Site maintenance needed

I noticed that most of my posts for this year up to the end of May that had photos are now missing some or all of the images. As I realized late in May, this came from using the easy but dangerous new copy-and-paste method of adding photos to Blogspot posts, which actually just hotlinks to the photo source. If anything changes with the photo source - in this case, the photos I had downloaded to Facebook albums - the link becomes broken, and the photos vanish. Not all of them, not all at once, but enough of them to be a problem requiring that I reupload them all directly to Blogger. So I have a LOT of photos to replace.

Broken links, dead images

I was planning on writing a funny post about an incident that happened during the period last year between the day Bowie was diagnosed with terminal cancer (when my mom's car was rear-ended at a crosswalk as we drove to the vet's) and the day Bowie died (which was also the day repairs to the car were completed.) To do that I wanted to check the post that I wrote about Bowie two and a half months after she died. Upon opening it I discovered that several of the photos in the post were...dead.

A few years ago Blogger introduced a new way of adding photos to your post: drag-and-drop. It was an extension of a functionality that had always existed for their photo posting, a way of hotlinking to an image on the internet. I've never liked doing this, because you never know when the image source is going to be moved or deleted. So up until relatively recently, I've preferred uploading images from my hard drive directly to my blog. It's a tedious, multi-step process, but it feels more reliable.

But drag-and-drop is so fast, so easy. I settled on a compromise: I would only drag-and-drop images from my Facebook page, specifically from Albums on my Facebook page. These photos, I figured, would have stable addresses, and wouldn't be going anywhere.

I was wrong.

The source images never actually moved, mind you. They were still right where they were, next to other photos that had been dragged-and-dropped and were still showing up just fine. Finding them took some effort, though. The names of the missing photos, mostly long streams of numbers, did not match the names of any of the photos in the albums, also long strings of numbers - until I tried to save them. Then the numbers transformed into something else. Two of those strings of numbers transformed into strings that matched the missing images.

I went through seven years of posts and found that most of the posts with missing photos were from 2017. Some posts from 2011 appear to be broken in a different way - the uploaded images are still in the posts but don't display. That's an investigation for another time.

Here are the posts currently missing images. I'll try to replace them with uploaded versions of the same images.

https://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2017/03/clouds-moon-and-venus-march-1-2017.html

https://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2017/03/july-17-2016-pale-white-disk-in-pewter.html
(fixed June 4, 2018)

https://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-tomatoes-of-2016.html
(fixed June 4, 2018)

https://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2017/02/see-crescent-of-venus.html

https://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2017/04/national-poetry-month-brian-fanelli.html

And here's one with the images present but not visible:

https://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2011/06/world-of-wonders-sideshow-at-northeast.html

CAPTCHA off, then back on

I haven't been blogging here as much as I would like to be, or probably should be, but I am keeping up with other people's blogs. One of the blogs I read daily is "The REAL Blogger Status," written by a Blogger insider but full of helpful information and occasionally biting criticism regarding the Blogger platform.

A post yesterday advised blog authors to be cognizant of what they are putting potential commentors through when they are forced to solve CAPTCHAs, those annoying and occasionally unsolvable distorted word puzzles that can be set as a pre-requisite for anyone looking to leave a comment. CAPTCHAs, while viewed by some as a minor inconvenience and necessary evil to screen out robotically-posted spam comments, can also dramatically reduce the number of illegitimate comments being left on a blog. If you use moderation, the post suggests, it may be unnecessary to also use a CAPTCHA.

I use moderation, and have ever since a flood of racist and harassing comments were posted during the election of 2008. These comments were coming in during the day, when I was at work and unable to do anything about them for several hours; for those hours they were as much a part of my blog as anything I had written. After reading yesterday's post, I thought maybe it was time to back away from the CAPTCHA and loosen things up a little. Last night I turned that setting off to see what would happen.

About fifteen hours later I had fourteen new comments in moderation. Every one of them was spam.

Spam comments aren't merely annoying. A lot of blogs permit you to flag your comment to receive an email whenever someone comments after it. This is apparently part of the strategy for spam comments: the spammer also requests these follow-up emails so they can harvest email addresses - and possibly blog addresses - from anyone else who comments. This is explained in today's post on The REAL Blogger Status.

So: CAPTCHA back on. My apologies for the minor inconvenience.

