Social Media, Ads, and other Annoyances and Time Sinks.

On a day after the elections, when the blue tsunami has hit showing that we the people haven't indeed lost our minds to the Magas, I sit here pondering online advertising.

See, I run a lot of software to block ads.  A Bloody Huge amount.  Recently Facebook decided to tweak their page.  Their right.  But when I see five ads, literally, for ever single pertinent "friend's post" i have to question why I bother.

On the other hand, I hear this often.  People dropping Facebook for other alternate social media outlets.  I've kept Facebook going for family.  I don't have a lot of "friends" on there, but I do that for a reason.  Only about 150 friends there and almost all are family or a direct connection. 

On Blue Sky, I do.  13000 at last count.  I have been vetting like-minded people there who have stumbled across what I am putting out and who think "hey, let me follow him".  Both outlets I have the same attitude - find me, and I will see what you have to say.  

Early on, I decided chasing fame online was overkill.  I go about my business, and do my thing.  The blog is my own echo chamber, a scratch pad for my life.  I put thoughts out into the ether, and things that I feel that I need to remember.  Deep dives into mechanical maintenance on sports equipment, or total teardowns of electronics, or cooking/baking.  Ya know, normal crap that I decided I needed a ramble on about.

Since 2009, I have been doing that.  I don't seem to want to stop that so many years later, even if it is canned humor on the weekends that have its own audience, and I have been recipe heavy on Wednesdays.

Good grief, have I really been doing this blather for 17 years?

It's all kind of feeding itself, pun intended.  After all if I am going to make something to fuel my training efforts, I will want to keep that recipe where I can get at it.  Everything is tested, and vetted.  It's also right sized so it doesn't cause issues.  

So I have had my fun for the day on there.  I think I may have reported more than 50 ads for ludicrous reasons, and that could be closer to 100.  

I don't understand why, nobody likes them, and there isn't really any reason why I would have someone screaming at me to buy their product.  It won't change my mind.  Especially at this ponderous volume that they have decided to shout at me, you, and everyone.

Can't say that the "Influencer" life makes all that much sense.  I"m kind of an edge case.  Sitting in my rocker, listening to a Soca station in London, while the thunder rumbles on the 16th day in a row.   I doubt I'd find many people in the US that like to listen to Caribbean music, unless they have a connection there.  I don't but I am amused.

So influence away.  I'll keep blasting away at annoyances.  Besides, I have to go tend to the oven.  It's time to set out food for dinner.  

Trust in Dog. When Rack Decides for you that The Walk Is Over

Walking along muttering to myself.  I was trying to put some plan into the day.  That's what I do while following after Rack.

To keep a McNab Dog, or any other herding dog, mentally stimulated in an urban environment, you need to get a few things worked out.  This is a solid rule for any dog, but especially for a herding dog.  

They need to know the lay of the land.  I have seen this sort of thing with Lettie before him, and Rack knows where he is at any given moment.  We would get out onto the walk and I would stop and say "Lets go home!".  At that point, I would be led by my dog to my front door.  The walks are as much as two miles (3Km) at one go, and we have four walks per day.  It gives them plenty of room to explore, to meet favorite people and favorite dogs, and there will be lots of sniffing.

They have always known how to get to the front door. 

For the first few years, we purposely would go out on our walks and try to get our dogs "lost".  It never worked, they would always lead us to the house.  Smiling the whole way.

Trust me on this one, this is why we have a dog.  Never mind that some people would cross the street to stay away from someone with their dog - those are the ones you don't want to run into anyway!  Companionship and protection.  After all, they don't know that my dogs have always been trained to be in any situation, and to be friendly at the very minimum.

While they are out, they are engaged in Dog Enrichment.  Keeping them aware, letting them free think, let them apply their own version of Dog Logic to any given situation.  

Rack is old.  15 years old.  In dog years, that's ancient.  He's learned the lay of the land.  That is why this is so strange.  Getting to the middle of the walk, we would normally head through the central business district of our town.  Lots of friendly people, lots of things to see.  

We stopped. Hard.  Then Rack decided to do a Hard No and turn around the way we came.  It wasn't weather conditions.  He's old enough that when he can hear, it is a Hearing Day, as he is mostly deaf now.  

It wasn't that there were any trash trucks nearby, except the rolling dumpster of a Cybertruck which says more about the owner's bad decisions than the noise levels around us.

Rack is the same dog that once had a trash truck ahead of him, and pancaked on the sidewalk because there was another one coming around the corner behind him and he couldn't escape the noisy beasts.

This was just a Nope, I Am Not Doing This moment.

So we turned around and walked back home.  No thunder, no rain, no angry barking anywhere behind us.  One of those mysteries that has us repeating "Well, this is new!" and following behind.

Who knows what lurks inside that little furry head.  We passed by some of his favorite people that he had just passed on the way down there.  He saw them, gave a wag or two, and walked right past.  I had to say to the people "He's on a Mission!" and continued on to his intended destination.

Hard to know.  Our vet has told us that he has active tumors.  She doesn't know how he's still going on his Bonus Years as we call them.  I insist it is nutrition and exercise - I'm something of a trainer in two sports so I'm a bit of a force of nature myself.

I'm really just thankful that he's doing as well as he has been.

He is also recovering from a bout of pancreatitis.  It exposed his weakening.  He's now losing muscle strength and mass.  He's spending most of the day laying flat out on the cool tiles in the house, and having trouble getting up.  It's a part of being on the trailing edge of the bell curve of how long a dog can last.  Or so we understand.  Whatever his infirmities are, he's in something of a remission this week.  It could change overnight, who knows.

As I explain to everyone, Rack Leads.  We go where he wants.  We watch what he needs and cater to them.  It has always been that way with him, that way with Lettie before him.  Once they learn where they are I simply Trust In Dog.

I would do it all over again.

Rack, you are being a little furry idiot. Well, That is New.

In the 80's show Mad About You, Paul Reiser said that having a dog is all about saying "Well, that is new." when looking at his dog Murray standing on top of an empty dining area table looking pleased at himself.

It really is like that.  The latest thing is that Rack, my elderly McNab SuperDog (TM) wants out.  Every hour.  It wouldn't be so bad if he did something but, well this is new, he walks out to the yard and stops.  That's about all of it.  Just stops.  He notices that I am waving to him and telling him to go on about his business, and sometimes that works.

Mind you, I am doing this sort of thing all day long.  Up at 5AM, I walk out in boxer shorts and trying to get CBC radio working on Sirius. I look up and he's looking off into the distance.  I would rather be inside because this morning Your Weather Was Drunk On My Lawn at 44 degrees freakin' Fahrenheit.  That being the devil's temperature of 6.66 degrees Celsius for the imperially impaired.

I am a good 8 miles south of the freeze line.  It never gets cold enough to freeze here, and it will warm enough to be merely annoying later.

With him being elderly, I am never quite sure if he can hear me.  Some may say it is "Selective Hearing", so I get the idea to test it.  When my prior dog, Lettie, was still alive, she lost her hearing around 9 or 10.  She still had enough that I could bend down and talk in her ear and she might just get it.  At 14, that is where Rack is at, although there are exceptions like Chip Bags, and Refrigerator Doors. 

That selective hearing does extend to deliveries, so the dreaded truck driving by gets a pass if he doesn't notice.  Seeing that the front door is his job to watch through the glass, if he sees the evil brown truck, he will bark at it like he's auditioning for the Yodeling Society of South Florida.  

Well, that is new.

Since the other delivery companies come in all sorts of trucks and personal cars, Amazon gets a grumble like Fed(arrow)Ex, and he has to see them hit the porch to make any effect. 

