A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; June 2011

One of the nice things about being retired is that we can generally be flexible about doing things. This time last week, we had no definite plans for much of anything between now and the end of the year, other than one last camping trip before the temperature gets too low — and doing something for Thanksgiving and Christmas, of course.

Since then, we’ve had a few things plugged into the calendar.

Our camping trip is this weekend… pretty firm. Temperatures are to be in the 60s during the day and dip down into the low 40s at night. We’ll get a couple of hikes in as it’s supposed to be dry.

We’re buying a “family” Christmas present this year for our youngest daughter and her family. They moved to Wisconsin earlier this year and we decided this week that we’re going to hand deliver the present — but we will be returning home for Christmas. We’ll probably start heading home on the 23rd.

Our oldest daughter will be here for Thanksgiving, but not sure how long as her boyfriend’s father passed away a couple of months ago and they’ll probably want to spend more time with his mom, which is understandable. They won’t be here late as the store she works at in Ft. Smith will be opening at 4 AM the day after Thanksgiving.

Then yesterday, our youngest daughter called to let us know that they would be visiting her husband’s family in NW Arkansas for Thanksgiving and wondered if we wanted to come up there that weekend. So we’ll have the opportunity to see the grand kids — and our daughter and son-in-law — this month and again next month. Our oldest daughter will be going up on Saturday as well. She hasn’t seen her sister since January.

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We have a family space on MyFamily.com where we share news and photos and sometimes just chat and gossip. We’re approaching the memory limit on the photos. Yesterday and today I spent a good deal of time archiving all of the photos that are on there. I downloaded 1,185 photos. My right wrist is a bit sore from all of the repetitive motions.

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I’ll be posting photos and information to flikr and my Haw Creek Out ‘n About blog during this weekend camping trip. We’re going to Petit Jean State Park. It will provide a good opportunity to see if I can post photos and travel journal material in a more timely manner than I did during our August and September trip out west.

Comments

November 15, 2007

Opal Tribble @ 1:01 pm

You are one busy man! It will be a lot of fun hanging out with family. I’m looking forward to next week when I’ll be away in South Carolina.

A family website was created several years ago but no one really participated besides myself and a few others. I would have liked to tackle the project myself. Hmm, I guess I can still do that, right? It would be a great place to load pictures, perhaps create a blog for my family. I know a few of them actually read my website although they rarely comment.

Opal Tribble @ 1:02 pm

I forgot to say I hope you and your family have a safe and wonderful holiday!

November 16, 2007

teeni @ 12:14 am

You are just a social butterfly now. But that is nice – your company is always in demand!

A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; June 2011

I’ve progressed through the first two days of our August and September trip and have journal pages published for them. I’ve incorporated images in a couple of different ways into them. It’s been an interesting experiment.

The first page is for August 13th, traveling from Arkansas to near Wichita, Kansas. The second one is for the day we spent in Kansas and is titled “Hot, Hot, Hot, & “Got change for $100?” runaround.” Had I known how hot it was going to be there, I think we would have opted for just one night at that campground. Both of these are published at Haw Creek Out ‘n About.

They are also tied to my Place and Images pages.

I think that with what I’ve done so far that I’ll be able to have quicker turn around on the Travel Journal on our next trip. The trip that I am working on right now was 7 weeks in length. If I get all of the material for this complete by the end of the year, then I’ll have a workable process.

Of course, I don’t know when our next trip will be. There’s a rumor that I’m going to be going back to work as a contractor around the beginning of the year. No one has talked to me officially about it, so who knows.

A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; June 2011

A blog article by Rose DesRochers about a toy recall reminded me about something Karen related to me earlier today.

Comments

November 10, 2007

Opal Tribble @ 2:40 am

I heard about that through visiting some of my blog buddies. Ecstasy was in it. That stuff started gaining popularity when I used to go out dancing. I remember being approached by a few people who thought I sold it because I used to carry this cute little purse/backpack.