Blog of the Week!

I'm really excited - I feel a little silly at how excited I am! - to have been the NEPA Blogs Blog of the Week on WBRE's PA Live! this afternoon. I knew that it was coming, but I didn't know when. The original plan was for a hand-off between me and Michelle: I would end my time as host of the Blog of the Week segment by featuring her blog, and she would begin hers by featuring mine. But things became complicated when Michelle found herself unable to take over the segment, and our Plans B and C fell through. When blogger Shannon Nelson (who was already doing a spot on PA Live!) came forward and was willing to take over the segment for us, Michelle and I (mostly Michelle) went into overdrive getting Blogs of the Week ready ahead of time. (Shannon is not able to come in every week, so she tapes several segments ahead of time.)

Still, I didn't know when my blog might be featured, and I was super excited when I found out it would be this week! The timing was perfect, since I've just begun my ninth year of blogging. That's close to a record for this area - Mark Cour has been at it longer, first on the various incarnations of Wilkes-Barre Online, and then on his (relatively) new Circumlocution for Dummies.

Click here to see Michelle's Blog of the Week post on NEPA Blogs. And click here to see Shannon presenting Another Monkey as the Blog of the Week on WBRE's PA Live!

Coming back

My blogging here has slowed down almost to a stop. That's not entirely because I've run out of things to say. I've also made a conscious decision to restrict myself from blogging - here at Another Monkey, at least - until I've managed to achieve certain goals in my life, goals from which blogging, personal blogging specifically, is a distraction.

That restriction is now lifted.

I have been blogging all this while, mainly over at NEPA Blogs. I feel like we've just gone to the next level there, knocked the lid off of it, with the discovery of hundreds of blogs in Northeastern Pennsylvania of which we were previously unaware. And the weekly appearances on PA Live! are going great, which makes the fact that I may have to leave the show in a few weeks that much more tragic. But schedules change, and it would have been unreasonable to expect to be available from 3:30 - 4:40 every Tuesday indefinitely.

I've also been taking a course in the fundamentals of solar power. I used to work in that industry more than twenty years ago, at least on the solar cell manufacturing end of things, and I would like someday to get back into it again. The main plotline for the next decade or so is going to be increasing energy demands in a world of finite fossil fuels. As emerging nations increase their demands for fuel and their willingness to pay high prices, and domestic energy producers realize that they can see higher profits from exporting refined fossil fuels to overseas markets rather than selling domestically, Americans will feel the pinch even more than they do now. Politically, in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, the climate is hostile towards increased capacity for solar energy, but that will change. And when it does, I want to be ready for it. So I've also been dusting off my NEPA Solar blog.

On top of all that, I also intend to become more active with my personal branding blog. There is much to say over there that can help others, and myself as well.

For now, I have to hit the books! I'll post more when I can.

Have your old posts been Drafted by Blogger?

I came across an interesting item on "The Real Blogger Status" today. It's in a post called "Recovering A Deleted Post" - which is itself interesting. But what caught my eye was this:

The choices of recovery / restore may depend upon how the deletion / removal occurred.

(1) Deleted by Blogger - Saved as Draft, because of DMCA violation accusation.
...

Well, that's interesting. It made me wonder: If Blogger were to do this to an old post of yours, delete it and save it as a draft, would they inform you? Or would past posts be silently slipping away into draft status?

I decided to check for myself. I know that I have numerous posts saved as draft. In some cases I started them, lost interest, and set them aside for later. In other cases I had a germ of an idea but didn't get around to doing anything with it. Other times I accidentally created a post from an online article using the blogger toolbar, or simply put something together as a post with no intention of publishing it.

Still, when I opened my list of draft posts, there were a few that looked completed, published even. One dealt with the issue of advertising back in February of 2009. Did Google decide that this crossed the line on its rules for people publishing ads not drawing attention to the ads, and put the blog into a draft status?

There are two others in draft status that dealt with the issue of racism in politics. Unlike the "Advertising" piece, neither of these posts had been assigned labels. And both of these posts seem to lack conclusions. Did I just get tired of writing them and save them for later?

NOTE: In a post published the same day as the "Advertising" post was written, I wrote this:

I have a different post about one-third done, but I'm going to hold off on it. It's nothing time-critical, anyway.

