State of the me.
Last week I got a nag email from Livejournal telling me that I hadn’t reupped my paid account with them. Considering that in the last few years when I went to renew my account LJ pulled some kind of asinine move, I was a bit reluctant to do so this time. But I can’t see any stupidity on the immediate horizon (although their latest Facebook-style games thing is rather silly), so I chucked in my cash and signed myself up for another year.
So I suppose I should actually write something here. Been a while, eh?
Work
Things have been going well, all told. Work is work, although it’s not nearly as soul-sucking as my last job at the call centre was. I have been assured that I should just give it time, and my enthusiasm will slowly be destroyed, but for the moment I’m still full of ideas and keenness. The company is woefully behind the technology 8-ball, though, so I may look around for other places to practice my craft to keep myself in a marketable status. (As an example, we are using SharePoint as a backbone for our content management system. Single-sourcing is a new concept. One of the managers seriously asked how we could implement a wiki but lock it down so that no one can edit it. …It’s a bit brutal.)
Treadmill
At home, things are also fine. Bella is still a pest, Merry is still dumb, and Jaws is still fluffy. We bought a treadmill last month in an effort to keep ourselves moving during the winter. In the summer we have our bikes, but once it gets cold we tend to go into hibernation mode and stop doing anything. The treadmill is in the basement, and we have found (to our chagrin) that we cannot run the treadmill and the space heater by my desk at the same time. Ah well.
The treadmill is rather spiffy, and came with all kinds of special programs you can do. I’ve been doing the Weight Loss level 2 program, which does intervals from 2.5 mph to 4.5 mph (which is a jog for me), and increases the slope as you slow down. I do 30 minutes four times (usually) a week. That’s just enough time to listen to one short podcast, or half of a longer one. So I am finally catching up on my huge podcast backlog! I missed a lot of these shows while I was in school, so it’s good to hear them again.
While it would be nice to lose some weight (since I am definitely overweight according to every chart out there), I’m more concerned with just getting into shape… Which is not the same thing as losing weight. I’ve met women who are heavier than I am who could kick my ass at climbing stairs. I want to be a bit more in shape, and the treadmill seems like a good starting place.
Blog
I’ve been writing a food blog for a while (since 2007, I think). In the past year, it was starting to feel really constrained, to the point where I felt like I’d outgrown Wordpress.com. So I moved my blog to self-hosting. You can find it at winnipeg-eats.com. I’m waiting for the old blog to slide down the Google ranks. Maybe I should go track down everyone who has it linked and ask them to change the address. :/
Annoying - when went to register a domain name, I found out that winnipegeats.com and winnipegeats.ca were both taken as of June 2010 or so. Grr. I’m betting that either someone bought the domains with a plan to sell them to me (since my blog had been pretty well established) or someone had plans for the site and got distracted. In any event, I just bought the domain with the dash. Screw ‘em! If the domains come available again I might snap them up, but I’m not paying some squatter for them.
When I moved the blog to self-hosting, I promised myself that I would keep a publishing schedule for it. Once a week seems to be the best schedule for me right now. It’s a bit slow for the blogging world (especially considering larger blogs that post 10+ articles a day), but it works for me. I can usually come up with at least one idea a week, and it’s manageable enough so that it doesn’t feel like homework. I’m also trying to keep a mix of types of articles: recipes, news as it comes up, events, random opinion pieces, restaurant reviews, and book reviews. I’m hoping to be able to get enough traffic to be able to get some small ads going, and maybe make the blog pay for itself.
Wordpress is a great blogging platform with a lot of flexibility. For example, if I know I’ll be too busy to write, or if we’re going to be away for a while, I can queue up some posts and have them auto-publish on designated dates. (I think there’s also a way for it to auto-tweet the new posts, but I haven’t quite figured that out yet.) This will come in handy this spring, since…
Vacations
…We are going on a cruise!
*pause for skweeing*
In exactly 28 days, plonq and I will have been married for 10 years. We’ve been married for a decade. (Whoa.) To celebrate this, we will be going on a group cruise to Alaska in May with a bunch of people, two of whom will also be celebrating their tenth anniversary. I am swinging from being terrified (the logistics of plane + train + boat is making me blanch a bit) to being completely and utterly psyched for this trip.
We’ll be flying to Anchorage, taking a train to Seward, getting on a boat, cruising for a week, getting off in Vancouver, doing the friends/family thing in Vancouver and on the island, then flying from Nanaimo back to Winnipeg.
We’re also tentatively planning on attending MFF this year after a two- (three?) year absence. We’re about through with driving across the Midwest in November (with all its snow squalls and disastrous roads), though, so we’ll likely be flying to Chicago for the con. It’s been far too long since we attended a con, so I’m also looking forward to this. I hope we can go.