Every dog gets to make themselves comfortable, I suppose, but digging a hole in the mat at the front door is a new thing.   It's been through the washer enough times that is getting a little frayed at the corners, so it's not terrible that he is helping things along.  In the evening the silence is broken by white footed paws dragging across the little gold rectangle there.  Scrape! Scrape! Scrape!

Well, that is new, as well.  Dogs don't normally dig to China through the doormat, do they?

That business with hearing though shows up at strange moments.  If I am watching TV, and it gets too loud, he will get up and go into the bedroom and put some distance between it and him.   If I laugh too loudly, same thing, he's off to the bedroom.  I'm big and loud anyway, so it happens frequently, sometimes more than once in a night.  I also possess access to his cookie jar so he comes back eventually, especially if I am in the kitchen looking through my own cookie jar.

Well, that is new, Hi Rack!

I have been told that hearing loss is a gradual muting of sounds until the tinnitus and ringing gets louder than what you really want to hear.  The Crickets are Loud Tonight might be something he would say.

The way to get around that is to talk at him in a high and squeaky voice.  I try not to do that in public because the sight of a fit 6 foot 4 inch tall man talking like a cartoon character might be a bit too much for others to handle.

Right now, the furry little idiot is sitting near the back room staring me down.  That wouldn't be the first time that happened this morning, so I have to let someone out.  Yet again.  But staring at the sky is new as well.  

Coming back into the house after being there long enough to stare at the back door, sometimes he will just sit down and stare as if to say that he wants out.  Immediately after coming in.  I've taken to ignoring that and putting a 90 minute time limit on all of that nonsense.

I guess that's part of the charm of having an elderly dog.  Scratching your head and saying to yourself "Well, that is new."

Rack and Oscar's Visitor At The Door

This was One Of Those Moments.
One Of Those Moments where you just have to scratch your head in confusion, and laugh.

It all started when I got the house to myself for a long week.  About 10 days.

I was rattling around by myself through the holidays, and December 27th, that was going to end.

Boxing Day, December 26th, I had to pick things up.  It was time to stop being a bachelor, and to begin to clean the house.

Living in South Florida, there is a fine layer of dust and sand that gets all over things.  You don't notice it at first, but you start looking behind things and under things and on top of things that you forgot to look, and there it is.  A layer.  Sometimes there are whole civilizations of dust mites living in it. 

You get used to it, so you periodically "Deep Clean" things.

But in just a week, there's enough that it needs to happen.  Move the furniture around, clean where it was, and move it all back.  Normal boring crap.  However that means that it would get loud. 

Oscar Likes Loud.  Oscar, my Orange Wing Amazon Parrot will make noises with anything in the house.  It could be a pencil dropped on the floor, he will chatter to it.  He laughs like I do, says "What?" in appropriate times, and believes that "Hello?!?!?" is an appropriate response to food. 

As in "Hello, you had better be bringing me some or else I will get louder". 

Louder can be heard a half mile away.  You don't want that.  He does "Louder" when the vacuum is run.  The vacuum would be run through the entire house today. 

"Oscar, want to play with the Hawks?"

I put Oscar out on the front porch on Aunt Betty's white plastic table.  She gave it to me with two chairs when she went back Up North and there it sits.  It was pristine when I got it, now three years of Dust later, it isn't. 

Did I say that the dust is from the beaches 2 and a half miles away?
Did I say that the dust is also from The Bahamas about 120 miles east of me?
Did I say that the dust also comes from The Sahara Desert half a world away?

Yes, really.  And it all got cleaned up.

I got out the vacuum and did the house.  Yes, even under the tv table cart and the couch.  All the chihuahua dog worth of loose dog fur were vacuumed away.  You never knew that a McNab Dog would shed so much, after all, he only has one coat and no undercoat.

At that point things got weirder.  I managed to mop the kitchen fairly quickly, and started on the dining room when I noticed that Rack the McNab SuperDog (TM) was acting concerned.  "Concerned" in most dogs will mean they might grumble or even bark.  Not with Rack.  He just stares holes through you with twin yellow-green laser beamed eyes as he melts your heart with curiosity.

Or in this case urgency.  He plopped himself in the middle of the living room staring at me.

I looked past him through the big window noticing that Oscar was not being bothered by anyone.

"Rack, I'm going to need that room soon."

Rack looked at me again as if to say "You had better check the door".  He's great for delegating responsibility since he's afraid of his own shadow.

I went back to finishing the dining room.

Straightening out my own frame and blocking off the dining room, I found out what was going on.  The house had visitors. 

Rack retreated to The Corner where he hides but was keeping an eye on both me and Oscar.
Oscar was looking at something just out of view and lunging at it. 

And there it was.  A Muscovy Duck.

Mind you, these ducks are completely harmless.  Since they're Outdoor Animals, they probably have all sorts of things that I don't want Oscar getting so I watched.  But instead of going to the door and shooing the creature away, I realized it was watching both me, and Oscar. 

I reached for the camera and squeezed off a couple pictures hoping that the light in the window wouldn't wash things out too badly.  It did and I would find that out later.

But there I was.  I was locked in another Wild Kingdom moment.  My house was visited by the ducks again.  This wasn't a surprise, we've got dozens of them.  I am only a short couple blocks from the nearest river and they never quite leave the neighborhood.  They are non-aggressive and harmless.  Since they eat the grubs in the grass, I can even say they're beneficial.

They're certainly entertaining, but I never expected them to come quite this close.

There was one a while back that decided that since I hardly ever drive my Jeep, it would roost under it.  I became a foster parent to a brood of baby ducks that would hide under there from the neighbor's formerly outdoor cats.  Not wanting to disturb them, I would always make certain that I could get outside quietly and go about my business.

Rack doesn't seem to mind them, but understands that they don't belong on the porch.

Like this rather curious one. 

It hopped onto the porch to see what this green parrot, Oscar, was doing on Betty's table, and discovered that there was me indoors watching it, and Rack watching all of us being confused.

I squeezed off a few shots more, turning on the flash for the last one.

The duck had had enough at that point when I tried to walk to the door.  It slowly turned around and walked back under the Jeep.  It had to be a part of the brood here.

So that's the thing.  You may have been used to living around nature, but nature never quite leaves you here in South Florida.  Sometimes it even pays a visit.

I went back to my cleaning and by the time I was done, it was wandering off the neighbor's property.

Nice to have a little visit when you're ready for a break from doing things, isn't it?

2203 Posts? Yep, it kept ticking for six years

This blog.  It's been a part of me for six years. 

I had to actually go back and check.  Gees, since July 30, 2009. 

I started it with a hello world post.  Everyone seems to.  You find your way back to it if you are interested.

I actually found that I enjoy writing.  I do get wordy, some of these posts are over 1200 words.  Almost all of them are off the top of my head.

Things got slower after a while.  You know, that New Blog Smell wore off.  I was writing about things that happened here in Wilton Manors, and the City Government scene.  I had to stop going to the commission meetings after a while, they were going well into the night and frankly I fall asleep at 10pm on a late night.  Doing that in the commission chambers when the meeting ended at 11pm would be sending the wrong message.

And I am actually quite in awe of the job that the commissioners do here, on average.  If you pay attention to your own city government, you'll find a few rotten apples here and there and a couple decisions you can't stand.

No comment there about specifics.

But since this is an "Anniversary Post" for the 2200th posting that happened over the weekend, I figured I'd do the old school Top Ten List of all times.  Since everyone seems to hit the same postings over and again, why not?

So from the most popular post to the 10th most popular post, here it is.

Most popular post:  The Gold Medal Flour Biscuit Recipe.  Trust me, this is an excellent recipe, I use it all the time when I want to show off.  If I really want to show off, I make home churned butter by putting the cream in the food processor and running it for 5 minutes or until I have butter and buttermilk in there.  Works like a champ!

