Categories
life

Running Again

After nine weeks my ankle is healed. I ran two miles a month ago to discover that it had not healed after five weeks. Today I ran four miles at my desired pace without any discomfort. In those nine weeks I’ve done some training on my bike, but I have been aching to get back out running.

Categories
meta technology

All Here

Well, my move from blogger is complete thanks to a WordPress plugin: Import New Blogger To WordPress. It was exceptionally smooth and I have all posts, comments, and categories from blogger. I had recreated all but one category already, but that one got moved as well. Once the plugin had done its work I took the time to move my few pictures over to my site rather than linking to their google-hosted space.

Categories
life meta politics

Citizenship

I am very interested in being an active participant in my community. Currently I am participating with a community group which has yet to name itsself. Members of the group should be getting an email soon from our group leader inviting them to come to my site and vote in the poll on my sidebar in an effort to chose a name for ourselves. I will continue to give some updates on the group activities here, although more details will be available when our group gets a name and a website (pending).

Categories
life meta

New Items

I have added some new pages to my site in the Life section. Actually, they are old pages from previous sites. I have integrated the style for this site with these pages, but I have some legacy markup that is does not meet the XHTML standard. Eventually I will get them to meet that standard, but they look not different to human users so for now, they are up. Go take a look.

Categories
politics

Goodbye Tom

I have been so busy with work lately that I just barely looked at the news for the first time this week. I was disappointed to learn that Tom Vilsack has abandoned his bid for the presidency. Tom was the first candidate to enter the race and the first that I endorsed. His reason for leaving – too much focus on money in the campaigning. With a much lower profile than many of the other candidates, he could not raise enough money to fund the kind of accelerated campaigns we are seeing.

I hope that, if Tom is willing, some candidate will be wise enough to choose him as a running mate. In fact, I think candidates from outside his party would do well to consider him. (I know I’m going out on a limb there, but politics as usual is not helping us.)

Categories
politics

Chris Dodd

I would not consider myself to be as familiar with Chris Dodd as I am with a number of other candidates. That being said, his experience as a public official showed through very quickly as I started learning about him.

While the fiscal conservative in me does not agree with some of his positions, his stated desire for a pay-as-you-go federal budget makes me hope that he would at least raise taxes before spending on unnecessary items. It also makes me hopeful that he would take a good hard look at our federal programs and try to reduce the inefficiencies in our burgeoning government programs.

While his ideology does not align perfectly with mine, Chris is a good candidate and would be a credit to the office of president. I therefore endorse Chris Dodd for President.

Categories
life meta technology

Functionally Complete

As of now I consider my site to be functionally complete. I do not currently anticipate substantial changes to the style or structure of the site. At some point I will post my style in case anyone is interested in using or modifying it for their own site. I would like to acknowledge the people who have provided some of the resources which I have found very useful in this design.

I learned how to do the rounded corner effects with CSS from: Arve Bersvendsen @ virtuelvis.com. Once I understood his code I was able to create the scalloped tab effect for my menu options. Who would have thought that my left-brained self could wax creative like that.

My header image is: “Ripples” by Jeremy Stanley @ www.flickr.com/photos/jpstanley. This image is licensed under a Creative Commons – Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. I was thus able to crop it to fit my header. When I share my theme I will include the cropped version and the original version of the image under that same license. All other parts of my theme will be shared under a simple Creative Commons – Attribution license.

I wanted a cohesive color scheme for my site and I found the Color Palette Generator by Steve DeGraeve @ DeGraeve.com. I used my header image to generate the original palette and then used the color picker to generate further colors from that palette. Steve has many other useful programs available on his site as well.

Categories
life

The Game of Life

Last night I had a very interesting dream about a computer program called “Life” or “The Game of Life.” This was not the one that some people have heard of where cells live or die based on some mathematical rules although it was similar in some ways. To “play” the game I was given a controller which I could configure for 30 to 60 seconds. After that point the game started and ran according to the internal rules without further regard to the status of the controller. In my dream version the game was played out in a virtual house with a lot of very interesting people – they reminded me of the family from You Can’t Take It With You. After wandering the house and observing the characters for half an hour I decided to leave the game.

I went home and learned from my wife that at the time I started the game strange things began happening at home. I soon discovered that this was true as very odd things began happening around our home – for example, we were visted by a virtual character who looked like my best friend. I realized that this game was not as innocent as it had appeared. I was forced to take comfort in the thought, when I attained a state of minimal consciousness in my sleep, that this was all a dream and that when I woke up there would be no intrusions from this so-called game of life.

Finally at 5:45 my wife woke me up so that I could go feed our son, Isaac, for his early feeding. As I got out of bed I noticed that the lights were on downstairs. I assumed that our oldest daughter, Savannah, was having one of her early mornings and was awake downstairs. That’s when things started to get weird on me again. While I was standing on the landing I heard Isaac cry and realized that he was not in his room. He was in the workroom next to his bedroom. I feared that Savannah had taken it upon herself to lift him out of bed and carry him to the next room.

I went downstairs to fix a bottle for Isaac and that is when I discovered that Savannah was not awake – although all the lights were on downstairs. I began to wonder if someone had come into our house. That didn’t make sense considering that nothing was missing, not even any of the computers in the office (where the lights were also on). I finally went back to my bedroom and shook Laura awake to ask if she knew anything about Isaac or the lights. It turns out that she had been awake with Isaac and Savannah during the two or three hours before she woke me up. She had moved Isaac and Savannah had turned on the lights downstairs.

The mystery was solved, but I had been wrong in my dream – the weird occurances had not stopped when I woke up. This really was “the game of life.”

Categories
meta

Going Home

I have finally made the move back to my own domain for my blog. This blog will remain at least as long as it takes to import everything from the new blogger to WordPress. I have no idea how long it will be before that is possible so this may stay for a while. However, I will not be posting here anymore. Recovering Technophile now resides at www.davidjmiller.org.

For any who use a feed reader without visiting my site, here is the new feed.

Categories
meta

Home Again

I have been wanting to move back to my own domain but I have selfishly wanted to wait until my blog, style, and site elements were complete before making the move from a polished blogger site back to WordPress. I opted to make the jump today. I consider my site style to be adequate for the time being but the other site elements are non-existant so far. I will leave my blogger site up as long as necesary – at least until I can import all the posts and comments from blogger to WordPress (if I were on the old blogger I could do that now, but I can’t with the new blogger yet).

Welcome to my new home.