So it looks like I was the one who put that post in draft status.

Still, if you use Blogger, it might be worth your while to review your posts that are currently in Draft, to see if Blogger has been quietly flagging your posts for suspected DMCA violations.

I'm still blogging (yeah, yeah, yeah)

OK. I just did a title reference to an Elton John song. Hooboy.

I haven't given up blogging. I'm still at it, trying to post every day (or so) over at NEPA Blogs.  The routine generally goes like this: Michelle finds the blogs, mostly through the NEPA Blogs Twitter followers (yes, we're on Twitter), and passes the sites on to me. I write up posts and add the links. If I have time and have a bunch of blog sites to add, I'll write them all up in one push (often while listening to Awolnation's Sail on continuous repeat - follow that link for the official video, or this one for the funnysexycool version, or this one for the hauntingly perfect one that is just the video to another song by another band, Eye of the Storm by Lovett...which appears to be gone now, dammit, but seems to have been replicated here) and program them to appear one a day for the next few days.

Except for Tuesdays: Tuesday is the day I go on WBRE's PA Live! and present the Blog of the Week, live on TV. Sometime between 4:00 and 5:00, usually around 4:30. This is actually pretty awesome. It's a great show with a focus on Northeastern Pennsylvania, and has probably given lots of people their first-ever chance to be on television. Michelle and I were already seasoned vets when we did our screen tests, thanks to our ComputerWise TV appearance a few months earlier. And like the ComputerWise TV appearance, this is really the result of Michelle's campaign for media domination for NEPA Blogs, which is working out quite well.

I'm also engaged in an increasingly aggressive job search, and doing my damnedest to think outside the box. Blogging and PA Live! both play a role in that, and I find myself becoming more socially active than I once would have considered normal. But all this is focused on a goal.

I've taken up with a writers' group in Scranton, and another one that is online. I'd like to grow as a writer, and improve my work. It's interesting to see the different takes on writing in the group. Many of the members are focused on writing as a profession, on teaching or on winning prizes, and have bought into specific paradigms of writing, some of which I'm only vaguely aware. Other members come from completely different backgrounds. There's a very good mix of ages and experiences in the group. At the very least these writing groups will provide material for some posts - and maybe spin off a blog or two as well.

So: I'm still blogging. I'll have plenty more to say here soon.


Title reference: I'm Still Standing by Elton John.

This is a test

This is a test.¹

1. If that test works, the "1" will be superscripted - and I will stop using *,**,***, etc. for footnotes.

This is a test

Blogger is rolling out a new GUI, and it has...issues. The ones I spotted a week ago are unsurprisingly still there, but I figured I may as well start taking it out for shakedown cruises to see just how messed up things can get.

Let's see. One of my upcoming posts is going to be a new entry in The Stained Glass Project. Right off the bat I don't see an easy way to open my blog so I can turn the words "The Stained Glass Project" into a hyperlink to all the other entries bearing that label. Let's see what right-clicking on the name of my blog in the upper left does...

Nope, takes me to another page, but this one has a "View blog" button at the top. Why doesn't the Post Editor have one?

Hmmm: also, in "Compose" mode, I'm in a scroll box with about eight lines of text. Two-thirds of the screen is unused real estate. Why?

OK, just switched over to HTML mode. Full screen to play with. Now, let's see about that link to The Stained Glass Project.

OK, back to Compose mode. Trying to do a hypertext link in HTML gives me a "scripted window" popup warning.

Back to HTML. So the next window I'm going to post about features a guy named St. Maximian and yet another image of Mary, this one in the Immaculate Heart presentation. Here's a two-shot of the pair of windows, added through HTML mode:

Hmmm...still the ugly old interface they used when I first started. Back to Compose.

OK, more options here..was able to increase the image size from "Large" to "X-Large." Still, it's very annoying to be squeezed into a box that's so small.

Looking up St. Maximian through my Google toolbar - let's see how well it adds this...

