Personal Blog

Blame it on the holidays. Blame it on my new grandson (almost 2 months old). Blame it on laziness.

I. HAVE. NOT. BEEN. BLOGGING.

Oh, for shame, for shame.

Nope, I won’t be making any New Year’s Resolutions. Those usually end up being unrealistic and unattainable for me.

But what will I do in 2012? What will I do? What have I done in 2011 that needs to be continued or curtailed?

Well, I have 3 exceptionally nice clients that I need to pay more attention to. Maybe I can find a few more who are as nice and cooperative as these three.

Just a few days ago, my oldest daughter, Angel contacted me via FaceTime.  This delights me because now my kids are teaching ME about computers and computer related things.  After this initial use of FaceTime on my iPhone, I was able to figure out how to use it on my iMac also and ended up contacting my other two kids and my good friend, Jeff.

In November, my son, Chris presented me with my first grandson who has my last name. Of course, he had a bit of help from his sweet wife, Sunnie. Chris is becoming an Apple afficionado. He now had an iMac and an iPhone. As a matter of fact, all my kids, have multiple Apple products. I will modestly take credit for putting the ideas into their heads about how Apple is the best of breed in the world of computers.

My grandson, Thomas will be passing through some very endearing stages as he approaches his first birthday, on November 9th, 2012 just three days beyond my own numerically impressive birthday on November 6th, 2012. I plan to spend just as much time with him as he, his parents, and my wife will allow. I have changed ONE diaper so far. Guess that will have to change if I’m going to be a good grampa. By the way, he calls me PePaw but he doesn’t know it yet. That nickname came from my first grandchild, Lindsay who is now a young lady of 17. It was inherited by my other grandson, Adam (Addo), a brand new teenager in December 2011.

My daughter, Deana, and I are participating in the Medifast program. (My friend, Jeff is also in the program and doing well.) Deana is doing it primarily doing it to lose weight while my primary goal is to get a consistent and frequent source of healthy foods to help me control my blood sugar numbers. Deana continues to be heavily involved in the Guide Dogs for the Blind program.

And my wife, Glenna, long suffering, loving, and patient partner for many years (our first date was on New Years Eve, 1960 and we were married on March 3rd, 1961) continues to multitask between quilting, housework, caring for Thomas, and playing with our new Playstation 3 (Ratchet and Clank is her favorite game at the moment.) She continues to thank me daily for rescuing her from a life in San Angelo, Texas…or she should.

My friend, Jan Triplett and I host a monthly blogging meetup called Bloggers United Network. We meet for two hours. The first hour is devoted to chatting and Q&A  and the second hour is devoted to quietly creating a least one post on an existing blog site.

I propose to lend assistance to anyone who wants to learn how to blog. The price of that assistance will be directly proportional to the amount of assistance needed and the intent of the resulting blogs.

I intend to learn a WHOLE lot more about WordPress and the particularly spectacular framework called Genesis. This is turning out to be a very rewarding but slow process for me since there is no good book about Genesis and the current blogs, although well thought out and helpful, are beyond my current level of programming. (My favorite source of written material is Bill Erickson. My favorite source of Genesis go-to advise is Jeff Bernier.) So, I will learn and teach as much Genesis as is comfortable. BTW, THIS blog is not done using Genesis. I’m using a neat theme called

I see that I have not dealt with the things I should not.  I remember something that my AA sponsor told me in 1980. He said, “Lindsey, don’t should on yourself.” So I try not to do that anymore. One day at a time. Easy does it. So this is day one of 2012. I’m blogging. And I will blog MORE.  I’ll visit with Thomas today. I’m on Medifast meal 2 of the day. I’m preparing to cook 2 meals for Glenna and me. I’ve drunk 16 ounces of water. I will work on a couple of websites. I plan on planning more and will start today. I will play a little World of Warcraft. I’ll kibitz Glenna as she plays Ratchet and Clank. I’ll take a nap. I’ll read some in my current fiction book, Doc by Mary Doria Russell. Then somewhere around 10pm I’ll turn in knowing that I’ve had another good day in a long series of about 26,000 days.

Happy New Year!

While heading into Denny’s for breakfast a few days ago, I saw these two signs. First time that I had seen such a sight.

That started me thinking.  I spend a lot of my time in the computer world and am somewhat aware of the comings and goings of hardware, software and techniques but like our dear President, I am blissfully unaware of the price of commodities such as a gallon of milk or a jug of electricity.


About a hundred years ago, we may have moseyed up to a saloon or boarding house and seen the analog of this modern day fueling station. And it may have looked like this picture.

This is always (or should be) a question you ask yourself every time you create a post or page on your website.  I just realized that I had not been consistently pursuing that task. So, I sat down this morning and created a few Google Analytic accounts.  You can see my discussion of this at http://www.exploringnewmedia.com/whos-that-knocking-at-my-door-find-out-with-google-analytics/.

I know, I know. That is a long URL.  Not too bad here since you can click on the link and be magically whisked away to that site but if you have to enter it on your smartphone or tablet using clumsy fingers like mine, it’s not so much fun.

My friend Jeff and I frequently pass URLs back and forth using Adium, our Macintosh IM program but we haven’t yet discovered a convenient way of doing that to or between mobile devices. Share with me if you have a good way of doing that.

Since my last post, Thomas has been christened and visited the photographers.  Here are some pix for the former event.

