Blog Birthday

Well actually it was June 21, 2002 so I missed it somewhat. Better late than never.

Seven year and counting

I missed marking the date (June 21) with a post but Iwill toot my own horn a little since I am still here and somewhat posting after seven years,

I lot of the blogs I looked at and inspired me have moved on a shut their doors but I guess that is life.

Getting back on the Horse

Either because of Ike or the election it looks like I am posting more once again.

Looking around I am dismayed at how much clean up I have to do.

I no longer have an annex since EV1 went bye bye and I will have to find a new place for all those sound files. It may be that I do it next month when I go to Europe (my first trip) or maybe not depending on how much of a distraction I find France.

I will post some Ike pix to Flickr soon and put the links here.

Belated Birthday

I meant to post on the blogs birthday but I have forgotten even that and now things are going to start to get real busy.
Maybe I will blog more because I will have more to say but less time to say it.
Who knows.
Anyway on June 21,2002 I started this blog which makes it (counting fingers) six years old now. Not as old as some but a lot older then others and things have changed a lot since then.

At least I now have a spell check add-in on Firefox so I should not have to go over and repost as much as I once did to fix spellings errors.

catching up

A lot has been going on since my last post some good a little not so good.
I will try to catch up but it might take a fw days.
I do have some new plants and trees but the pictures may take a little longer to get posted.

Traveling

Everytime I say I am going to start blogging regularly again I mean it, I really do. There is just so much going on that it never gets to the top of my list which why why I am in awe of people like Glenn who manage to do so much in their day jobs and are still organized enough to keep up with their blog.

I never even got around to blogging about my experiences at ONI-Con this year. I will and eventuall I will even post the pictures to flikr. I did it a little different since I was bored last year I decided to get more involved and was part of the Security Safety detail this year.

We will get to the Ren Fest on Saturday at least so I can try and sell all those extra tickets. Then off to NYC for a few days to see old friends and relatives. I will try to blog more when I get back. Really I will.

Belated birthday

On June 21, 2002 I started this blog on blogspot.
While I am not still going strong I am still going.
Comments will be open for b day wishes.

Random thoughts

After posting the last post I looked at my search log and noticed that there seemed to be a lot of searches on Eleanor of Aquitaine.

I didn't remember the reference myself so I did the search and came up with this quote of the day.

The post was from 2003 and an imprt from the old blogspot site that never got cleaned up. I cleaned it up a bit and got to thinking about other things.

When I first started this blog on June 21, 2002 I had an idea what I wanted to do. Part of it was a personal log which I still manage to do when I get around to posting. The other part relates to the name Freedom Lives which I have been somewhat less successful at. Not that our freedom's are in any less danger because they are if anything in more danger but there are other people doing that better than I , then as well as now even though the blogosphere landscape had changed a lot so that many of the blogs I "grew up" with have passed into history a long time ago.

One of the ones that hasn't and was one of my early supporters is the one done by Meryl Yourish. If you have not visited there I urge you to follow the link because it is worth your time.

As for me I think I need a bit of a redirection and redesign so that will be in the future. the redirection will not be that radical because I still intend to post on things that bother me especially concerning the pitiful state of our colleges and universities as well as all the other things that piss me off. The redesign will have to wait on funds and in the short run might only consist of a new name The Hawk's Nest which will signal more of a personal rather than a political orientation and more pictures once I get a response form Flickr tech support.

I am back

I actually had a reason for not posting in the last 6 weeks. My computer was being rebuilt. The power supply went out so I ended up getting a new box and moving all the incredibly dirty 5 year old guts to the new body.
Actually a friend from work did all the hard stuff.

Not I can finally do my taxes but I will try to put a few posts up also.

Merry Cristmas

Merry Cristmas Everyone

I hope to catch up soon but right now there is a large dinner waiting.

Happy Anniversary to Me

By going back in time and looking at this post I was able nail nail down today as the start of the fifth year of Freedom Lives.

MT lists 513 posts and there are a few more than that which never made it over from blogspot but all in all I am not un happy. I have pretty much been coasting of rover a year or so and I want to thank those of you who still come and read whatever it is I write here. I am still taking garden pix and will eventually post some more before the deer eat them all.

Thank you all for being here and I will try to up my post tempo a bit. It is not that I have not been interested it is just that other things including being elected president of a 1500+ member group has somewhat limited my time.

Happy Holidays abuse

Why say Happy Holidays when what you mean is

Merry Christmas

Happy Turkey

Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
We have a lot to be thankful for as a nation.
A lot of that is nagitive stuff like:
1) thanksful there has been no terrorist attack in the US.
2)Thanksful we are not France.

ect..