#2:  Two Cycle Engine Repair - I replaced a primer bulb on a weedeater and apparently I did a good job of it since I still use the machine, 4 years later.

#3:  Simply Hired and the User Experience -The website simplyhired.com is not one of my favorites, and I wrote why and showed why they need to change.  They did incorporate a few changes of mine, and continue to change.

#4:  Puns and One Liner Weekend - A List of puns.  I really debated long and hard about posting Jokes here.  Then I realized that people actually enjoy the silly things and this blog gets hit heavily for them.

#5: GFS Marketplace Review - GFS Is a Wholesale marketer of foods and restaurant supplies.  They also sell directly to the public.  I'm quite happy with the store, but their coupons truly annoy me.  The software that they use to create the coupons, on your PC, require that software be installed.  Since nobody has told me what that does on my machine, I can't say I trust the software.  BUT the place is really quite good, and the staff is friendly.

Rounding out the rest of the top 10:

#6:  An Impatiens Flower Picture - This variety is no longer sold and went extinct.  Impatiens are now larger.

#7:  Jewfish Creek Bridge Picture - The view you get when you enter the Florida Keys.  This is what I think of as the "border" although I may not be technically correct.

#8: Canning 1, Pineapple 0 - Although I am a good cook, sometimes my recipies don't work!

#9:  Hotmail Annoyance: Turning off Hotmail's former interface behavior of hotkeys.  I hated hotmail, and I hatie Outlook so much more.  Microsoft has turned evil since Ballmer left.  I can't believe I am saying nice things about Ballmer since he was the punchline to a joke but there you have it.

Finally

#10: Sister Mary Ann's Gasoline - Yes, another joke.  Apparently loads of folks liked her story!

Rude Blog? Blogger is OK With That Again

One morning, I was sitting in my comfy bouncy chair, living my G Rated life.  Music playing, the dog by my side, the parrot chattering.

I open up my dashboard thingy after having made a purdy pixture for you folks to look at as well as a backstory.

There are plenty of sites that are nothing more than a picture a day or a list of them.  I look at those as well, they're great to fill up your computer for when the screensaver kicks in.  I must have close to a gig of them, who knows!

There was a nag link at the top of the page.  I rarely look at them anyway, most folks don't look at nags I suspect.  Twenty years of being trained to ignore adverts or simply blocking them in my case, and you get that way.

The link pointed me to a page that was titled "An update on the Blogger porn content policy".

I laughed.  Out loud even.

I may be noisy, but I have never posted that kind of content here.  I could.  It's legal.  At least it is at this point in history, tomorrow could change that.

The original change in policy was fielded to gauge reaction I suspect.  The reality is that "rude" is in the eye of the beholder.  There are some people who look at this blog every single day, others less frequently.  I know of one person who complains about it loudly, although never to my face.  Apparently I cut a little close to the bone in one or more comments about them.

No, I won't say who.

But.

Never anything that would even be considered a Hard Parental Guidance Rating, at least in my mind.  If it would get past the censors on the big three TV networks in the more enlightened parts of this backwards sliding country that I live in, I will post it.

Apparently I can now.  Well thanks, I can let my artistic nude flag fly I guess.  It's not for me, but it is for many people.

There are plenty of blogs out there that have restricted or adult content.  Some are simply to excite the reader, for however long it takes them to finish their visit.  Others are to educate about health or perhaps anthropological issues.  After all, teenage children would keep select copies of the National Geographic under their beds for private reading back in the day.  It was actually a plot point at the beginning of the movie Porkys II.  While seeming random, the plot of that movie is strangely parallel to the whole discussion of whether rude content should be allowed in the movie or not.


That sort of excitement is easy to find.  The educational sites are more important, and that is why the internet exists in the first place - to share information among people who are interconnected no matter how distant.

There was a great amount of noise, digital ink, and whinging done in a short period of time, and Google, Inc. have decided that the Blogger policy on Porn will not be changed.

It doesn't really effect me here, I'll continue to write the kind of things that Mrs Grundy in her small town may be interested in reading, but if you need that kind of medical or anatomical information that is hosted on a blog somewhere and somehow connected with Google and Blogger, it will be safe.

Sure, I'm vague, but I don't need that sort of information right now.  The last time I went for "medical" information it was to diagnose my brake problem on my Jeep Wrangler.

Besides, the kind of excitement that the 1950s teenager found in National Geographic is so prevalent and so easy to come by these days for free online, that you just don't need me taking pictures of body parts and slamming them up in 16 million colors with my website URL hidden semi-discretely on them.

I'll remain here, G rated, for all the world to see.

You may return to your regularly scheduled rude websites now, Google's fine with it.

Some People Have A Memory, I Have A Blog

Going through the list of old posts on this blog, I noticed that there is a weird counter intuitive pattern.

I have commented about how I put recipes on here because I want to be able to get to them.  We have a recipe box.  It is the size of a microwave.  I mean this is more than the card file that "mom used to have", this thing is a beast.

Now, mind you, it does serve two people with two very different cooking styles.  Every fall, for example, when it comes time to bake Fruitcakes, we dig down to the bottom of the box.  Finding the recipe, we place an order for the candied fruit, and wait.  When the fruit arrives, we make up these cakes.  They're nothing like anything you would find in a supermarket. 

At least in a larger supermarket.  Those things are cloyingly sweet and gooey. 

Homemade fruitcakes are rich and sweet but in a savory and almost spicy way.  That was the original recipe.  Not the gloppy stuff you find at a roadside tourist trap in the south.

Trust me it's a different world I'm talking about.

But that's the thing.  Since it is a box, the recipe you haven't used is always buried under the flotsam of baking.  My own recipes, pre-blog, were printed out and saved into a book.  Then, I started to "print" them to PDF files and saved them on my chip, a 128gb postage stamp sized memory chip.  I can move that between machines, and old copies of the files sit on servers now.  Since there are so many I threw up my hands and moved the best online.

So the blog serves as a mental scratchpad. 

Any task like that I tend to write up. 

Thinking that nobody really wants to read about my recipes, I would cast them off to the four winds like the milkweed seeds that I casually tossed over the fence that one day.

Shhh, don't tell anyone.

But you see, that's the weird thing.  The postings that I think are so much filler are the ones that the internet seems to like.  My recipe for Gold Medal Self-Rising Biscuits gets hit more than any other blog posting in the four-plus-years that I've been at this.

The stories about my McNab Superdog, Rack, get hit heavily too.  Apparently there really is an attraction for those feel good stories coupled with a picture of an admittedly good looking dog.

What was all this navel gazing about anyway, you ask? 

Simple.  I ran out of bagels.  I ran out of biscuits.  So I needed to make more over the weekend.  That caused a cascade of things.  Pizza Dough was made, risen, then half of it is rolled.  The remainder goes into Pretzel rolls. 

Serendipity is that act of finding something you wanted more than what you were looking for in the first place.  In my case, it's Challah Bread.

In March.  Sure, it's not traditional to have Challah in March, but Mom got it all the time and called it Jewish Egg Bread, and we loved it with peanut butter and jelly, or toasted with butter.

Buttah?

No, Mom's accent wasn't "Like Buttah", but she did have a funny way of saying things.  "Jew-eesh Aig Bread" was how that came out along with her Zs that came out "D'Zs".  I guess if you spoke only Italian until 7 you'd have an accent too, even if you did have an appreciation for proper Italian foods and sauce that you start on Saturday for Sunday's dinner.

Don't judge me.  I still say "Crick" for creek from time to time...

Even if I am not planning on churning butter for those biscuits, and settling for Cream Biscuits, I was going to do some serious cooking.  Since there was Char Siu Pork in the crock pot, there's extra ginger.  Can't waste Ginger since it is too good, so why not make Crystalline Ginger?  While that's simmering there's always time to make Lemon Curd since there are two Meyer Lemons in the fridge.

