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

I’ve been trying out flickr, the photo sharing storage and site, the last couple of days to see if it would make it easier for me to manage my photos.

Right now, it looks like it will be very helpful and may actually cut out a couple of steps for me.

For whatever reasons, I was reluctant to use flickr in the past. Once it became a part of Yahoo, I was even more reluctant because of an earlier bad web hosting experience with Yahoo.

However, I’ll give flickr a try for a while.

If it works, I’ll be reconsidering how I do my photo-galleries. My photo blog will continue as is.

Comments on “Trying out flickr”

November 1, 2007

teeni @ 9:45 am

I’m sorry you had a bad experience with Yahoo but hopefully your Flickr experience will be better. I’ve been using Flickr and I like it.

I’ve just been browsing through some neat and amazing photos on flikr. I’ve known the photographer for a very, very long time and have seen a few of her images, but haven’t really stopped and took a good look them in quite a while.

The pictures are really, really good.

Makes me quite proud!

You see, she’s my daughter and I think I might be able to learn a thing or two from some of the pictures she’s been taking. Cool!

Sycamore Leaf

Originally uploaded by wanwu

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

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time assembling and publishing historical articles related to Yellowstone National Park. It’s interesting to read first hand accounts of a place I’ve been to quite a few times and will likely visit several times again in the future.

I had heard — or read — anecdotal stories about people cooking fish in some of the hot springs in the park. Today, I came across the following account from the first expedition into the Yellowstone region, the Washburn Expedition of 1870:

Several springs were in the solid rock, within a few feet of the lake-shore. Some of them extended far out underneath the lake; with which, however, they had no connection. The lake water was quite cold, and that of these springs exceedingly hot. They were remarkably clear, and the eye could penetrate a hundred feet into their depths, which to the human vision appeared bottomless. A gentleman was fishing from one of the narrow isthmuses, or shelves of rock, which divided one of these hot springs from the lake, when, in swinging a trout ashore, it accidentally got off the hook and fell into the spring. For a moment it darted about with wonderful rapidity, as if seeking an outlet. Then it came to the top, dead, and literally boiled. It died within a minute of the time it fell into the spring.

The Washburn Yellowstone Expedition, No. 2 by Walter Trumbull; Overland Monthly; June 1871

Comments on “Boiled fish – accidentally”

October 26, 2007

teeni @ 10:06 pm

Poor fish!

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

We’ve been back home for 4 weeks now and I still haven’t gotten around to dealing with all of the photos that I took and finishing my incomplete travel journal. I’ve taken a step back, looked at what I’ve got, and developed a plan — of sorts.

The first thing that I’ve done is lay out the route of our travels on a map.

The next part of this will be to tackle the trip in small bites. For instance, the first part will be the trip from home to Spring Lake Campground outside Halstead, Kansas, with the pictures that I took along the way and in Kansas.

For each part of the trip I’ll publish a travel article on my Haw Creek Out ‘n About blog as well as build a photo gallery on Haw Creek Outdoors.

I’m going to treat this as a project. My hope is that once I’m done with it, I’ll have a model that I can use for future trips — and that I’ll be able to use it while traveling so that it’ll fairly current.

Comments on "What a trip!"

October 26, 2007

teeni @ 10:07 pm

Well, I hope it will be a fun project for you to put together. I’m sure it will be fun for us readers!

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

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger posted a couple of articles related to Googles reranking of a large number of blogs. Apparently it’s been a major topic on a lot of blogs in the last day or so — at least in many the blogs that are making money for their owners.

I’ve never paid much attention to blog or web rankings. I just do what I do and don’t worry too much about stuff like that.

However, I thought that with all of this hubbub over PageRank, I’d check to see where my blogs fell out.

Rowse’s problogger.net has a ranking of 4 today.

This blog has a ranking of 0, but the website has a ranking of 3. My photoblog has a PageRank of 0. All of my other blogs have a 4 and their associated websites have a 3.

I don’t know what it means — but I’m not going to worry about it.

I’ve got some outside stuff I need to be working on.

Comments on “Google PageRank – what’s that?”