We do have some things to be thankful for that are positive.
I am thanksful my family is all together
That they are all in good health.
That we live in the greatest country in the world.,,
of course in my case that is just an accident of birth but I think I would have ended up here anyway just because there is no place on this planet that is anywhere as good to live in as the US.

Proof of that is all the left wingers who constantly are trying to there the US down do not seem to be in a hurry to move to whatever they feel if the country of thier dreams,

I wish they would we have much too much important stuff to do to be bothered with that kind of nonsense.

Blogging Alert

Most Bloggers give an alert when they will not be posting but being as my posting schedule has been pretty spotty recently I couldn't do that.

So in a reverse of tradition I am putting up an alert that I might be posting a lot more in the near future.

I will be attending Defcon this weekend in Las Vegas and if my laptop stops acting up I will post as much as I can from the 13th annual Hacker event.

This is pretty exciting for me since I have wanted to attend for 5 or 6 years now and for one reason or another it just never worked out. IT is not starting out well since I messed up my plane reservations somewhat but I hope that things will be all uphill from here.

3 Years and 100,000

Yes next month it will be three years since I started this blog and there is no truth to the rumour that I have been cutting back on posts so that the 100,000 milestone will occur in the same month.
I have been busy getting my life going but I do have some nice pictures of the garden that I will post soon, I promise.

While 100,000 might not be a lot to people like Roger or Meryl or Glenn I have worked very hard for it and I am glad to see it happen. I will also state that while I go through periods of not posting a lot I am not in any way thinking about quitting like so many of the blogs that were around when I started have done.

Anti-spam

Due to the latest wave of spam comments and pings I am closing both comments and pings until I can find the time to fix it somehow.

New Ring

I have been a little lax on my housekeeping and since I am feeling a bit more secure in my new job I finally got around to deleting the linnk to unemployed bloggers which I replaced with conservative bloggers.

I also pulled the blogshares link since I have not used it in a while. It was a cute idea when it started but I think it got old quick.

Tech Stuff

I have been real busy at work lately getting more into icky things like Complus, Active Directory and transaction isolation levels on SQL Server to name a few.

I am trying to tie up all the loose ends by the ned of this month so I can move onto my next project with promises to be very interesting.

As if that isn't enough I may be taking on a new major outside responsibility that will likely finish off my remaining free time. At least I won't be bored.

Seasons Greetings

Large Mammals

Freedom Lives has reached 477 in the Blogosphere Ecosystem which is its highest rank ever.

I want to thank all my loyal readers and linkers.

I also want to thank whatever bug has gotten into the system since I don't really think that I all of a sudden have 251 blogs linking to me.

That said it is nice to be out of the pack for a change even if it is only until Bear fixes whatever it is has gone wrong.

Closed Comments

In our continuing battle against comment spam, comments will be closed until I upgrade to MT 3.x.

What you are not yet?

Give me a break, these days I am lucky to find the time to post.

Problems

We are having some technical difficulties.
Regular blogging will resume asap.

Milestones

I was quite surprised when I logged on to notice that this would be my 1001 st post. Time files when you are having fun.

Comment spam

Somebody decided to add another 300 comments to the blog. I have nothing against Cialis but isn't there enough advertizing on the normal channels already.
Thank goodness for MT-Blacklist, not only does if block things I know about but it helps me get rid of ones that are new to me.
There are always new ones popping up however.
I just have to be more on top of things.

Light Blogging Alert

I will be gone most of the day so don't expect to see anything here until 10pm cdt or there abouts.
I have one microsoft event that I am late for , another in the afternoon and a user group meeting tonight. I guess you could call it a microsoft day.
I suppose I might at least get a t-shirt out of it but they have been getting cheaper lately.

What I do Well - redux

As I related in the previous post where I broke Zempt I have a talent for messing up software and hardware.
It seems I am on a roll.
Last night the server I am on crashed while I was tweaking the site.
Verve said that they would have to replace the fan.
Today I got a message that they were going to have to replace the motherboard of the server.
I rock.

Moving Right along

I got the comments line set up the way I want it and the Category Label but MT does not seem to be generating the category files yet.
That should keep me busy figuring that out.

Testing Zempt

Well It didn't break but it didn't insert the song playing either but that could have been my fault.
Ah I see, that is how it is done.
Bill,
I noticed that it had lost some of the categories I had downloaded and had to re download them but that was probably because of the crash.
The only other thing I used was the spell checker which I will use now.
Bill,
It doesn't seem to save changes to the dictionary. I tried to save Zempt three times and it flagged it all three times.