Recipes aside, those jokes that I feel a little guilty about posting always get hit heavily after the immediate posting.  They save me from Writer's Block, and I haven't had to do any during the week.  But if I ever get completely blocked, or have somewhere to go in an emergency in the morning, you'll see one during the week.

No, I wasn't going anywhere with this.  Other than the kitchen.  That's what happens when you need to do some cooking and your recipe file is online.  You start finding things you forgot you knew how to do.

Now, does anyone have any good ideas of what to do with Ginger Simple Syrup?  Pancakes perhaps?

The Little Mysteries Of Writing

Sitting down at a keyboard and writing, rambling on, can be an odd preoccupation.

You end up having a conversation with the inside of your skull.  An imaginary person is sitting there, and you're talking away.

It is possible to be entertaining, instructional, and engaging.  It is even possible to do all of that all at once.

It is possible to annoy, anger, and enrage.  I've done that as well.  In fact I've had someone once, thankfully just once, threaten me.

I laughed it off.  Being "On The Net" since the dusty old days of when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and the years started with 19, I have watched things go from being an academic discussion to the current obsession with cats, selfies, selfies with cats, and butts. 

Thanks to some pseudo-celebrities, it's even Selfies with Cats and with Butts. 

We're doomed I tell you, Doooomed!

This audience is always imagined, and sometimes it shows its head.  Mostly polite of course.  Most people are, or at least try to be, or at least think they are.

I've been at this for quite a while, and probably will continue for a while.  After all, it's easy to take a picture.  It's even easier to write about what you were thinking about.  I tend to do that and keep a few pictures in abeyance - that's in my back pocket.  Bang out a few paragraphs and so forth.

But you really never know what will get people excited. 

I've found that the recipes and the dog postings are very popular.  There are, however, some days you just don't understand.

This business with statistics.  You go into your favorite blogging platform and you can find out what people were looking at.  You also can do that with Google Analytics.  Both of which I do on a daily basis.

But I think I had a statistical anomaly that I am still scratching my head about.

Linux.

No don't run away.  It's not going to be banging on about how wonderful it is, or how it's the perfect thing to do with your old computer that got replaced on Xmas or Chanukah or your birthday. 

It is, but that's not the point.

While I do talk about Linux from time to time, I don't do it frequently enough to become an authority about the subject.  I'm kind of "middle of the road" with my knowledge on the subject.  Level 2 support, maybe Level 3, if you're taking notes.

When you look at your statistics and see that you got so many hits from so many places, you have to scratch your head.  Yeah that again.

I got 75 percent of my readers in yesterday from people sitting on a Linux computer.

3 out of 4 readers yesterday agreed that Linux was the platform of choice.

As opposed to about 1.5 percent of them in the real world.

Fifty times more people hit this blog with a Linux computer than in the real world?  Is my math correct?

Penguins unite!  You have nothing to lose but your Microsoft shackles!

As I write this on Windows 8.1 on a rather nice laptop...

Cross platform here.  Platform agnostic.

Dry, I'll stop that before I confuse you.

I just ... don't... get... it.

So instead I will just post a picture of the beach at Fort Lauderdale and call it even.  After all, my own family is suffering through some below 0 F wind chills today.  It won't even hit 70 here today or as we say "It's not a beach day ... unless you're from Minnesota".

But the Linux thing.... I just don't know!

Reminds me that I need to find the chip reader.  There's an i7 laptop that needs a copy of CentOS dropped on it for a server project I want to complete with Wordpress and a proper LAMP stack.

How to Fail At Pizza Crust Without Really Trying

I have a lot of recipes.  Many of them I share, some others I don't.

Oh come on, you know you hold back one or two of your favorites if you really like to cook or bake.  After all, how would you know what to bring to a party?

My chocolate chip cookie recipe is one of those.  I'll let you in on a secret though.  Churn your own butter.  It really makes the flavor pop!  Five minutes in the cuisinart later you have butter and buttermilk.  Make biscuits.

But the thing is that nobody ever tells you of the failures.

For every successful cook, there is a trash can full of fallen souffles, burnt biscuits, and wooden roasts.  Things that got undercooked, or overcooked.
Things that got the wrong proportions.
Things that went into the oven and the power went out.
The yeast might have been bad.

Any of those things!

The recipes I share are tested.  I have done them more than once.  I don't do them rushed.  I take pictures.  I marvel at the color of the crust, the flavor of the crumb, and the mouth feel of the flake.

But I have done them before.

Some of them I have done many times before.

Many many.

Really, that many.

But I am on a quest.  The quest for the Grail?  No Monty, not the quest for the Grail, for Camelot is a very silly place.

The quest is for the simplest recipes I can find for a given menu item.  They may take a little extra time or be quirky, but once I get it figured out, they're golden.

Fudge, for example, is dead simple.  Three ingredients for the basics, then toss in your goodies and you're done.  It can even be done in the Microwave by a bright five year old as a treat for mommy.  Doesn't even need daddy's help, and may even be better without it.  You really just have to "warm up" the chocolate and stir it until smooth.

My friends that are non-cooks or even anti-cooks are those who I find the simplest recipes for.  Cooking is one of those things that everyone, without fail, can learn, but they do have to at least try.

I went onto a search.  A quest!  No, not for that damn Grail, Monty, go sit down in the corner.

I was searching for "Three Ingredient Recipes".  Those usually are the ones that you mash together with a fork in a big bowl and then toss in the oven at an appropriate temperature.

Usually 350F.

For about 30 minutes or until done.

I found a lot of them.  Just go to your favorite search engine that doesn't track what you are doing, type in "Three Ingredient Recipe" and find what you are looking for.

At least that was the theory.

I was planning on a two ingredient pizza crust.  It was easy they said.  A cup of Self Rising Flour and a cup of Greek Yogurt.  They warned it will be sticky and they warned to make sure you used the real Greek yogurt and not the crap that has corn starch to thicken it.

I have everything on hand on a daily basis for that. 

The whole weekend I was thinking about trying this.  Seriously.

Ok, I don't have a life.  So give me one, I'll make failed pizza crusts for you, honest!

Finally I decided it was time to do it that day.  I waited until it was time.  I even had someone here who wanted to watch.  "Drop In" friends will do that.  They will help you if you have a task to get done if you make a hint.

So I got out the mixer. 
Dough hook. 
Self Rising Flour. 
Proper Greek Yogurt that was one step removed from Cream Cheese.
The dog got interested and joined us in the kitchen at this point.
Turn the bloody mixer on.
Get the parchment paper and line the cookie sheet while I'm watching the magic happen.
Dust the cookie sheet liberally with flour so it doesn't stick.

They always tell you that when you make a pizza.  Pizza crusts tend to be drier than bread dough.  Put down a lot of flour and knead well.  It is like playing with clay, you have to work it.

Blah blah blah, this is two ingredients, right?

Finally I get bored with watching it spin and switch off the mixer.

I end up with something that looked more like biscuit batter.  Thick and sticky.  I could use it to spackle a wall.

No, really.  I have a hole in the wall I could have slapped this puppy into and it would have sat there on a vertical surface just drying out and ...

Pouring the batter out onto the flour I began to roll it out.

That would be when I found the problems starting.

It stuck to the paper so I added more flour.

It stuck to the wooden rolling pin so I added more flour.

It started making holes in the crust so I added more flour.

At this point it was about a cup and a half of flour total.  This wasn't right.  The parchment paper was turning into a wet sticky mess and fully bonded with the bottom of the pizza dough.

After about 5 minutes more of this silliness, I got another piece of parchment paper and dusted it heavily with more self rising flour.  I was expecting, that, if I ever got this in the oven, it would burst open in a scene that I Love Lucy would have been proud of as the crust would fall out onto the floor and ask for asylum here in South Florida.