October 25, 2007

teeni @ 8:07 pm

I do think these things get more attention than they deserve and people worry too much about them. I’m thinking that “activity” at a site is really what is important, not some rankings that can be influenced by things that shouldn’t matter. Activity could be a combination of comments, hits, subscriptions, etc., because that is what is going to make your site more attractive to advertisers or to make money yourself. That’s just my opinion.

October 26, 2007

Rose @ 11:41 am

A pagerank of 4 is good. Backlinks play a very big role in Google’s pagerank algorithm.

The hike to the bottom of the Tower Creek canyon and the base of Tower Falls in Yellowstone National Park has always been one of our favorite hikes. It’s been a fascinating place for people to visit for many, many years. It was named by the Washburn Yellowstone Expedition in August 1870 and Nathaniel P. Langford described it in The Wonders of the Yellowstone. (I’ve published part of that description at Haw Creek Out n’ About.)

Unfortunately, this year, we were not able to make it to the base of the falls. We had gone most of the way down when we came to a sign that said that the trail was closed. Apparently there had been a slide in 2006 or before and the trail was blocked. We were a little upset about hiking all of that distance only to find that the trail was closed. There should have been a sign at the top saying that it was closed or the trail should have been closed higher up. There are a lot of people who have used the trail over the years and many probably remember it fondly — though climbing back up can be rough, especially if it’s hot, you didn’t bring water, and you’re wearing the wrong kind of shoes.

I send a complaint to the park service about the lack of posting higher up, but, of course, there’s been no response.

That was just part of a day that didn’t go the way we intended which I posted about in Today sure didn’t go as planned, and I didn’t get some of the photos I thought I had — but that’s okay!

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

I had always assumed the Old Faithful got it’s name because it was faithful in it’s eruptions over a long period of time. Not so. If you’re interested, I’ve published a small narrative by one of the men involved in naming the geyser. It’s over at my Haw Creek Out ‘n About blog.

Comments on “Yellowstone and how “Old Faithful” was named.” »

October 23, 2007

teeni @ 11:19 pm

Well, of course I’m interested. Going to read the narrative now! **grabs coat and rushes off to Haw Creek Out ‘n’ About**

October 26, 2007

Rose @ 11:42 am

I’ll be sure to drop by and have a read.

Several years ago — OK, it was a long, long time ago — I was attending college as a non-traditional student, finishing up my degree while working full-time. George Herbert Walker Bush was the president of the United States and Al Gore was a United Sates Senator who hadn’t invented the internet yet.

One of the classes I was in was a college algebra class. It was the first college class that I had ever had that required a calculator — the only calculator I had used in high school had been a slide rule.

The airhead I was sitting behind was having difficulty getting the answers and kept asking the professor questions about how to do the calculations for the problems on the black board.

Exasperated, the professor finally asked, “What kind of calculator do you have? It’s supposed to be a scientific calculator.”

The airhead replied, “Well, of course it’s scientific — it’s a solar calculator!”

Funny Monday

This time last year I had pretty much settled with myself when I was going to retire — and I wasn’t keeping it a secret!

There was some question about waiting to see what would happen with the so-called alignment that no one seemed to know much of anything about –other than that those who wanted a job would have a job. There was talk that some people would get some sort of severance package.

“Don’t you want to wait around for the package? ” I was asked more than once.

The answer to that was easy. “No.”

If I had thought that there was a chance I would get one, it might have been different. However, in almost every other situation where packages had been offered in the past — whether it was called it reduction-in-workforce, down-sizing, right-sizing, or some other kind of sizing — the group I was in had only gotten offered packages once or twice. Even then, it had been a very limited offering to only a couple of people out of a hundred or so.

Back then that was great for me, because I wasn’t close enough to retirement that it was feasible for me to take a package. With so few offered, it represented job security for the rest of us.

So was retiring the right choice — rather than waiting to see if there would be a package offered?

Yes!

The alignment process was very secretive and took much, much longer than advertised.

If I had stayed thinking that I would know something in the next month or two, I would have been disappointed. I essentially left work on January 15 when I went on vacation. I wouldn’t have found out about my job until October, nine months later.

And then, it looks like I was right about the severance packages. None were offered to the group I was in.

Perhaps if those of us who retired earlier this year had stayed, then there might have been packages. If there were, chances are that they would have been offered to someone else and I’d still have a job.

I didn’t want a job.

Since the odds weren’t very good in my favor, I retired.