St. Maximian - Saints & Angels - Catholic Online

OK, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V caused the screen to white out until I hit "Enter." Anyway, there's another St. Maximian - let's try adding him through the HTML editor:

St. Maximian of Constantinople - Saints & Angels - Catholic Online

Not much on this guy. The first one at least got hurled out of a tower. And look, there's a third Maximian:

St. Maximian of Ravenna - Saints & Angels - Catholic Online

That time there was no white screen after I hit Ctrl+V. Weird. Anyway, this guy was also a bishop, like the first one. Neither is listed as a doctor or prescriber of remedies, which may be significant, though the last one gets a mention of having built St. Vitalis Basilica. No, nothing there - though Vitalis and his wife were martyred by Marcus Aurelius, played by Richard Harris in the movie "Gladiator."

The GUI doesn't like ampersands, especially when I switch back and forth.

Well, so far, the most annoying thing is the eight-line-high text entry box. What gives? I have to wonder if that has something to do with me having my screen magnified when I first opened it.

Let's see if spell-check works...

Yep, that works. Hey, has this been autosaving as a draft? Only one way to find out, and I'm not gonna try. Saving...

Ummmm.  Where's the "Post" button? That's a big oversight!

Ah. It's "Publish" - white text on a gray background. Yeah, very visible. Let's try "Preview" first...

OK, preview worked fine. I'll hit "Publish" and call it a night - after I apply some labels.

(It also doesn't have a "View Post" option after you publish, just "View Blog." "View Post" is useful when you're editing an older post and want to view it after you've edited it. Also, there's some ugliness in the post-publishing page, which I expect is because I'm working in IE8 rather than the next-generation IE interface.)

More, after the break

I'm experimenting with a new (well, new-to-me) feature on Blogger: the jump break.  People who are just casually glancing at one of my posts might think "Gosh, he's being unusually short-winded," but I assure you this is nothing of the sort.

All shall be explained...

...after the break.

Scranton Blogs: Content thief?

We're always on the search for local bloggers to link to from NEPA Blogs.  There are lots of blogs out there, and new ones getting started all the time.  One of the ideas behind NEPA Blogs is that if we create the right degree of linkability - many blogs linking to a central blog which links back to all of the other blogs - everyone will benefit.  The little blogs will benefit from being linked to by a site that is linked to by the big blogs, and the big blogs will benefit from being linked to by a site that is linked to by lots of little sites.

The structure of NEPA Blogs is designed to encourage posting activity.  The most recently updated blogs appear at the top of the sidebar, if those blogs are equipped with an RSS or Atom feed.  The more often you post, the more often you will be at the top of the sidebar, and the more easily readers will find your site.

We find blogs in all sorts of ways:  People can send them in, or we can come across them accidentally, or find them on another NEPA Blogger's blogroll.  Sometimes we go out and do brute-force searches on terms like "nepa blogger" or "wilkes-barre blogs" or "scranton blogs."

One of those last returned a hit for scrantonblogs.com.  It advertises itself as "A Blogging Network For Scranton Bloggers!"  Great, I thought, someone else is doing the same thing.  I'll just link to them and...

The content on Scranton Blogs looked a little familiar.  Very familiar.  Heck, I had written a lot of it.  And so had NEPA Mom, and Mark Cour, and Stephen Albert, and Andy Palumbo, and...

It was pretty unnerving to open up someone else's blog and see my own work looking back at me.  And it's not like someone was saying, "Oh, here's an interesting post from anothermonkey.blogspot.com." If it weren't for the fact that I had coded in a slug at the end of my posts during an aborted attempt to set up reposts to Facebook, no one would have known that I wasn't a blogger writing for a site called Scranton Blogs.

So who is responsible for this?

Heh, that's the fun part.  There's no "About Us" for Scranton Blogs.  There is, however, a little note at the very bottom that says "Copyright for all content is attributed to the original author, and their respective websites."  Not that they go out of their way to point to the original authors or their respective websites.  Clicking on my name points to http://scrantonblogs.com/members/d-b-echo/ - making me look like I'm a "member" of Scranton Blogs who writes for them.  (I am not, and I do not.)  Clicking on the post title for my most recent post points to http://scrantonblogs.com/2011/05/10/weekend-update/, rather than to http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2011/05/weekend-update.html.  So the copyright thing at the bottom is just lip service.

Fortunately, a whois search turned up some answers:

Registrant:
Artz Group Inc.


