CogBlogged from ‘January, 2006’

Finally- something with a “2.0″ on the end that has substance! My first tech task of 2006 has been the upgrade of CDB to WordPress 2.0 the “Duke” release. There should not be any noticable difference from your view, dear reader, as apparently most of the enhancements are under the hood. I avoided the excitement and followed the upgrade instructions to the letter, including making a proper database backup (actually I have scripts that do this nightly, but also did a mySQL dump via PHPmyAdmin as well as made a copy of the database there too); made a backup directory copy of the blog, de-activated all plugins. So far so good, time will tell. Supposedly there may be some performance enhancements as database queries were optimized in the new version, and I am getting used to the new admin interface. The new HTML editor is ok, I usually compose in [...]

flickr foto Rock Rustlin’available on my flickr Using a pickup to pull a boulder out of a hole intended for a tree. Not all of our holiday break time was lounging around the cabin vegetating to DVDs. This is a little sport we call “rock rustling”. You see, our property sits flat, but falls away south of the cabin. We must be very close to the bedrock Coconino Sandstone (the thick white cliffs of the Grand Canyon are the same rock), so that you cannot stick a shovel in the ground without hitting rocks, from baseball sized nuggets to some pretty big honking boulders. So this is a spot where we planned to plant our live Christmas Tree, and sure enough, while digging a nice planting hole, I struck one of the “big ones”, a boulder about 3 feet on the side. Working it loose was work enough, but then [...]

flickr foto Books, Books, Booksavailable on my flickr Where do all the books come from that find their way to a thrift store in Flagstaff? More blogging via flickr… Maybe 1 or 2 readers may recall I’ve been doing all my personal book purchases at thrift stores. Sometimes, staring at a room stuffed full of books available for 25 cents each, how each one represents the intense labor and grand hopes of almost as countless authors. And beyond that, how many authors out there are not represented as they were not “lucky” enough to get their work in dead tree mode? I have unlimited respect for anyone who goes through the arduous taskl of putting their ideas from imagination to paper. They dream big, of making an impact, of affecting others, of sharing ideas that might matter to someone else… hey, it sounds like blogging? But do their dreams include [...]

flickr foto Strawberry Mountain Reflectedavailable on my flickr Another photoblogged thing while I am tossing up a pile of new photos to flickr. I am continually fascinated by the reflections the bright Arizona light creates off of our 1999 VW Beetle. The car is fun to drive, but crikie! all the parts are plastic and it has been a wallet drain with repairs and busted parts. At least it has this redeeming quality of creting interesting reflections, this showing the reflectedview we see to the southeast of our cabin in Strawberry.

flickr foto Tree Lightsavailable on my flickr Another round with a manual and lonig night time exposure. Our Christmas tree is a live Austrian Black pine we will plant after New Years. While on break, I had fun experimenting shooting in full manual mode with the Canon Digital Rebel XT. I forgot how much I enjoyed picking and adjusting exposures, and unlike the old Nikkormat, I could immediately see if I guessed right. At night, I played with long exposures on a tripod of the holiday lights on our cabin. This is our decorated tree sitting on the back deck. Each year we have purchased one of these living pines (a strain that is not susceptible to the bark beetle which has decimated the Ponderosa Pines the last 2 years) that we then plant on our property. These trees are very fast growing; the one we planted 2 1/2 years [...]

flickr foto Who Needs a Dropping Ball?available on my flickr Any little town can have a ball drop for New Year’s Eve… in Flagstaff, Arizona, a giant metal pine cone will fall to usher in 2006. Continuing 2006′s opening blogs in flickr onli… It’s New Year’s Eve. Dropping some ball in Time’s Square is so lame, like so Dick Clark, like so Perry Como, like…. Here in Flagstaff, Arizona, the festivities include the dropping of the metal pine cone outside the historic Weatherford Hotel (see the big news coverage). As you can see we were in town a day early, and actually missed the big drop. But hey, it was rather impressive just to be standing in such a spot where New Year’s would drop in Arizona fashion.

flickr foto Found Numbersavailable on my flickr Here in a men’s room at the Flagstaff Brewery are those pesky bad luck numbers that someone Lost. Shall we play them in the lottery? So there I was, taking care of… mmmm. “business” in the men’s room at the Flagstaff Brewery, when these familiar numbers were there written on a wall plate cover right in front of me, Has someone Lost these numbers? Okay, a good chunk of our holiday time was consumed watching the first season of Lost on DVD. I must shyly admit that I have been addicted to this show from the start, but had missed 2 or 3 crucial episodes. At least my fandom of this show has some good company. The intricate, nested, slowly revealed storylines may get me. The fact that not everything in the plot is as guessable as most other TV. Maybe it was [...]

flickr foto Office With a Viewavailable on my flickr This is where a spent most of the time during the holiday break in Strawberry Arizona. The cubicle next door has a hot tub. The odometer has rolled over 2006 and tomorrow marks the first day back at the office. Since I’m coming off a splendid restful time on break, and I’ve been getting to do more photo action than normal, the first blog sets will be via my flickr pile. So D’Arcy, at your request, this first one is for you, a shot of the hammock view at our place in Strawberry. The little mound in the distance is Strawberry Mountain. I wish I could say I made some reading progress on a pile of novels sitting on my nightstand, but most of my hammock activity involved noises like “zzzzzzzz”. If I could get a job with this office view, [...]