rebeccachapman.org

It’s Thanksgiving day here in the U.S. The leaves in central North Carolina are red and golden and brown. The sun is shining, and it’s chilly with a hint of melted frost on the porch railings. Fall is in full force and Thankgiving encompasses the natural beauties and bounties of the season.

Thanksgiving is a great holiday. In fact, it has become a favorite. The retailers skip over Thanksgiving entirely, so the lack of commercialism is refreshing. They haven’t yet ruined this holiday.  We don’t have to see Thanksgiving decorations in July so that by the time the holiday arrives, we are entirely sick of hearing about it and lack any and all desire of actually celebrating it. No one feels obligated to spend thousands of dollars on gifts, so the retail marketers are left out in the cold for at least this one holiday of the year. Thankfully.

Employees who are normally forced to work on the days of the more commercial holidays may even get the day off to spend with their own families instead of spending it with consumers who don’t know when to take time off from their consuming.

No, Thanksgiving is a time of fun, family, food, prayer, joy, peace, and the simple act of just being thankful. I am thankful for Thanksgiving day. Happy Thanksgiving!

Categories: Simple Living
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Since I was accepted as an Amazon Associate, I’ve been playing around with the available widgets and settled on one that I liked. Unfortunately, whoever writes web code for Amazon apparently doesn’t practice clean W3C web standards because the Amazon widget code doesn’t validate. It’s very frustrating!

Actually, I suspected something like this issue would happen once I started using affiliates on the site, but I had hoped differently. The Amazon code doesn’t even validate under transitional xhtml. I’ll still use the widget and the aStore though but I’ll be looking for ways to make them validate but without breaking the use of these features.

I’m having fun with them in the meantime!

Categories: Web Development
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Yesterday, I decided to dismantle my old computer work desk. It was a huge armoire of sorts that contained the computer and other peripheral items. It covered most of the wall and was dark. I wanted something smaller and lighter and easier to move for when I decided to redo the walls and floor as I am not at all fond of their existing colors and condition. The previous owner definitely had tastes that were vastly different from mine!

I took a couple of photos. The first photo shows the old desk after it was completely dismantled. Originally, I was going to move it to another room and then get it picked up by one of the local thrift stores, but I could barely move the thing. After seeing a screw, I grabbed a screwdriver and unscrewed every screw I could find, pulling some of the more stubborn screws out with a hammer, and turning every turning thingee I could also find. After nearly dropping parts of the desk on my head a couple of times, the desk was in pieces. Easy to carry pieces. I will likely see if anyone on Freecyle wants them before deciding on an alternative.

After making a huge mess of clutter all over the floor, only half of which is picked up at the moment, I moved the new desk into place. It originally belonged to my grandfather and was given to me many years ago. I suppose that means it’s a new, old desk. The second photo shows my new desk area. The desk drawers are not currently in place because I am planning on reorganizing them. It took a long time to get my computer set back up because I was very careful about keeping all the cords and cables separated and as neat as I could get them.

I have a little cherry wood telephone table next to the desk (hidden by the chair in the current photo) that holds the tower case of the computer, the UPS, and the cable and phone modems.

A bad thing happened right after the desk move. After I got everything set back up and everything plugged in and reconnected, my cable modem wasn’t working. Even worse, my phone wasn’t working because my cable modem wasn’t working. (I currently have VOIP) I turned things off and on, I unplugged and plugged things back into other things. I swapped out cables just in case something had gone bad and finally, I had to run next door to borrow the phone to call the cable company. (Ironically, I’d recently written a post on Xanga about how I didn’t have a cell phone because I didn’t need one. Well, I still don’t need one often enough to pay $50 or more per month for cell phone service.)

Much to my emberassment, I discovered that there is a reset button on the cable modem. All I had to do was press it and my cable modem was restored! That button needed to be painted bright orange because I never saw it until after I started looking for it.

Although I have more clutter to clear now due to the desk move, the deed is finally done and I will be getting rid of the pieces of the old desk that was taking up a huge amount of space. I was no longer enjoying the old desk and so  it will be good to see it go.