One of the young ladies reply when she found I did not sell it was “Well why do you have that tiny backpack?” Well I do need a place to put my keys, Id, etc., I thought that was an odd reply, lol. I carried a backpack so I did not have to hold it in my hands. I love dancing so I was always out on the floor dancing.

I imagine there will be a lot of unhappy children this Christmas if they had their heart set on those toys.

November 12, 2007

Rose @ 9:41 pm

This is another one of those things that’s been keeping me busy in retirement. The shop is on the lower floor. The upper floor will mostly be used for storage. We used to have a storage shed on the spot that the shop now sits on.

The side in the picture is the only one with siding on it right now. Tomorrow the platforms come down, the bolt holes get filled with dowels and I start working on another side.

I just read the following disclaimer on a website that had screenplays for a fair number of movies:

DISCLAIMER:
All material published here was copied off the net, and therefore the curators are not liable to any copyright infringements or anything like that. Virtually all can be just links to somewhere off the internet.

It doesn’t matter where the material is obtained from. If you publish copyrighted material, it’s infringement unless you have permission from the copyright owner or it’s published under the fair use provisions of copyright law.

The idea that “I found it on the internet so it must be OK to use since someone else already put it there” is just plain wrong. It’s a myth that publishing something on the internet changes the copyright rules. All the internet does is make it easier to break the rules.

One of the exclusive rights of authors — or whoever else owns the copyright — is to distribute copies to the public… by whatever means. Publishing copyrighted material on line is an infringement of this exclusive right.

More copyright related information is available at Copy Right, Copy Sense.

A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; June 2011

Day before yesterday, we went to Woolly Hollow State Park, which is north of Conway, Arkansas, for a hike.

We had never been there before and my intent was to use the visit as the focus for a new approach to presenting travel related images and information on-line. I didn’t have a firm concept of what I wanted it to be at that point. I just knew that I needed something different. What I had just wasn’t working.

My old approach was to have a web page for each place that we had visited, with a few photos on it, and another page set up as a photo gallery index with each photo having it’s own web page and site navigation. Every one of the pages had advertising on it, of course. Though I had built some templates to streamline the process, it was still quite a bit of work. For the Woolly Hollow material there would have been a content page, a photo gallery index page, and 24 photo pages.

With the new approach, there is only one page. Space for content, photo gallery, and advertising is provided, with links to the individual images on flikr and a link to the flikr slide show for the “set” of photos. Over the last couple of days, I edited the photos that I wanted to use for the Woolly Hollow page and uploaded them to flikr and developed a new web layout I’m calling “Places and Images.”

With this, I should be able to publish new material a lot sooner after I’ve shot the images for whatever location we’ve visited. Of course, I’ve lot a pretty good backlog of material from places we visited this year, but this new approach should also be very, very helpful for that.

My whole concept for this is to publish “photos from places we’ve visited combined with relevant information and links.”

Now to catch up on some other stuff that have been neglected over the last several days……

Comments

November 7, 2007

Opal Tribble @ 2:45 am

I really like that!

Perhaps you might want to add a few affiliate buttons related to travel in a sense they are just like Google Adsense you select the type of program/button you want and just place it on your page at the moment I’m averaging a few sales per day. It’s outperforming adsense. I have found on some of my pages they compete with Adsense the beauty is I keep making money from the same person each time they buy at the store. My highest is 180 days.

November 8, 2007

Melanie Goad @ 10:59 am

I really like the format. A very informative page.

November 9, 2007

Mike Goad @ 1:26 am

A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; June 2011

Dan Rinnert writes, in The Inner Map to Paradise Found, about (1) having the right attitude, (2) recognizing that you have choices, and (3) planning for the future.

It’s an excellent article.

It’s all too easy to not recognize that your life is a result of choices that you’ve made. Most people also don’t understand that their attitude is a choice. Unfortunately, too many people don’t plan for the future and end up having to work in the years where they could be taking it easy.