515 Center St.
Scranton, Pennsylvania 18503
United States


Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: SCRANTONBLOGS.COM
Created on: 13-May-09
Expires on: 13-May-12
Last Updated on: 30-Apr-11


Administrative Contact:
Group, Artz dns@artzgroupinc.com
Artz Group Inc.
515 Center St.
Scranton, Pennsylvania 18503
United States
+1.5702908301


Technical Contact:
Group, Artz dns@artzgroupinc.com
Artz Group Inc.
515 Center St.
Scranton, Pennsylvania 18503
United States
+1.5702908301


Domain servers in listed order:
NS2.BIOMEGATECH-HOSTING.COM
NS1.BIOMEGATECH-HOSTING.COM


Registry Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Registry Status: clientRenewProhibited
Registry Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registry Status: clientUpdateProhibited


I think I'll have a word with them. Though those email addresses don't look very functional.

In the meantime, I'll cross-post this on NEPA Blogs and Another Monkey.  And if this works the way I think it does, this post will automatically be displayed on the Scranton Blogs site as well.  Let this be their top story for a while.

UPDATE, 5/12/2011:
Now my posts aren't displayed there anymore, but the other bloggers' posts are. I've already let several of the other content theft victims know, and I can just work through the rest of the list.

The proper thing to do, if the person running Scranton Blogs wanted to do something like this, would be:


- Post excerpts from blog posts, rather than repost the whole things
- Include links to the original posts, both as a title and a "Read the rest here..."
- Give full attribution to the bloggers and blogs from which these posts are being taken
- Remove any language or architecture that gives the impression that the blog authors are actually working for Scranton Blogs


Not that it should be necessary for anyone to explain all that to this person. But apparently he still doesn't get it.

Be back soon

I haven't really felt like blogging much these past few days.  There are really much more important things I should be doing that I haven't been doing.  But in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, I'm getting hit with a lesson I took away from this post by Bill:  You really don't want to know what other people are thinking.  Some people, anyway.  It's more disturbing than you could imagine to discover there are psychopaths and sociopaths lurking - well, not everywhere, but in enough places to make the world an uncomfortable place.

(As Jon Stewart pointed out, the life stories of the six mostly-random people who were killed in this past weekend's shooting are enough to make you realize that any random person may in fact have a truly amazing life story, and there's a greater likelihood that any given person falls into this category than into the "crazy" category.  But the crazies can definitely out-shout the amazings.  And out-shoot, too.)

I'm thinking a lot about the basic question "What is a blog?"  Someone set out to answer this back in 2003 for an actual scholarly reference work, and this is the definition she came up with.  Compare this definition to the sites listed on Regator's Top 50 Blogs of 2010.  How many of them fall within the definition from 2003?  Can an argument be made that some of these are not, in fact, "blogs?"  What is the definition of a blog in 2011, and how has it changed since 2003?

But enough of that nonsense.  That's all for another time.  I've been playing around with a...thing on Facebook, something I did once before.  It's a way of generating imaginary album covers.  The rules:

1 - Go to wikipedia and hit random. The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.


2 - Go to quotationspage.com and hit random. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.


3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”. Third picture no matter what it is, will be your album cover.


4 - Use photoshop or similar (picnik.com is a free online photo editor) to put it all together.

5 - Post it with this text in the "caption"

Here are the album covers I've come up with tonight:

38541 Rustichelli was a techno-trance outfit consisting of a single member who kept his identity a closely guarded secret.  His exclusive underground performances usually consisted of banks of keyboards and sequencers playing by themselves onstage while the anonymous artist mingled with the gathered crowd.  Tragically, he was often the only person in attendance, and his career ended after a single album which, while completely digital in composition, was released only on vinyl.

Trying to tap into a Japanpop groove, Matthew's Best Hit TV was eventually revealed to be a quintet of North Korean spies seeking secrets of nuclear weapons manufacture.  Their efforts at espionage were slightly less successful than the sales of their lone album, a collection of somewhat sweet ballads and, inexplicably, sea chanteys.

George Maniakes was one of the more successful Greek lounge singers to prowl the clubs of San Francisco in the late 1960's and early 1970's.  Like "No Guarantee of Maturity," most of his songs seemed to be directed towards pre-pubescent girls in an other-than-avuncular manner.  He eventually vanished from public view after a  scandal involving currency speculation and the importation of exotic fruit.

