Life as a Lonely Blogger

August 10th, 2011 Thomasso

Once again I am left with so much to say, but not enough time to regurgitated all down in text form on my very own webpage. I have been focused on work, and it has been focused on me. I am not complaining about work, nor the time that it is consuming in my life, but I am missing, very much, the quiet moments that I have when I am sitting here freely typing away my thoughts. I have hit the evil time monster of public me versus private me and the balance of harmony that I claim I have found. This last week has been busy.

The markets, particular the Gold market, has consumed my free time thoughts for the last three days. With the continuation of the recession, the wild ride of everyone’s wealth has driven Gold up to new heights. Today Gold hit another all time record of $1800.00, which for those who follow the commodity and see it a “hedge against inflation,” then this spells “doom of epic proportions” according to one of my friends who plays the money markets.

I love Gold. I own some Gold, and nothing thrills me to see it climb like it is today. But it also worries me when I see the effect the market economy has on the rest of my friends and people around me. I know that when markets slide, and governments give out bail out money to the corporations, and interest rates will either go up or down, common people are going to get hurt. But the rich and the greedy do not care, and apparently those who own Gold too, according to a co-worker. The question is, can you rest assure that you can pay your rent, or make your mortgage payments for next month?

My lack of time has also meant that I missed out on some really great summer parties with friends this last couple of weeks. As I am single, some of my friends have tried to find me that perfect match, but I really have not been looking. Like my work, over the course of the last decade, my life has been one big goal seeking exercise. When I announced that I was going to University back in 2003, friends and family laughed at me. Some mocked my tenacity at that time. Now I laugh back at them, of course having just graduated, but they all figure that I now need another “commitment” to my already overbooked life.

Well, again I have to cut my typing short, just when I am getting warmed up. Sadly, I cannot say for certain when I will return back to the keyboard and blog for another session. Hopefully I will return soon. Thomasso -signing off now.

Oh, by the way, I used four programs to create the above graphic of the blue tee: Kpovmodeler-PovRay, Inkscape and the GIMP.

Posted in Art, Blog Problems, Criminology, Diatribe, General, Photographs, Social economics | Comments Off

This is Just a Little Test Post to Get My Twitter-feed Working – Not Important

July 21st, 2010 Thomasso

I’m setting up my Twitter Feed to work with the blog. This is tough getting everything just right with so many settings, yikes.

Lets see if I can get this damn thing to tweet for me.

Added: Success! It worked! Yeah!

Now when I post, my Twitter feeds are send out to alert everyone that I have posted. Am I doing the world a favour by broadcasting my blog posts and jumping on the social media bandwagon, or is all this internet stuff just a complete waist of time and energy? Well, I kind of like it, and I am paying for it.

Heh heh, it appears that there are some who are anti-social media. I guess not everyone is a fan of networking. Hey-this is how you get the “better” employer to notice you, as compared to the social Luddite employers who are still stuck in the 80′s.

Posted in Blog Problems, General, Nifty Plug-ins | 5 Comments »

To Cast the Net Beyond the Fringe and Say the Hell With it!

December 19th, 2009 Thomasso

I got mad at my ISP last night. Every time I tried to upload a movie file to my website, it either timed out, or it took two hours to go through the upload process. I gave up. I heard that the University Library was open until 10:30pm week days, and 10:00pm during the weekends, so I hopped in the truck and drove to the Surrey campus. The Langley campus was closed.

In the mean time I was having troubles with some other web sites also – so naturally I assumed that it was the fault of my ISP. When I tried to download a web page, it would time-out. It was not a good night to go surfing on the net.

When I got to the University Library, the first thing I did was fired up my lap top and connected through Wi-Fi. Once connected, things seemed a little faster, but when I tried to connect to my web site, the same things happened–hardly any connectivity. This told me that it was not my IPS, but my web provider!