Categories: Home & Garden
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I’m not much of a shopper. I don’t like spending money and I don’t like the hassles of trying to navigate a store in order to find what I want and safely escape with my sanity intact.

Well today I went to Home Depot and bought a few things that I’ve needed for months. I’d been living half in the dark because half of my light bulbs had burned out around the house and I hadn’t yet replaced them. Today I invested in some compact fluorescent bulbs to replace the burned out incandescent bulbs and the house is much, much brighter now. I am so thrilled with having light again!

It is important to have the right tools for a job on hand, so I also invested in an electric sander. For months, I’d been telling people I was planning to get one so I could finish sanding the paint off of my walls in order to repaint later. I’d been attempting to do them by hand and I’d gotten part of a bathroom sanded in a very mediocre way. It’s been patchy for along time now. Today, I finally got my sander. It is going to make this wall job so much, much easier.

Another task I’ve been trying to do without the right tools is dig and move dirt in what are supposed to be garden beds. They are more like weed and grass beds at the moment, though they may be slightly improved than when I first started. I bought a straight rake and a hoe. Moving dirt and then smoothing it again instead of trying to dig it all up with a hand trowel and an extremely heavy shovel.

I’d been unable to dry my clothes in my dryer for the past few weeks because wasps moved into my dryer vent. Ant mounds had popped up all around the yard and, despite my kicking over their mounds from time to time, the ants thrived and the mounds got larger and larger. Well today, I have wasp and ant killers. And mixed with my cordless electric leaf blower (which I also found today after having waited many months), my dryer vent should soon be clear of both wasps and lint.

I’m also using the leaves as mulch.

It will be very nice to finally be able to finish some of these projects I’ve started around this house, but for lack of the proper tools, have yet not completed. I’m not a fan of making a habit of spending money frivolously, but using the wrong tools, or letting something fall apart for lack of good tools, can be far more costly in the long run than investing in long-lasting, quality tools that contribute to a job well done.

Categories: Home & Garden
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I will be presenting a speech tomorrow for my Toastmasters club. I’m on the third speech project in the Competent Communicators book. I’m supposed to “Get to the Point” in this speech.  I’ve decided to do my speech on how using the new B-C-P Toastmasters website can enhance one’s experience with Toastmasters. Not only will I be getting to the point, but I’ll be letting everyone at the meeting know more about this superfantastic website option for our club. (Shameless plug.) A little while ago, I received an email from the person who will be taking on the role of Master of Ceremonies about turning in my speech introduction.

Speech introduction? I need one of those?

Oops!

So now I’m trying to figure out how to introduce myself and/or this speech. I’ve never had to compose a speech introduction before.

Categories: Toastmasters
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This evening I spent time designing a “tab” button for my About page and then found out while testing the new button that my categories were all linking to blank pages instead of to the posts assigned to those categories. Very puzzling.

It turns out that just having a category.php file in the directory will prevent the template from using the default pages. I had created a category.php file while going through the tutorial, but it was blank except for a comment I had entered as a reminder of how the page is used in a template. I deleted thet page and now my categories are working!

The category.php page is used to create separate, custom pages for categories. I will likely play with this feature later, but for now getting everything standard is a good thing.

I will need to add a couple more “tab” buttons for other items and I also plan to experiment using text links over the tab graphics instead of having the text built into the graphics. For now, I just wanted to test the appearance to see if I liked them in reality as much as in theory.

Categories: Web Development
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Do your houseplants look like this poor, wilted philodendron? Are they parched and gasping for water? Are their leaves drooping, curling, turning yellow? When was the last time you thought of them? Go and check on them now and see if any are suffering from lack of a good soaking or misting. (Just be careful not to overwater them.)

I took my own advice and now my plants are much happier, including this lovely philodendron. Houseplants are beautiful, relatively inexpensive, and full of life. They promote health and well-being in your household. Give them the care that they deserve and they will bring joy to you each day.

Categories: Home & Garden
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I’m trying out a couple of WordPress plugins for displaying photo galleries. The first is called NextGEN Gallery and the other is Flickr Photo Album for WordPress.  The Flickr setup is giving me validation warnings. I think I will need to customize the photo album templates for the plugin to clear those. I also can’t seem to get the sidebar widget to work.

