Archive for the Blogs Category

I’m “It”

My friend Shannon tagged me and now I’m supposed to share six little known facts about me. Shannon traveled to Siberia with Harry & me in the summer of 1998, so it seems unsuitable to include that trip as one of the facts. For those of you who didn’t know that little tidbit, count yourselves lucky to learn seven.

1) I really like to dance, even though I have quite limited talent and Harry and I haven’t gone out dancing in years. This leaves me to find other opportunities- Harry & Charlie get to watch me do silly dances around the house fairly regularly, my previous co-workers in Seattle used to occasionally be graced with my moves, and I like to work it into cleaning whenever possible. I think someday soon I’m going to take dance classes–either swing &/or ballroom with Harry or modern by myself. Both sound like fun.

2) For as long as I can remember I have loved whales. Dolphins in particular. I wrote almost every “free write” report from junior high through high school about one aspect or another of whales. Sometimes I still can’t believe I didn’t become a biologist. One of my biggest dreams is to swim with wild dolphins and kayak alongside whales. We came close one time in the San Juans, but weather turned the orcas in the opposite direction. I’m not too sad that we’ll have to try again someday. Once it happens, we’ll keep trying!

3) I have run three half marathons and completed a sprint triathlon. When I got pregnant, Harry & I were training for the Seattle to Portland bike ride and I was going to do the Danskin tri again. I really grew to love road biking and can’t wait to go on rides with Harry & Charlie once we get a trailer. I also hope to do another tri next summer. My knees and running haven’t gotten along well lately, so I may have to walk that portion, but I’d be alright with that. I would encourage all women, no matter what shape and age, to give the Danskin triathalon a consideration. It is an incredibly inspirational event. For those wary of all three sports, portions can be divided among teammates.

4) I’m trying to live in a more earth-friendly way these days, though I realize I have a long way to go. Nonetheless, it’s good to be headed in the right direction. I’ve done simple things, like recycling, since childhood (I grew up in Boulder…plus, Seattle’s recycling program is probably the best in the nation). Since our current town doesn’t have curbside recycling for cardboard, we are storing it in our garage until we can take a big load to Eco-cycle. It cracks me up to have a three car garage filled with one car and lots of cardboard. We also use cloth diapers (& often cloth wipes) for Charlie. This has been much easier than I expected and something I’m really happy about. We clean, launder, wash dishes, shower, etc… with non-toxic, non-chlorine, non-petroleum based products. I hope to begin doing grocery shopping and most errands via bike & bike trailer very soon. Harry & I have learned that many green choices are also good for the pocketbook, despite what many people think.

5) I speak Dutch. I used to speak fluently, but it’s been 13 years since I lived in Monnickendam (a small village north of Amsterdam) as an exchange student, and there aren’t too many people to Nederlands spreken with here. I have kept in touch with many friends there so it is high on the list of vacation spots for our family.

6) Harry & I love board games. We have played them our entire marriage and will probably continue to do so until death do us part! We are currently (and have been for years) stuck on Ticket to Ride and Risk.

Off to play a game!

Shan~ Do I need to tag people now or is my “duty” fulfilled? :)

Joyent, TextDrive, and Strongspace Special Pricing Ends January 15

If you’re a business owner and you’ve been looking for web hosting, online storage, and web-based communication and office productivity software, now’s the time to swing down to TextDrive and choose either the Mixed Grill or 3-Martini Lunch plan. These one-time payment, lifetime-guaranteed plans are going bye-bye on January 15, 2007.

$499 and $1,399, respectively, which may sound like a large chunk of change, but when you look at the features and consider that you’re getting everything for the rest of the life of the company, it makes great business sense.

Head over to TextDrive* now and find the link to Specials and select either The Mixed Grill or Three Martini plan.

* The first link to TextDrive is a referral link that will give me some hosting credit if you continue to sign up, should you feel so inclined. :)

No More Links

In the spirit of spring cleanup I’m also removing the “links for [date]” posts from Loveoirs. The old ones will remain but I will not post any new ones—for the time being. If you want to know what I’m bookmarking you can follow along on my Delicious page or you can add the RSS feed to your favorite reader. Cheers!

FeedBurner

I moved our RSS feed to FeedBurner. If you’re following along in a newsreader, please update your feed link to http://feeds.feedburner.com/loveoirs. Cheers!

HarryLove.org

After much weeping and gnashing of teeth, I have separated the sheep from the goats in my very imperfect, non-What-Would-Jesus-Design way. And so, HarryLove.org is now open for public lambasting. Just don’t ask me what it’s for.

A Few New Features

Thanks to the generosity of the WordPress team and some open source plugin developers, this site has some nice, new, shiny features, some visible and some not.

First, thanks to Mark Jaquith at Tempus Fugit you can now subscribe to comments via email using his Subscribe to Comments plugin. If anyone posts a comment after yours, you’ll know.

Next, thanks to Skippy at Skippy.net, you can subscribe to our blog posts via email using his subscribe2 plugin (see also the link in the sidebar) and display your gravatar in our blog comments using his Gravatars plugin (get a gravatar and then leave a comment to see what I mean). And as a backend service for me, I’m using his WP-Cron plugin to send a database backup of this blog to my Gmail account every day.

Next, thanks to Ricardo Galli and his WP-Cache plugin this blog serves a cached version of each page rather than dynamically generating each page from the database with every request. The result is a much faster page load time for you and extra bandwidth savings for me.

Also in the mix is the Related Posts plugin from Alexander Malov and Mike Lu. At the bottom of every post is a short list of (possibly) related posts for your endless reading enjoyment.

Finally, thanks to Ryan Duff at RyanDuff.net and his WPContact-Form plugin, you can now contact us! (See also the link in the sidebar.) The great thing about it is that we don’t have to expose our email to spammers or obfuscate a mailto link (inaccessibly, I might add) with JavaScript. You get what you want and so do we.

WordPress is amazing. Last year I customized an installation of version 1.2 to serve as a simple CMS for my church. Now with version 2.x and all of the new plugins popping up, it’s almost unnecessary to hack WordPress anymore. For the price of a few minutes of searching Google and a few hours of installation and tweaking you can have a professional content publishing system that meets the demands of most small businesses. It’s a very exciting time to be a content producer (and/or to be a web designer).

(Or one who uses parentheses.)