Taking the dough and parchment paper, I flipped it on top of the new parchment paper.  A parchment paper sandwich now, I began to peel the dough off the older paper onto the new.

I began to grumble at this thing.

Cursing everyone from the Doughboy on the commercial to the inventor of commercial yeast, I started to pick at the sticky goo.

Thirty minutes later, I was still picking.  I had peeled about a half of the dough off the paper and I simply gave up.

You see, life is a learning process.  You win some, you lose some.  I'm sure you heard that before.

In this case I probably should have simply added more flour to the mixer until I got to where I could work the dough.  At least that was what my baking skills told me.

I didn't.  I wadded up both layers of parchment paper, the glue like batter, and tossed it unceremoniously into the trash bin.

With. A. Thump.

We had Chicken Parmesan sandwiches instead.
With Home Fries since they cook well with no fuss.

I was beaten but not done.  I know I will have that pizza.  Just with my fool proof yeast risen dough.  After all, it is my sister Pat's pizza dough, and I know that recipe like I know the back of my hand.

All the way down to the piece of dried pizza dough that I found stuck to my fingers when I was eating that Chicken Parm Sandwich.

Mmmm Chicken Parm on Home Made Rolls.

Let me tell you the story of Pat's Pizza Dough....

The Anatomy of a Post

The Anatomy of a Post

Start out the day with the Morning Dog Walk. 

Stepping out of the house, I look East toward the ocean.  A little more than two miles away I can see the tops of the hotels and condos at the beach.  A red light glows over the tree line along with the top floor or three of those tower blocks.  They're welcome to it.  The beach can be fun, so can the ocean, but there's a certain something about living on a sandbar with one way out that makes me nervous.  NOAA says we get a tropical storm every two and a half years on average anyway. 

So when do you get a tropical storm on that half year?  Lies and statistics.

Rack has finished watering his favorite rock, and I look up for a friend.   She has been over that way, near the red light guarding the sandbar for most of the year, but she's getting more and more shy as time goes on.  Her name is Venus and she was left alone a while ago by her partner Mars.  He shot off toward the west months back and she's been fading towards the Bahamas and the Atlantic ocean beyond.

We go out looking for our own adventure.   Rack sees someone who he thinks he knows.  I'm never sure whether he sees the dog first or the person, but for no matter, it's merely a distraction.  We're trying to get our walk in.  I'm reminded of a topic and am walking aimlessly at that time of morning.

What was his name all those years back?  Jim's roommate in college?  Joe, I am sure of it.  At least it was the first year only.  He ended up with someone else for the next couple.

We're wandering back to home.  In the full light of the approaching Supermoon, I still can't tell whether he's true to his name, the Yellow Footed Herding Dog, or he's just clean.  We hit the dog wash station on the porch as I wash his feet.  We're plunged into the dark of the approaching dawn and it's time to head in.

More details as I am in the bathroom brushing my teeth.  I'm a lousy housekeeper, the little collection of brass figures on top of the medicine chest need to be cleaned.  Dust gets everywhere, the Sahara ocean leaves its mark on South Florida as everything needs to be washed down frequently.

I get through breakfast, letting the dog wander and water the backyard, and my own morning routine.  It's an early Sunday morning.  I'll be putting up a joke today.  No such thing as a day off, it's merely a slower day.  There are things yet to do.  All the "meta" things we all do, tasks that need to be done in order to do a task.  If you want to make an omelette, you have to break an egg.

I load up the last 80 web pages in tabs on the browser, answer the kettle.  Coffee time.  Settle back in for the mug and the morning.  Finishing all that it's time to check in and see if anything has Gone South, what has exploded.

Nothing.  I may as well go outside.  The internet is broken.  I'm up too early to disturb anyone else in the house, the sun has barely risen.

Pavlov, your dog is drooling.

I get up.  We all have a digital dial tone these days.  The Brrrrr in our ear isn't a wired telephone, too bad as I have a couple that are really quite nice. That has been replaced by the internet.   If that isn't up and running, things grind to a halt.  How do they think they can call themselves a utility if they can't keep the internet running?  Com-crap not withstanding, I hit reset by unplugging the cable modem.  Our internal network is still running.  One of the problems with listening to an internet radio is that when the internet crashes, the music stops.

Or more likely, that's the idea.  Music going means all is well.  Music stops, and we're sunk.  Run in panic like the crazy ants that live in the Mango tree's pot.  Lift that conch shell.  They'll run all over your arm in a panic.  No wifi?  Are you crazy trying to run a business without it these days?

Can I hop on the neighbor's connection?  Not with the Big PC.  I don't have their password any longer.  That machine I fixed for them has been re-imaged, and the password is gone.  Forget using a phone, that's insane trying to look at anything "production" on a browser on an Android phone that is only 2.8 inches across running a 5 year operating system.

Realize that the world hasn't come to an end.  I can write on a notepad.  Or rather Notepad.exe.  My spelling will be checked when I paste it all into Blogger later on.  I could do it live on my internal Website.  I've got Wordpress running here.

I hear stirring from the other room.  I'll pass the ball.  I don't have the phone number for...

"Hey do you know the internet is down?"

Yeah I had a feeling... "Gonna call Comcrap?"

A little bit later, all is right with the world.  I get the posting out.  I think I'll wear That T Shirt "I'm outside today because the internet is down."  Yeah, that's the ticket.  I should probably get that contact info for them.  Yet another magic bullet to the modem.

1800 Posts and All Is Well!

Yeah I looked at the blog info and noticed that I had a nice round number and thought, why not?

It's been four years, 1800 posts.  Some good, some I could have done better.

How does that sound, could have done better.  Code word for "What was I thinking?"!

At any rate, I had a four year run and only missed one day recently. I'm still a little embarrassed about that.  I looked at the site that morning very early, got up to do "other things" and got into a shiny object.   Since I try to have something on here by 10AM I simply forgot.

I'm also doing some of these in advance, some of these on the seat of my pants.  Depends on how full my head is at.

I've been told that I can write about just about anything if I have a mind to.  That came from my own training in High School.  I was hard pressed for a book report, remember those?  I went up into our attic.  Back in the 1950s would be my guess, someone had been on that Book Of The Month Club thing.  The books got collected and the box ended up in our attic.  I can't even say it was my own parents that were members of the club, the box may have been given to them.

Taking that box, I found the most obscure novel I could find.  I remember it was titled "Gestapo".  I opened the book up and saw the chapter titles.   Writing a paragraph on each chapter would be easy, I never actually read the book.

Got an A Minus on that report too.  I guess I can tell a story if I put my mind to it.

Those who return here seem to think so.  According to Google Analytics, 27 percent of the people who read this blog on a given day have been here before.   That was over the last year or so.

(Waves hands)  Hi and welcome back!

On a planet of almost 8 billion, that's not a bad percentage.

It's not a big blog, I don't have all THAT many readers, and if someone were to send me some money saying thanks... it would be the first.

Writing helps keep my mind clear, and it is something that given a topic, is easy for me.

I guess though to close this out, I'll give you that David Letterman Top Ten List for the last month only.

1. Puns and One Liner Weekend
2. Hotmail Annoyance - Turn Off Keyboard Shortcuts
3. Parking hours discussed at the Commission Meeting
4. Gold Medal Flour - Extraordinary Buttermilk Biscuits
5. The Roof is Evil, and Must Die!
6. Goodbye Lisa
7. A Parrot and a Magician on a Ship
8. Three Men Are Walking in a Desert - Humor
9. Gnome 3 in Debian Jessie Using VMWare Workstation
10. I-95 North, Deerfield Beach, Florida

Most of those are older even if it is over this month only, and surprisingly people are coming to this blog for those jokes.  I guess I shouldn't be embarrassed at posting them.  I find them in various places.   If you want to send me some, feel free.  My own rules are that I have to be able to tell them in a business meeting - no swears, no bigotry, and not too controversial.