Zempt

At the insistance of the author I am trying to break this again.
I had no idea he was reading here.
I know how I feel when someone breaks software I have written even though I write bug free code (?), so I am trying to use it again, which I would have done anyway.
Another nice feature is that it can grab the sone that winamp is playing and add it to the post which is something I have been doing by hand. So I downloaded the plug-in for winamp 2.x, I use 2.8 and XP Home.
So we can see if all that works too.

Another Issue resolved

A couple of emails from Wind Rider and an hour of squinting at templates and I finally got the sidebar working right.

Comments

True to form, I fixed the templates so that comments can be displayed inline however you can no longer post comments.
I am not sure what I did to screw this up but it looks like the typical one step forward, two steps back.
:sigh:

What I do well

After all these years I can still do one things real well.
It took me all of two posts to get Zempt to crash.
I once crashed an entire microcomputer setup at a PC EXPO show in New York. The Hp people were not very happy with me, to say the least.

Thanks Dean

I want to thank Dean who did the work of setting this blog up on MT. He has done this for many other people and I am sure they like me are all grateful to him.
We all want him to know that before Google takes out a contract on him.

Bridge too Far

Having now gotten a working MT blog and all my links I am going a step further and trying to get a tool named Zempt to work. Zempt was suggested by Joni who is having connectivity problems this weekend. So far the only problem seems to be that I can't update categories unless I go to MT. If this can be doen from within Zempt, someone please let me know.
The one great thing Zempt has that I need is a spell checker.
I am sure it has a lot more but I can't speel worth a shit.
Never could and probably never will.
That will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever read comments that I have posted. I wish comments had spell checking.


Update: Nothing ever works the way you hope it will. That must be one of Murphy's laws. In the sentence above I spelled posted as psoted and the spell checker didn't catch it.
:sigh:
Update: when I spell checked again it caught the error in the update but still didn't correct the original.

Beta Testing

There is still a lot of work to do but if anyone wants to go over and bang on the new site at starhawk.net, feel free.
Any constructive advice would be wonderful.

My mother used to always clean up the apartment before the cleaning lady would get there. She said it had to be clean enough to let someone else see. I never understood her when I was a kid but the new web site is about to that point, I hope.

Decisions, Decisions

My new, still in testing blog has comments in it. I have not installed comments here because I didn't want to deal with it.
Let me clarify, it is not because I can't deal with it, in fact I can deal with it very well. I dealt with it for nine years when I ran a public BBS system. I also dealt with it on CompuServe where I was a section leader in the Multi-player Games forum for a number of years. I just didn't feel like doing it.
I may leave it in as a test this time.
Of course then we have a bigger problem.
What happens if you throw a party and no one comes?
Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I have never thrown a party where no one came.
The closest I came was my going away party from Columbus where a lot of people turned around when they saw the police car in my driveway.
The cops didn't stay till the end of the party and left with just a warning to keep it down.


Listening To: Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen

Learning Movable Type

Which is what I am doing at the moments I can actually log into it.
Today I forgot my password so I had MT send me a new one. The only problem with that was that I had entered the address incorrectly. Luckily I did remember my domain's password so I was able to retrieve the mail that had bounced with the new password.


Listening To: Year of the Cat - Al Stewart

more testing

This started out well with me forgetting my password

Another New Link I have

Another New Link
I have been meaning to add Merde in France for a long time and I finally got around to it today. This is a great place to get further reasons why its not a bad idea to not buy French anything. If you have any seconds thoughts about how messed up things are in France read this blog for a few days. Side by side in English and French.
Current Song: Within you, Without You - George Harrison

Added to Blogroll

Housekeeping
You may not have noticed it but I have been adding names to my blogroll here and there. Today I added Dean Esmay who has done and is doing great work helping people move off of Blogspot.
Current Song: Solitary Man - Neil Diamond

More Housekeeping I started playing

More Housekeeping
I started playing with Blogger to republish my archives in a monthly format. I think I got it working but the index page doesn't work so I just have them listed in the sidebar.


Current Song: Madmen across the Water - Elton John

Housekeeping I have been doing

Housekeeping
I have been doing some housekeeping and I found out something very interesting. It seems I didn't post any garden pictures during the month of May. I didn't realize it but I guess it took me a while to recover from my trip to NYC which if you didn't know was to see the unveiling of my father's headstone. I intend at some point to make these all accessible as well as all the Quote's of the Day but that is a bigger job.
I also added some links to the sidebar.


Current Song: Beware of Darkness - George Harrison

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday
I knew it was coming up but not exactly when. I checked the day before yesterday and I am pleased to report that I started this blog exactly one year ago today. It has been an amazing year in the world and I am still not sure where the blog is going. I am still enjoying doing this so I guess it will continue for a while.


I added an Amber Alert ticker to the site. I am not sure about the placement but I couldn't fit it on the sidebar.