Anyway, that’s the news from here for now. There are a few other odds and ends, but I’ll likely get to those in another post since this one’s long enough. ;)
So I suppose I should actually write something here. Been a while, eh?
Work
Things have been going well, all told. Work is work, although it’s not nearly as soul-sucking as my last job at the call centre was. I have been assured that I should just give it time, and my enthusiasm will slowly be destroyed, but for the moment I’m still full of ideas and keenness. The company is woefully behind the technology 8-ball, though, so I may look around for other places to practice my craft to keep myself in a marketable status. (As an example, we are using SharePoint as a backbone for our content management system. Single-sourcing is a new concept. One of the managers seriously asked how we could implement a wiki but lock it down so that no one can edit it. …It’s a bit brutal.)
Treadmill
At home, things are also fine. Bella is still a pest, Merry is still dumb, and Jaws is still fluffy. We bought a treadmill last month in an effort to keep ourselves moving during the winter. In the summer we have our bikes, but once it gets cold we tend to go into hibernation mode and stop doing anything. The treadmill is in the basement, and we have found (to our chagrin) that we cannot run the treadmill and the space heater by my desk at the same time. Ah well.
The treadmill is rather spiffy, and came with all kinds of special programs you can do. I’ve been doing the Weight Loss level 2 program, which does intervals from 2.5 mph to 4.5 mph (which is a jog for me), and increases the slope as you slow down. I do 30 minutes four times (usually) a week. That’s just enough time to listen to one short podcast, or half of a longer one. So I am finally catching up on my huge podcast backlog! I missed a lot of these shows while I was in school, so it’s good to hear them again.
While it would be nice to lose some weight (since I am definitely overweight according to every chart out there), I’m more concerned with just getting into shape… Which is not the same thing as losing weight. I’ve met women who are heavier than I am who could kick my ass at climbing stairs. I want to be a bit more in shape, and the treadmill seems like a good starting place.
Blog
I’ve been writing a food blog for a while (since 2007, I think). In the past year, it was starting to feel really constrained, to the point where I felt like I’d outgrown Wordpress.com. So I moved my blog to self-hosting. You can find it at winnipeg-eats.com. I’m waiting for the old blog to slide down the Google ranks. Maybe I should go track down everyone who has it linked and ask them to change the address. :/
Annoying - when went to register a domain name, I found out that winnipegeats.com and winnipegeats.ca were both taken as of June 2010 or so. Grr. I’m betting that either someone bought the domains with a plan to sell them to me (since my blog had been pretty well established) or someone had plans for the site and got distracted. In any event, I just bought the domain with the dash. Screw ‘em! If the domains come available again I might snap them up, but I’m not paying some squatter for them.
When I moved the blog to self-hosting, I promised myself that I would keep a publishing schedule for it. Once a week seems to be the best schedule for me right now. It’s a bit slow for the blogging world (especially considering larger blogs that post 10+ articles a day), but it works for me. I can usually come up with at least one idea a week, and it’s manageable enough so that it doesn’t feel like homework. I’m also trying to keep a mix of types of articles: recipes, news as it comes up, events, random opinion pieces, restaurant reviews, and book reviews. I’m hoping to be able to get enough traffic to be able to get some small ads going, and maybe make the blog pay for itself.
Wordpress is a great blogging platform with a lot of flexibility. For example, if I know I’ll be too busy to write, or if we’re going to be away for a while, I can queue up some posts and have them auto-publish on designated dates. (I think there’s also a way for it to auto-tweet the new posts, but I haven’t quite figured that out yet.) This will come in handy this spring, since…
Vacations
…We are going on a cruise!
*pause for skweeing*
In exactly 28 days, plonq and I will have been married for 10 years. We’ve been married for a decade. (Whoa.) To celebrate this, we will be going on a group cruise to Alaska in May with a bunch of people, two of whom will also be celebrating their tenth anniversary. I am swinging from being terrified (the logistics of plane + train + boat is making me blanch a bit) to being completely and utterly psyched for this trip.
We’ll be flying to Anchorage, taking a train to Seward, getting on a boat, cruising for a week, getting off in Vancouver, doing the friends/family thing in Vancouver and on the island, then flying from Nanaimo back to Winnipeg.
We’re also tentatively planning on attending MFF this year after a two- (three?) year absence. We’re about through with driving across the Midwest in November (with all its snow squalls and disastrous roads), though, so we’ll likely be flying to Chicago for the con. It’s been far too long since we attended a con, so I’m also looking forward to this. I hope we can go.
Anyway, that’s the news from here for now. There are a few other odds and ends, but I’ll likely get to those in another post since this one’s long enough. ;)