The other thing that got me is that there are quite a few people coming to this blog directly.  They must have bookmarked the URL.  They are also using google, specifically, and searching for it.  That's a bit circuitous, but hey knock yourself out.

You will note that number 9 is very much the tech that I know that my local readers tend not to read.  It's kind of esoteric.  I use Linux every day without fail, on the desktop, along with Windows.  It's an environment that I'm as comfortable in as my Mac OSX or Windows.  As I find things, I will let  you know.

So enough of this patting myself on the back.  The dryer is beeping, and the dog is begging for more yogurt!

I'm not going away just yet... I'll be back tomorrow.  No, really, that one is already in the can.  I pushed it aside just to do this one when I noticed that it was a round number.

I Finally Missed One

I write an article a day, every day.

Or at least I had up until Saturday, last.

I was sitting at the laptop, looking at the machine, going through my normal grind and something happened.  I guess I got distracted by some shiny object.

At 9AM, I reviewed what I had written to go onto the blog.  That's pretty typical for me.  I tend to write off the cuff and get things done at the moment.  Off the top of my head.  For the longest time I was "A Week Ahead".  That slowed to "A Day Ahead".  Then I started having writer's block and ended up dipping into my Day Ahead and setting them off while writing something for tomorrow at a more convenient time.  My cushion was gone.

Weekends were easy, I keep a file on the desktop called "jokes.txt" where I grab jokes that amused me, change the language so that they could be broadcast on TV, then save them onto that file.  I'd post one on Saturday, one on Sunday.  Just copy and paste and then release, announce the post, then done.

But I slipped.  Who knows.  I'm a great multi-tasker, usually doing four or five things at once.  Well we all make a mistake from time to time, I guess that's why pencils have erasers.

That was the first time since September 10, 2009 that I haven't posted something and that next day was when I went to go to a daily post.  Coming up on 5 years.

I realized that I had done that when I woke up enough to look in the mirror Sunday morning.  Up at 5AM on the dot.  Stupid o'clock ... or so.

Those jokes aren't the favorite things to read by the people who have liked the blog on Facebook.  Yes, I'm there too.  The number of people who read them tend to be markedly lower than the weekday postings, immediately.  But they do get read by people out in the world.  Believe it or not, there are quite a few people who like to read dumb jokes about Moose and they end up reading my blog for a page or three.

It's all linked and they show up on your favorite search engine, whichever that one is.   On some searches, I am actually the first link you will find.   I guess I really do understand Search Engine Optimization, or I have an idea of what I'm doing.  Generate enough content and people will actually read it.

When I got back from the morning rituals in the house, the dog walk, and my first mug of coffee, I thought I might just blow it all off for Sunday as well.  Hey I took the weekend off!

Nope.  It's Sunday afternoon, I'm sitting here with a glass of iced tea, ducking laser beams from the sun reflecting off of two different properties, and listening to a generic dance channel, all the while writing to you folks.

I said it once a while back that I didn't know how long I will keep this daily article writing up, but I will go back to pre-writing the blog for now.   It makes it easier to Skip A Day.  I did that when I went to Key West.  Got a full two weeks ahead and took dozens of pics, then posted them for weeks after.  I think that happened the same time that they pulled down Old City Hall here.

There is a funny thing about writing a blog.  "Different strokes for different folks" is a great way to describe writing and content.   Some people actually look forward to my stupid jokes.  Others love the dog stories.  My recipes get hit very heavily.  This week there was only one article that I wrote within last week that was in the top five - the one about scrapple.   All the rest were heavy tech about Linux, Job Search Online, and the Biscuit article - in no particular order.

I do watch what gets read here, it's all about what's on the top of my head when I sit down to write, but I do try to write on a different topic and discipline each day.  I also try not to be too dry.  In fact, I'm reading this and thinking it's one of the more dry articles that I have written in a while.

Since it's going to be a crazy-busy week for me, I will take some more time and try to get ahead a bit.  That includes posting next weekend's jokes today.  Blogger will release them when I tell it to in the future.  It makes it easier for me if I actually remember to put something out there.

So if you actually do enjoy what I write, tell me and thanks, it helps to know and it helps to keep my brain cleared of the chaff.  Introspection is good for the soul.

If you don't then why have you read this far down?

Now I Know Why People Store Passwords On Post-its Under The Keyboard

I have a video.  In retrospect it isn't all that much.  About a minute of my dog romping in the back yard.

I got it off the video camera, reformatted it to the correct size.  HD Video used to be a special thing, but now... even a cheap phone will do better video than we used to get back in the square box days of TV.

Not too long ago, and yeah, get off my lawn.

I grabbed a picture of my dog, and my neighbor's dog Ellie.

Both were a lead-in.  I have done this sort of thing before, professionally.   I may be a bit rusty, but editing video is something I have done since the mid 1990s both professionally and as a hobby. 

I have taken video that I have shot, as well as video created from broadcast sources, and I even made a giant Powerpoint project that I converted to video.  Yeah, you know the one that runs behind the stage to annoy, er advertise companies at a street party?  I did that.

I managed to get the short video, three transitions, four titles, a comment frame, and more, put together and in the right format for the web.

Time to log into youtube.  Oops.  Where's that password?

Wait, the washer was beeping.  It needs to go on another spin cycle anyway.

Back to ... where was I?

Postman arrived... I can ignore that for a little bit.   Let me tweak the titles again, I'm not too happy how things show up in motion.  I'm getting a blur.

Time to render the video again.  Crash.

Windows is demanding a reboot, I can postpone that.

Bring the project back up again.  I think I need to find a better piece of software to do that task, I'm running something from 2003 still.  At least it's not like writing a novel in an extinct word processor and on DOS.

Once I get this render done and uploaded, I'll look into Cinelerra and Ubuntu Studio again.  I have enough Linux machines around me that that shouldn't be a problem.

More distractions, this time the fifth recruiter in the last hour.  Sure, you're from New Jersey.  Right, and I'm living on the Moon...

Ahh, render is done, now back to that old youtube account I have... Ramblingmoose.   What was that password again? 

Fail.  No such luck.  Should have written that thing on the bottom of a Post-it and stuck it on my desk somewhere.  It's not in the emergency file either.

Oh well.   Time to drop back five and kick.   Write about the experience, curse at Google with my best might, and put up the original video of Rack licking peanut butter out of the Kong.  

*sigh*

Wow, that was only a month after I got him? Long time ago...

A Field of Yellow Flowers

I have a secret.  Some days, I just walk out the door with the camera in hand thinking I may need this to jar my memory to write.

One of those mornings where I wake up way too early or way to late, and the mind just is clear.  Too clear.  A morning where clarity of thought is so strong that you can hear the winds whistle through the ears.

A mental dial tone of a day.

Stand up to make coffee and breakfast's first course, and realize that the sun is just now coming up.  Looking out at the pool it's beginning to rain for the first time in a week.

The dog wants a fish oil tablet as a treat, then the yogurt and cranberry that hasn't yet been pulled from the refrigerator.  Tea Kettle is whistling to make iced tea for later and coffee for now.

One ounce of grounds weighed, 18 ounces of water, two packets of sweetener, two level teaspoons of creamer yields one perfect mug of coffee.   Remember that kiddies!

By now, anyone who takes pictures regularly has a large library of memories.  A catalog of photography that serves to jar your memory of things that sometimes should be shared, and others that should not.  The trip to the beach where you climbed into the giant conch shell and couldn't get out easily but got a picture of it as you bent over to retrieve your right shoe comes to mind...