For NextGEN, it appears I just have to call the gallery into an existing page, so it might be less of a hassle to use in my own templates. Another plus for NextGEN is that the photos will be stored on my host instead of with Flickr.

I will construct a photo gallery page for each plugin for now.

Categories: Web Development
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….or at least something’s not right in the house.

I belong to Toastmasters International and am currently V.P. of Public Relations for my local club, B-C-P Toastmasters. I’ve set up our club website on freetoasthost.org and have been administering it. Adding content to that site can be a very frustrating process at times. I am forced to use an editor that, even in html view, adds a huge amount of garbage to the code. Even when I’ve cut and pasted text from my own text editor, the site editor takes my clean code and just mangles it. (Reminds me of what happened when a neighbor’s dog got into the chickens next door.)

I’ve given up on keeping the code clean there. It’s literally impossible to do without moving the site off of freetoasthost.

Another issue has cropped up though. Earlier in the week, I checked on the site and half of the homepage was deleted. Only half, which I thought was rather odd. Usually when things get deleted, it’s everything. Things just go poof altogether.

So I thought maybe one of the other officers had been in there messing around to learn some of the site functions specifically added to freetoasthost for Toastmasters clubs. In fact, I really hoped it was the case, but after I thought about it, I didn’t believe it to be possible. I’m pretty certain I’m the only person in our club right now that has actual admin rights to be able to go in and modify the site itself.

I’ll have to ask around just to be sure.

I’m starting to suspect that an administrator of freetoasthost may have gone into our site and modified the home page. I believe they have admin access to all of the Toastmasters sites on that host. If they were the culprits, then why? If there was something on the page that they felt shouldn’t have been there or violated something with freetoasthost policy, then I really wish they would have contacted me directly and I would have been happy to remove it without also destroying the rest of the content on the page.

I recreated the page that same day and now today when I’ve gone in to check on the site, I’ve noticed that there are some slight changes once again. Hmmm….

As a solution, I think I am going to move all of the news over to the Blogger blog and just keep static content on the freetoasthost home page. I had been using the blog to post news content only after it had been on the main page for a while, but it looks like a different strategy is definitely in order, at least until I find out what’s going on.

I’ve never had any similar problems with Blogger. Unfortunately, I can’t set up the blog directly on the freetoasthost page or I’d try that solution first and all I’d have to do is republish if something went awry.

So far, the advantages of freetoasthost still outweigh the disadvantages as club functions go and it’s free for the club. It’s a bit frustrating though for a web admin!

Categories: Toastmasters
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Yesterday while setting up my new profile on Xanga, I accidentally sent Xanga invites out to every single address of every person to whom I’ve ever sent email or have added to my address book in gmail. Big Oops!!! For some reason, Xanga has invites set up so that everyone in the gmail contact list is selected by default, so after I unselected what I thought was everyone, it turned out that only the duplicate address of the one person who was already on Xanga was unselected and the invite emails went out to everyone else, to my horror!

While I never had any intention of making my profile or posts there private, spamming my contact list was not exactly the method I would have chosen to let everyone know about my new Xanga blog. Since I’ll be doing most of my blogging here on rebeccachapman.org, my purpose for setting up a new blog there was to reconnect with the Xanga community.

Apparently, I’m now reconnecting with everyone else too, so for those newcomers who do sign up and create their own profiles, I’ll be happy to subscribe to their posts should they set up a blog there. It’s probably the least I can do to make up for the spamming.

I thought about sending out another email to everyone to apologize and explain what happened, but decided against it since I didn’t want to spam the whole list again. Monday may be very interesting since there was a time a few months ago when I added everyone in my entire department at work to my address book in case I needed to contact anyone there from home. They all received invite emails too, I’m sure.

Granted, many on my contact list are those who are already friends or family, or are people I know from work or church, but others are a lot less familiar. I can’t help but wonder what they must be thinking. Perhaps they might just delete my email as spam, or perhaps they will be curious and possibly create a blog of their own.

There is a lesson to be learned from my experience:

If you’ve ever made an embarrassing blunder while blogging and want to talk about it, do feel free to comment.

Categories: Blogging
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