The Shift Key was an early alternative band whose songs were relegated to college stations until well after alternative had gone mainstream and was considered passe.  "A Year and a Half," their seventh album, was considered their most upbeat work, despite controversial cover art apparently parodying the suicide of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain.  Following their breakup in 1998, the members all independently went on to form competing "new folk" bands, who now tour county fairs and jamborees and enjoy far more success that they ever experienced in their earlier incarnation.

NOTE: The original images, taken from Flickr totally without permission:

"Very Little on Office Supplies" :  Pericolose curiosità (parte 3) From Fabio Luffarelli
"Health Like a Waterman" :  "Look At All The Lonely People" by CantBuyMeLove
"No Guarantee of Maturity" : "1/52" by rockie nolan
"A Year and a Half" : "Humpty Dumpty *Explored*" by Nelson Oliver

Almost there...

I think I'll be ready to resume blogging by the weekend.  Maybe.  We'll see.

Had a post-worthy encounter with another blogger the other day, and another blogger has accomplished something very post-worthy.  So I'm already backed up on material, as well as all the other stuff I've promised to write.  (I almost wrote "A Rock Too Heavy To Lift" the other day, in response to someone else's post on the topic.  Someday...)

Backing off, again

Well, after a month with an almost-perfect daily record of blog posting, I think I'm going to be backing off again.

I've got some stuff going on.  Most immediately is the notice that arrived the other day informing me that my homeowner's insurance was being cancelled.  This came with a little notice that I could appeal this cancellation by asking for a review by the state, but the request had to be made within ten days.  Within ten days of what, I'm not sure.  The notice was issued and mailed last Tuesday, which would reasonably have had it delivered by last Thursday - which just happened to be Thanksgiving, a day without mail delivery.  So we lose one day there.  Lose more days for holiday visiting with family and friends, so I didn't even see the notice until Sunday.  Filled out the appeal form yesterday and mailed it this morning.

I've called the insurer to see if we can get this reversed.  I spoke to someone in their President's office, who told me I would have to take it up with my agent; I contacted the agent, who told me I would have to follow the instructions from the President's office.  Typical runaround.  The agent told me to get back to them on Wednesday, which happens to be a work day.  I work all night and sleep during the day.  I'll have very limited windows in the morning and the afternoon in which I can get this taken care of, if I can get it taken care of at all.  If not, then I get to use more of these very limited windows to try to secure other insurance before December 27, which is when my insurance is due to be cancelled.  If I don't get homeowner's insurance before then, I suppose I'll be getting contacted by my mortgage holder...which is, coincidentally, an insurance company.  I wonder if I can get insurance through them?

Let's review:  In August, while I was off donating blood and making chicken soup for my sick, elderly mother, someone broke into the side of my double-block house that I use for storage and cut out all the copper pipes.  I quickly replaced the window they broke to gain entrance, then reinforced all the entrances with alarms and locks and other means.  After a visit from an insurance adjuster to assess the damage, I had a monitored security system installed on both sides of the house at considerable expense.  My current plans include tying the electrical and water utilities on both sides of the house together, which will cost rather a lot of money. 

And now I've been informed that my homeowner's insurance is being cancelled.

The estimated recycling value of the stolen copper pipe is about $60.  It's like being victimized over and over again by the same crime...most recently by my insurance provider.

And that's just one of the things I've got going on right now.  So, please excuse me if I miss a day of blogging here and there.  

The Fog of Work

Umm, hi.  Remember me?

I've just gone more than a week without blogging.  That's something of a record for me.  In the past I've only missed blogging for that much time because I've been in another country with limited access to the internet.  But not this time.

Work is winding down.  According to the official notice I received earlier this week, at some point on or between December 13 and December 26 my current employment, like that of many of my co-workers, will be terminated.  But in the meantime, there's overtime to be had.  Overtime is valuable.  I'm trying to get at least two days of overtime out of every four days off, though I've only managed that once.  To increase my chances of getting one or two days of overtime, I'm actually selecting days in three-day groups, with choices ranked first, second, and third, and the maximum number of days requested specified.  Unfortunately, this means that the days that I work overtime are not necessarily continuous with the days that I am normally scheduled to work, resulting in alternating days of work and not-work.  So instead of four-days-on four-days-off, or five-on three-off, or six-on two-off, work is dissolving into a cloud of days, like a fight scene in a cartoon.  It is hard enough to remember if I'm supposed to be off or working on any  given day.  This has made it difficult to dedicate any time at all to blogging.  In fact, this is the first time in several days I've actually been online.

