HerdingChaos

I have not been keeping up with my blog. I have only this to offer as an excuse.

I got home from work today at around 7:30pm. After giving me a hug and a kiss Tracy told me: "You know what daddy? I wish daddies didn’t have to work."

Me too.

I have not updated to blog in forever. I have not seen my kids as much as I want to. I have not had too many chances to do any photography. I have not been on my bike since… uhm. wow! I just looked in my log and I have not been on my bike since 4/26. wow.

This stops tonight. Tonight I ride. 

I have not posted in way too long. I have been working way too much. I am however getting ready to take some time off and I am looking forward to that. So maybe I will get some inspiring stories while not enduring death by power point.

In other news, I joined livejournal today. Not to worry my faithful reader! I just pointed them to this blog. I only joined so I could read friends only posts from my friends or something.

Home after traveling for a couple days + 74F and blue skies + convertible + SUM41 turned up two notches past distortion = Airport parking garage to home in 24 minutes.

We seem to have fixed the server problems with some different hardware. So now we need to diagnose the old busted hardware and fix it.

I do plan on catching up on posts. I have quite a few in my head that I just need to sit down and put to bits and bytes.

While getting ready to post this I noticed that as of a couple of days ago, herdingchaos.net is one year old.  

We have had some server problems. They are still around and we plan to swap out some hardware soon. Trying to fix the hardware problems has taken most of my free "computer" time. So I have not had a chance to post a few things. They are queuing up and I plan to catchup soon.

I added a cool weather gizmo to the bottom of the sidebar. I put that in there for you Becky. So you would feel warm when you look outside and see all the snow.

The default header image for this theme did not fit with the title or subject or anything on this blog. It looked nice, but I wanted something that fit more with the subject matter or at least the title of the blog.

I googled around for large images of chaos. I did not find anything I liked. I switched the search term to fractal. Wow. There are some really cool fractal pictures out there. I spent way too long just paging through all the fractals. Then I found phidelity.com. You need to go by and check out this site. I really love the layout and the content. Best of all, it is running open source and everything is covered under creative commons.

I have always been a fan open source and free software. I have committed code to quite a few GPL programs and I always love giving something back. I wish I was as talented an artist as Kris over Phidelity. Check out the sand circles!! Way too cool.

I downloaded the dripples 6 fractal from the picture gallery and modified it a bit. It is now the niffty new header image for the blog. I swear the bathroom looks just like that picture after trying to clean the kids in the bathtub. Well, not exactly… there is more toothpaste and shampoo and just a little more chaos.

I have been looking at all the themes available for wordpress and trying to decide on one. I picked this one. I hope you like it (listen to me go on about someone else liking it… I have a readership of one, and that includes me:P ). I think I will eventually learn more about css and php and work on making one all my own. But for now I really like the work that has been done at wpthemes.info.

I also just turned on the permalinks feature on wordpress. Click on the title of a post to see the results. The URL’s for the post used to just be a post ID going into a script. I like the permalinks much more.

The new blog software appears to be working quite well. I was able to turn back on the comments for all of my posts. Within 2 hours I had around 50 comment spams that had been posted. Wordpress does such a better job with this. There are bulk interfaces for cleaning entries up. And Wordpress detected the spam after a few of them started looking the same, and moved them to a moderation queue. That made it quite easy to dump them before they were even posted. There is supposed to be plugins for spell checking and image posting and other nifty features. I do not have any of those working yet. But I will get them running as I have time.

It has been a few months since I have posted. Since that time we have been blessed with a new baby girl. Her name is Loren and she has been the best baby. I am not sure if we are just getting to be better parents at this point, or if the babies just get more laid back if they have a few older siblings. Loren has been sleeping most of the night since day one. Andrew and Tracy are both really enjoying playing with their little sister. Sometimes too much…

I just got back from traveling for a week. I was away for work and then for a memorial service. It was tough being away from the family for such a long time right after Loren had arrived. I’m glad to be back and I am really looking forward to this weekend.

I am going to try and keep up now that this blog software has pretty much taken care of the comment spam problem. I also would not expect the layout to remain the same. Expect more changes and more posts in the near future.