But there's this picture of little yellow flowers.  What to do with them?  They're really quite nice, but look like the white ones in the yard that you're always trying to pull since the seeds get caught in the dog's fur.  A nice innocuous native species that should be propagated because they do so well with so little care.

Still getting settled into the New-To-Me computer it's time to fire up Photoshop.  Oh great, the fonts got confused again.  No, using the official font for the road signs in Poland would not quite work with a "softer" picture like this one.  Instead of Drogowskaz, try MV Boli again, it is scripty but not Comic Sans.

Comic Sans.  Shudder.  Let's make the world look like 1996 again!

Ok, find my color for the stroke, and add the titling.   Hide the URL inside the photo just in case someone got slick and tried to borrow the thing commercially...

There we go, all nice and pretty.   Nice new shiny object for the blog.

They will never suspect that each of those beautiful yellow flowers are smaller than the size of their little pinky and that you managed to feed some more mosquitoes when you went out to take the photo.

Wet nose on the right arm and a wiggle says Pay Attention to Me!  After all, it is all about the dogs, right?

As Rack jolts my head out of the stream of consciousness, my mind jerks back to the present.  That, and the UPS guy just drove past.

Waiting on him... he's got the fan for my backup computer.  I'll have to take apart the laptop and do a photo shoot of that.   Most people never even considered that they can do repairs to a desktop, let alone a laptop computer.  That will have to wait for next week when the little box gets here with the smile on the side.  For now, I've got bigger fish to fry.  After all, that iced tea is calling and the dial tone just turned into a growler. 

The mind has been off the hook long enough, the stream of consciousness has broken.

Making 4AM Work

4:14 glowers at me from across the room.

Grumble.  Darkness.

4:26

This isn't working.

4:34

Not going to fall back to sleep am I?

4:36

Feet hit the floor, grab the socks.

Even Rack doesn't believe I'm up at Insane O'Clock.  He barely looks up at me through the predawn glow. 

I pad to the bathroom with my way lit by dozens of little Power On LEDs on various clocks and power conditioners.

Take care of business.  It's now 4:45.  May as well get started. 

I walk out of the bedroom and say "Hello Oscar".  Rack is still laying in his dog bed.  Oscar thinks I'm insane and tells me so.

"Plbtbtbtbtbtbt".
Just what I need, social commentary from a bird.  "Ok, Oscar, Good morning."
"Hello!  Plbtbtbtbtbtbt".

I think Raspberries, I haven't had them in ages...

I get Rack's food and water set up for him and try to get him to eat.  He finally sticks a black nose around the corner.  Slowly moves over to the bowl, gives it a single sniff and walks to the front door.

"Hey, I'm over here."

I get Rack dressed and we walk outside.  Chilly morning.  Should be, I'm up and walking the dog a solid hour earlier than normal.  It isn't yet 5AM.  I bet the people I see won't be all that ... normal.   Even the gym is closed.

We stop and sniff.  And Sniff.  And Sniff.   Every.  Single. Step.  It seems we're in a sniffy mood but nothing really happens.  

The nice thing is that it's quiet.  I mean quiet in a way that it rarely is in South Florida.   I'm just about in the middle of the sprawl of the city and there's nothing going on.   I hear a van approaching.   It is approaching for so long that I realize I was hearing it before it was even in town. 

The van passes, we get out to The Drive.   The parking lot was unproductive.

The pavement is wet from misdirected irrigation systems.   The sprinkler heads are pointed in strange angles.  I'm That Guy who walks past a sprinkler that is pointing strangely and re-aims it to do some good.  Besides, watering concrete won't help anyone.

We make it to the middle of the walk before Rack finally wakes up enough to do what he needs to. 

Still silent, the closing of the trash can actually echos off the big apartment building towards our rear.

It is our city.  Mine and the dog's.   Walking down the middle of the street with nothing to worry us.  Even that strange barky rottweiler in the house on the corner is sleeping when we walk past.

Really, hair trigger dogs need training.  Shaddap dog!

I spot an approaching car far enough off that we manage to get to the side of the street well before we need to and wave.   It's an unknown officer from our PD - you can't see who it is in this darkness and I suspect that is how they like it.  It wouldn't be the first day I see a cop at well before 6 AM in town, I expect them.

The one thing I realize is that all this is going much faster than usual.  The next walk in a bit more than 12 hours will be the 5PM walk.  Same distance could take as long as an hour.  Every dog in the neighborhood is out watering the park at 5:25 PM.  At 5:25AM you have the city to yourself.

I'm so early that I realize I am back home sitting in my chair having had breakfast, sitting coffee, chair dancing to a Brit-pop RnB song played on BFBS that fades into their presenter giving weather forecasts for the British Forces around the world.

18C in Kandahar, 5C in Kabul, and 18C and sunny in Gib.

That's Gibraltar to us outsiders.  Gib's chilly tonight, going down to 9C.

Dance Contest in Germany and a pick-up aerobics get together workout in the Falklands.

By the time the sun is up, I'm already getting restless.  The dog has decided that he'll just finish his sleep.  I'm deciding on a second cup of coffee.

Checking on email, my part for the computer is on its way, two different websites need attention, the newsletter for the month gets started, and I get a part for a project that will let me sell a computer in a couple weeks.

May as well just be productive if you're up at 4, you never know who you won't stumble into.

The Dog, The Hedge, and My Shoulder

I spend most of my time out following Rack around town.  When someone sees me outside of the house, it's one of three mile-plus walks.

When you walk around in circles three times a day, you end up seeing things.  Neighbors at the same time and place.  Other dogs.  Stranded snowbirds.  Leftover partiers from last night the bars. 

It's all a part of living in a resort town within a resort town.  While Fort Lauderdale's Spring Break heydays are long gone, there's a definite chilled out atmosphere here. 

We do have a number of routes.  People, and their dogs, are creatures of habit.   Same time tomorrow is a good rule of thumb.  I expect to see the same people.  There's one person who has a habit or walking past my house with a chihuahua.   He's notable because his bald head has caught the rising sun of the morning more than once.  Instead of walking his dog, he's carrying the dog in his left arm.   It is always his left arm, the dog is always upside down, and the dog's head is usually draped over the crook of that arm lolling around.

Needless to say it's "That bald guy with the dead dog again!" comes to mind when I see the top of his head bouncing over the top of the laptop screen.

The first walk of the morning starts in the same way most days.

Check the weather conditions to know how to dress.  69F in mid February with not a cloud in the skies, light breezes off the ocean?  T-Shirt and Jeans.  At a quarter to six in the morning, I expect a quiet walk.

Try to coax Rack to eat.  He's more interested in getting outside.  Parked at the door after he sniffed the bowl, I know it's going to be a bit of a rush.  I'll have to call him over about three times before he calms down enough to lasso him with collar and harness.  Silly puppy!

We walk out the door, down the couple of streets and end up in the parking lot.   I wander through the place randomly from tree to tree, in a rough approximation of Brownian Motion.  My being a very large molecule bounced around by a smaller more reactive one in my dog.

Silly mutt, Go Poop.  Go poop... NOW!

Well, that didn't work!

We make it through the large parking lot disinterested in the open spaces.   Of course.  It's not private enough.

I'm getting accelerated as he pulls me along.  Luckily I wake up fairly quickly in the predawn hours.   Looking to the skies, Venus is bright and the moon glow casts it's light on me making shadows on the ground. 

But Rack just still hasn't found The Place.

I'm getting concerned.  Will he do "it" again?

Yes.

He's out on The Drive, snuffling around the bases of the hedges.  Doing The Dance, he begins to spiral inward as he spins seeking The Spot.  Pirouetting on a point he drifts behind the shrubs.

Crap!  Literally and figuratively, I think, how on Earth did he do that AGAIN?  Fair enough, I never did like those public restrooms either, but a bashful dog?