That's not the only reason for this hiatus, though it is the major one.  But I've been doing some thinking about my life, about the priorities I've established and the commitments I've made.  I've realized that I've been neglecting some of those commitments, and that maybe some of my priorities have been out of whack.  Which is not to say that blogging has been responsible for either of these problems.  But upon coming to this realization, a cloud of guilt settled over every other commitment and priority in my life.  So I've got that going for me, too.

I have three consecutive days off now, counting today.  I should really be sleeping right now, or mowing the lawn or raking leaves or conducting a job search, but instead I've chosen to catch up with my long-neglected online life.  This post is a part of that.  In a few minutes I will head for bed, to sleep for who knows how long.

Dialing it back

This break-in has made me even more paranoid than I already was.  (Though if I had been a bit more paranoid before, I would already have done all of the things I just did and am planning to do to secure the house, and the break-in would not have happened - or would have happened in a completely different way.)  A few weeks ago a blog-friend went on vacation to the beach and announced this fact very publicly on his blog and on Facebook.  At about the same time, a rash of burglaries in a local area were traced to someone who was using Facebook to determine when people were not home.  I never got around to warning him.  And then my house was robbed.

I've been pretty open with publishing details of my on-shift/off-shift schedule here, as well as other details of my life which could be very useful for someone cruising for helpful information when seeking to break into a house.  I don't think that had anything to do with my break-in, but I think I'll be stopping that practice anyway.  Maybe I'll also dial back my post-a-day routine, especially since I've been asked to work on creating a new blog to post useful information for people affected by past, present, and future cutbacks at my workplace.  Plus I'm going to be meeting with plumbers, home security installers, and other such folks during my free time, so I'll have less time for blogging - or anything else, for that matter.

Off schedule

Oh, boy. I vary stuff ever so slightly, and things go kaput. I should always remember that stuff about "sensitive dependence on initial conditions."

Today was my first day back to work in a while. It may also have been my last day back to work for a while, depending on how the schedule goes. It was only six hours - sufficient to satisfy some technical requirements for maintaining benefits for the month of August, which is why everybody in my department is rotating through six-hour shifts right now. The problem is that by Monday I had almost readjusted myself to a "normal" daywalker schedule. I had gotten up at six in the morning and got to bed just after midnight. I woke up Tuesday morning at 5:30, but forced myself to keep sleeping for a few hours more. Once I was up, I had a plan: breakfast, shower, get dressed, then take my mom out to a 2:30 appointment and grocery shopping. Check out by 4:00, home and unpacked by 4:30, head to work by 5:00.

I forgot to do a blog post.

The problem is, there were two things I wanted to blog about, and I think they deserve their own blog posts. So I'll do that.

Damn, I used to be able to write

I bought dental floss today. Fifty-five yards for eighty-eight cents. Dental floss, it seems to me, is a product subject to massive price inflation and massive size deflation. I knew I'd written about this in the past, so I did a search of Another Monkey for "dental floss." What I found surprised me in two ways:

1. The price of dental floss is the same as it was over two years ago.

2. Damn, I used to be able to write.

I don't know if observation #2 is actually true. I mean, maybe what I was writing twenty-five months ago was crap, as crappy as what I'm writing now. But I've always been plagued by this tendency to envy the quality of my writing in the past. I'm sure in June 2008 I was looking back at stuff I had written in 2006 or 2005 and thinking "Wow, I used to be able to write."

Judge for yourself, if you have the time. Stroll through the archives of yesteryear's posts and see if you don't agree.





When you are done, you may enjoy these images of crepuscular rays, taken at about 8:24 tonight:

No post today

Sorry. Things to talk about. Just don't feel like talking about some, and can't do justice to others tonight.

Bonus day

Tomorrow I am getting an unexpected day off. It was only going to be a four hour day anyway, so it's only a 10% loss on total earnings for the week. (Which is still pretty large.) But I am exhausted, and I never got my lawn across town mowed, so I should be able to get it taken care of.

Tomorrow marks the six year anniversary of this little endeavor. Maybe I can use the extra time to write a fitting post.


Fun fact: Coney Island is only a little more than two hours and forty-five minutes from Nanticoke. Maybe someday I'll make a pilgrimage there.