I see that I have not written about Thomas for a couple of days. I have visited him and held him closely during those days but he has not been doing anything interesting. Just the normal things babies do – crying, dozing, eating, pooping, crying, burping, smiling(? or was that gas ?) so I felt reasonably certain that you would not want to hear about it.

But today, my grandson joined the human race. His parents took him out to meet Santa. And from the look on both their faces, it appears to have been a success. Obviously, Thomas’s parents have not warned him about strange, old men. After all, he still tolerates me.

His Grandmother Allen has been decorating today in the hopes that Thomas will somehow focus his eyes on the pretty lights and shiny baubles on our teeny Christmas tree.

His parents are going to a Christmas party tonight and I fully expect that Thomas will be roosting upon his Grandfather Allen’s chest for most of the time that they are absent.

I created this website using WordPress. I am styling it using the Genesis Framework, which is really a super, but complex application for creating and modifying your theme, or the overall look and functionality of the website.

As it came from Studiopress, it was pretty bland – black text on a white background, and no bells and whistles.  I intend to gradually change its looks and discuss what I did.

Today, I’ve decided that I want to make the background black. Perhaps, someday I’ll put a graphic behind the content but for today, I’m just going to change the colors of the background.

NOTE: Today’s changes will all be done in the style.css file located in the public_html/personal/wp-content/themes/child folder of my newmediauses.com account. This will be done using a Macintosh FTP program called Transmit to access my website and a Macintosh text editor called TextMate to effect the required changes. Read more »

I visited Thomas just after lunch today. Didn’t get him to hold him as soon as I showed up because he was zoning between deep sleep and approaching hunger.

When he did stir himself enough for his mother to deem that it was the right time to fix his bottle, she handed him to me – no, she PLACED him on my chest – and proceeded to the kitchen to make up his magic elixir.

All the times I had held him before were accompanied by little snorting, snuffling sounds and wiggly movements. This time, the lad was hungry! And he commenced to proclaim it to the world, both by sound and frantic movements of body appendages. Wowsers, I hadn’t experienced anger quite like that since the time that this dunderhead cut in front of me at Costco.  Umm,  well, enough about that.

When the bottle was ready, Sunnie (Thomas’s mother) allowed me to feed the boy. And burp him. And feed him. And burp him. And gasp as he filled his pants with the vilest smelling stuff this side of a toxic waste dump.

I gladly gave up my possession of the scion to the Allen empire and trotted off home – another day of Thomas time – this time tinged with lots of reality.

I’m working on a website for a treasured client and I’m using WordPress, Genesis Frameworks, and Gravity Forms at the moment. Gravity forms is a new addition to my toolbox and is working out very nicely. My problem with it is the problem that I face with many of my tools.  I know too much about too many things and think I can muscle my way into new ones without doing very much research.

Today was no different but it is ending well. My secret? Reading the flipping instructions and examples and watching the demos.  Oh, yeah. And talkin’ to Jeff. Wow, who would have thought that would work?

I have a new grandson, Thomas. He is the first grandchild with my last name. That’s nice for continuity.
He is a wonder. He weighs about 7 and a half pounds today. He can’t talk. He can’t focus his eyes. He is doing what all newborns do – gathering up energy to take on the world.

He is pretty much a helpless lump. But…he has four adults doing everything they can to please him. Soon, he will have 2 more adults to add to the mix when his grandparents from Minnesota come for a visit.

I visited with Thomas early in the day as well as at the end of the work day. Our time together is usually pretty tame and non-spectacular. He will have been well fed and will sleepily allow me to place him on my chest as we recline in a lounger. There we sit for an hour or so with only small beeps and burps and farts interrupting the quiet time. Thomas makes some sounds too.

This is certainly not on par with tossing a baseball back and forth but I’m afraid that will have to wait for a few years. We both know that is in our future and are content to wait for those good times.

The Bloggers United Network was started by good friend, Jan Triplett. She later invited me to co-lead the group with her.  We meet once a month to discuss bloggy things and to take one hour to start or do a blog. Attendance is sporadic. Sometimes we have a dozen folks.  Sometimes it’s just Jan and me. Mostly it’s the two of us plus Howie Richey, Texas Tour Guide Extraordinaire.

I wrote a blog last year called Having a Blog Doesn’t Make You a Blogger at my website, Exploring New Media. I updated it just a bit for the Bloggers United Network and included it in a blog I called “Blog as I Say, Not As I Do“.

The point that I’m trying to make is that having and maintaining a blog is not an easy task.  You need to make a commitment to keep it current, sit your butt down, dash out some purple prose (or pertinent poetry) on some kind of a consistent basis, then post the dang thing.

Here I go. I WILL create at lease one post every day regarding what I’m doing. The topic may be playing a video game called World of Warcraft. It may be my learning experiences with Genesis Framework, a super framework using with WordPress. It may be grandfatherly doting over my newest grandson, Thomas. You get the idea – an eclectic hodge podge. After all, it is a PERSONAL blog. I’m assuming this challenge to prove to myself that I CAN blog everyday.

How about you?  Anyone out there want to join me? You can create your own personal blog and post on it OR I’ll even let you guest blog at this site.  Contact me via the comments below or by email (lindsey@exploringnewmedia.com) or by phone (512 dash 921 dash 2618).