Rack has a habit.  Find the smallest spot you can, then go in there.  If you need to do anything do it.

Dog Logic.

The problem is that I don't fit.  I am an athletic 6'4" who drives a now "classic" Jeep Wrangler because I don't fit in a Honda Civic.  Too small a space and I'll get stuck.

I bend down.  Noticing how perfectly shaped the little hedge is I'm getting pulled out from the hedge by the other arm.  Rack!  SIT!  Dog, you're insane, we just won't do it this way again.  Nope!

I wedge myself between the cement of the light pole and the hedge hearing crackling of the limbs and leaves as my arm reaches to clean up after the dog.  Some small bits of plant snapped, I'm now wearing those same leaves and who knows what else on my formerly clean T-Shirt.  There's a dent in the hedge that is a passable impression of my right shoulder that I hope will "buff out".

Pulling free, I vow to not allow him to put me in the spot like that again.  On the other hand, he did the dance and found Magnetic North which was entertaining and a bit of a surprise.  Spinning around before moving their bowels, a dog will generally try to align themselves North and South.  How he managed to find himself enough room to spin around in that confined space I have no idea.  McNab Dogs are a talented lot, I just didn't think orienteering in enclosed areas would be one of those oddball traits.

Now we have a new habit.  Walk on the far side of the sidewalk away from the buildings.  That avoids all the hedges.  My arm is stretched taught toward the building with the dog who really REALLY wants to go, there.

However, that open lot with the tall grass?   Yeah, get back here... awww not again!

Let me get the bag and flashlight out you silly mutt...

1500 Posts? Is It Time For A Vacation Yet?

Yep, you read right.   This is my 1500th post.

Good grief.

This blog started July 30, 2009.  I don't know what I had in mind then, but basically that one post just said hello and promised more.

Whether anyone wanted more or not didn't matter, here it is.

I took a bit of a rest, cleared my head and then came back to it about a month later.  First a random post here, another there, then three times a week.

The blog has been at least one article, or joke, every day since September 11, 2009. 

All 1500 of them.

It seems traditional to give a review of the most popular articles each time you do one of these things.  I've had a few bizarrely popular articles.  It seems to show what this blog is about. 

Recipes, Reviews, and Pictures.  

The number one post was my recipe for Biscuits.   It is lifted right from the back of the Gold Medal Self Rising Biscuit bag, and it gets hit almost every day by some cook somewhere.  Let me tell you, they're mind-bendingly good, but you really do need to go and find the post on how to make butter in the food processor.   Add them together and it's something that is an experience.

The second most read post is a picture of an Impatiens flower.   We had them in a pot in front of the door that now has some succulents that were given to us a while back.  The thing is that the irrigation flooded the pot every morning and one of the seeds ended up in the little "ditch" in front of the front garden.   That flower's gone but not forgotten.   Maybe we should try them again - only if we can keep the snails out!

Number three?  It's a recipe.  More accurately a review of my own ineptness.   I tried making Pineapple Jelly out of some leftover cans from Hurricane Season.  I got a slurry that was tasty but way too loose.   I re-cooked that jelly and it thickened nicely.   After discussing it with a friend in Atlanta, Craig just told me to send it to him.  He said he enjoyed the slurry on ice-cream like a topping.   Waste not, Want not!

To round out the top five, I have two tech articles.   One told you how to stop hotmail from doing annoying things, another reviewed a website called SimplyHired.com .   Hotmail is "dead", having been co-opted into the supremely annoying Outlook.com.  SimplyHired is a job search website that I really don't care for.  Yet another "aggregator" of jobs that I look at to see if I missed anything.

These tech articles tend to have "staying power".  In fact all of the top five posts were not very popular when I wrote them but they get hit frequently.  People seek out help all the time online and anything like that will get read over and over by people who stumble over the same problems you have.  Someone out there has found the problem, may have figured out the solution, and will follow up by writing a page or three.

Did You Ever Have A Bad Technology Day?

I should have known when I walked outside and heard Fort Lauderdale farting from across the river that today would be weird.

Getting out well before dawn, I walked Mr Dog out on our normal morning mile.  Rounding the corner near the park, I heard a sound.  A strange farting sound that I only had heard once before.  That had started me looking for a toxic cloud until I realized that the winds here predictably come from the East.  Yes, the ocean breezes saved me from the Mosquito Spray Truck that was dispensing death to all those many creatures that will hone in on my scent and try to turn me into a giant blood sausage.

Expecting strange we soldiered onward.  This being a noisy town, I wasn't surprised to hear the 6AM train on the distant FEC tracks, the traffic on Wilton Drive, and the general background 60 cycle hum from the many air conditioner compressors.

Not a quiet town.

But all of that is a normal part of living in the Not Big City that is South Florida.   Pretensions of small towns aside, we're in the middle of a sprawl of 7 or so million people, someone somewhere is going to drop a dish.

Getting home and going through the motions of operating the washing machine on super-duper-extra-hot to sterilize the dog's mats, I settled in for a morning.  While the laptop is behaving well, the network was not, so I ended up having to reload pages one handed.  You see, the mosquitoes are not the only thing that wanted to turn my arm into a blood sausage.  I had 40 plus pounds of playful dog insisting that my right hand was his play-toy.  Slowing life to a more relaxed pace, Mr Dog wanted his attention for the better part of an hour.

While I'm sitting there watching this bundle of black and white fur and energy gnaw on my arm, I'm getting messages coming through on my professional account.  Between printers breaking, computers acting strange, and someone just not having time to get to that meeting that he wanted with me early in the morning, I realized that the entire world was stuck in second gear today.

Miraculously, I managed to get a break, a solid 10 minutes of productivity when Rack the dog decided I'm Done and trotted off to his crate.  The big yellow school bus trundling by my house apparently over the speed limit seemed to help his decision while I get working on a phone call.

Many tech support woes can be solved by a simple axiom "Did you try restarting your computer?".  That's the Tech Support equivalent of "Did you Jiggle The Handle?" - great way for you to delay while you think about things like the true solution of the problem, or whether you really need that second mug of coffee.

Coffee almost always makes things better, and there's just enough time before that rescheduled meeting to meet the need.

Meanwhile, the washer that was supposed to be finished two hours before, finally gathers itself up and realizes that it's got a full load inside and snaps with a volley of beeps for attention.

Webpages set aside with a shrug, virtual servers started, it's time to get up and do something else.  Even the washer is running slow.  May as well step back and let it happen.

Cobwebs and a Fresh-ish Start

Knowing is half the battle.
Planning wins the battle.

Knowing that last week was going to be hell, I filled the blog with articles.  Sat down and emptied my head about the dog, and other random thoughts that came to mind.  Being quite preoccupied, I was allowing a mental vacation even if a rest was the last thing on the cards.

Now that the week is over, it's time to restart some things.

Projects always need to run their course, even if it is a matter of saying "we're not going to do this any more" or "I'm done and lets bring it to the next level".

Fewer distractions mean more things get done even if getting it done is spinning the wheels.

Having finished the week, sitting down at the end of the morning rituals, it allowed me to look out the window and realize that it was time to dip the toe into the water of a few very specific tasks.  Being self-directed, you only answer to yourself when things "go long".

So now I am taking a bit of my own medicine or eating my own dog-food.  Step back, get the big picture, then take the long view of things.  Life is a marathon, not a sprint.  If you're impatient for results, you're cheating yourself out of the opportunity of excellence.

The Long View however can not be achieved in one big step normally.  So divide the goal, and conquer. 

I think I heard that somewhere.

So reach for the first stage in the plan.  It's usually the smallest one and is easiest to congratulate yourself when it is over.

For now, there's a server that has been waiting on my time to finish.  Getting it up to date means that at least the mind is moving in the right direction.  Sure, it's a small step but it is moving forward.