechanism to keep it from being overrun by spambots. Send us a shout if you want to check it out.