Comments on “Choices – Attitude – Planning”

November 4, 2007

teeni @ 11:04 am

I would also like to add that our government isn’t helping in that area in that people now have to work longer to retire at full benefits through no fault of their own. That kinda stinks too. But yes, I agree that having the right attitude helps in almost all of life’s circumstances and we can choose to have a good attitude.

November 6, 2007

Opal Tribble @ 6:34 am

This is a good point Mike and I agree. I do believe if you plan wisely then you won’t have to be dependent on the government. In my preparations I did not look for my job or the government to help me out when I retire. I thought How can I support myself on my own without assistance.

I know of one woman that had to come out of retirement because she did not plan wisely. She did not make a lot of money but simple things like buying lunches when she could have made them ate up her money tiny chunks at a time. The money she used on lunches could have gone into wise investments. She could have put in tiny chunks at a time.

I started investing even back in the day when I was making less than $9 per hour.

A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; July 2011

I’ve taken a lot of pictures this year. Having a good digital SLR makes it so very easy — almost too easy.

Unfortunately, it has also caused a few problems. I ran out of room on my 80 gigabyte hard drive. I’ve been spending a lot of time working with the images in my photo editor. Some of my better images were lost when I was copying files over to DVD.

While I’ve got a long ways to go, I’m starting to get a handle on it.

For yesterday’s image on my photo blog I reached back to one of my earlier images from this year — taken at Bona Dea Trails, a Corps of Engineer park not too far away from here, on February 4th.

I plan to integrate some new photos in the photo blog with some of those taken earlier this year, or even those from other years, possibly even some that were taken with my old film camera.

Comments

November 2, 2007

teeni @ 9:51 am

I’m glad you have a good camera because I love looking at your photos. That stinks about running out of space though. Your “reflection” photo is really pretty. It was hard for me to tell where the real plant ended and the reflection began, even when I blew the picture up to size. Lovely.

November 6, 2007

Opal Tribble @ 6:36 am

I would invest in an external hard drive. That’s what I did for my photos and video editing in doing so I’m not slowing down the the other operations since it has it’s own dedicated drive although to be honest I didn’t notice it too much before but I do like having them all in one location.

A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; June 2011

Sunset over the Black Hills

 

The problem looks like it’s with the visual editor. Whenever an existing post is opened, the WordPress visual editor apparently tries to clean up some of the messy code. Unfortunately, some of that code is what was providing the layout that I had selected in flikr.

Flikr provides the bare-bones post, but it doesn’t select the categories or add links — the kind of things I like to include in my posts. However, it does give a layout for photos in the blog that I like,

So I guess for a while I’ll be going back to just using the code editor, at least for a while.

And it worked!

The picture and it’s captions are still where they belong, on the top of the page and on the right. (Except I moved it to the other side to see if I could!)

Now that I’ve got that figured out, I can do some other tweaking.

It also explains some of the difficulties I’ve been having with editing my Daily Chronicles of the American Civil War blog.

I guess the visual editor is great if you want just simple editing. At least it’s not as bad as the one that they forced us to use for editing web pages back where I used to work. That one was painful, especially when someone else went in it to edit it and lost everything.

Now that that’s done, I can move on to other stuff

Comments on “Well, I think that I’ve got my issue with flikr figured out”

November 2, 2007

teeni @ 9:52 am

Oh, I’m glad you figured that out. I have found some of those issues with the free WordPress as well. Some things that don’t work in the visual editor DO in the code editor but I’m not sure they want us to know that. LOL.

November 6, 2007

Opal Tribble @ 6:39 am

I’m not sure if I told you but I’m a history buff and am especially fond of civil war history. I really love the changes you made. It looks very good.

I mainly use code editor in Word Press visual editor in my opinion has it’s limitations especially if you want to do more. I usually do, lol.
Excellent work you’ve done at the Civil War website. Congrats!

Opal Tribble @ 6:41 am

Oh by the way I’m adding that blog as a history resource on my homeschooling website. There is a lot of excellent info on your website! My daughter and I will be stopping by later this week for a short lesson.