Some other students in the computer lab old me that most of the kids are off from school as of Friday, and that it might be possible that most of them are on-line textting each other, clogging up the net. I thought about that, and figured that this might be the cause. The only thing that didn’t add up was I only had a few web sites that I went to which were slow or not working, so I doubted that it could be the on-line kids? I managed to up load everything I needed to, and then I went home.

This morning I checked to see if the connection rate was still slow, or shut down, and when I logged on, there was a notice posted on the server page. It said that they had service interruptions over the last 24 hours, and that now every was back to normal. I then went to the server’s blog and read that they had some vandalism on their server-farm, and that someone tried to take some equipment. They said that their local law enforcement officials caught the person and they noted that none of the equipment was taken. Cost in damages, however, was about $5,000.00 US.

I started thinking about this today, about how fragile our network really is. I remembered in my class on terrorism from last summer, studying about how important our information network is in today’s world, and asking the question would we be crippled from having no network? Although it would not indirectly harm us if the entire Intranet collapsed becuase of terrorists, but it would certainly hurt us over a longer period. By collapse, I mean no web browsing, email and VIOP, possibly cell-phone and land-line phone service too. I know most Banking and some forms of commerce would stop, but most businesses would manage to keep on operating.

On a humorous note, I wondered how many people would go through Intranet withdraw, if the idea of Internet Addiction really exists? Would I be one of those people? After all, I do spend a hideous amount of time sitting in front my keyboard and monitor, and hlaf that time connected to the internet. I treat emails like they were phone calls for goodness sakes. Does this mean I’m sick–I have an addiction that affects my social life, if their is such a thing as a social life?

Nope-things are all good. I have network connection and life goes on. My ISP are doing their job and I can sympathise with my web provider about their misfortune. Once again I am happy.

Posted in Blog Problems, General, Humour, Photographs, Social Justice | Comments Off

Still Dealing With no Service from My ISP!

May 7th, 2009 Thomasso

Well, day number three with no evening service. I had a connection early this morning but I had to head into work, but when I got back it was down again. When got up the next morning it was working again—go figure.

I’m sort of cheating with my posting by back-dating the last couple of posts—I really wrote them on these days but didn’t get a chance to posted them until now (May 8, 2009). It is frustrating when you pay for service but are not getting it. I understand that things break-down and all, but my service provider should at least give us some warning or a reason as to why. This has being going on since Tuesday.

Posted in Blog Problems, Diatribe, General | Comments Off

The Wonderful Semester of Summer, and My ISP Sucks!

May 6th, 2009 Thomasso

The first day of classes were fun, and I still have one more to go before I can turn the page on “week one.” So far the best class looks like my CRIM4900 class on International Crime, a preceptorial style class, or for you old school types it is also known as a seminar taught course. The prof seems to be well qualified to teach it, as she works for the RCMP, and has done most of her academic training throughout Europe. I think we are lucky to have someone of her calibre, and I am looking forward to all the materials that we are going to be covering in the weeks ahead. Some of the preliminary readings look very interesting, especially the arguments over terminology and usage of the label transnational crime vrs international crime by academics, governments and bushinesses. And the other neat quality about the class is that there is no textbooks for it as all readings are either in video format, or on-line text and in library resource materials.

My ISP (Internet Service Provider) is really ****ing me off right now. Today marks another day out of two with down service so far this week. I had no service on Tuesday all day, and right around 3:00pm today it was down—and is still out—as of this writing. I am paying Shaw Cable damn good money to have my machines connected to the Internet, and so far they are really trying my patiences. If these long outages continue then I will have to move my business over to Telus or go with Satellite (which is a smaller band width, but more reliable). In the long run I may need to change who I do business with, and during these hard economic times I do not think that companies would want to loose too many of their customers because of poor service. * hint *

Spreadsheets are either your best friend or they are your worst nightmare. So far this week I have being asked to create spreadsheet for two different people. One person just needs the basics, or the rudimentary in-out and balance type while the other needs to consolidate a huge amount of data and thus a massive undertaking for both of us. For both people I don’t mind it doing this, but I fear that teaching people from scratch on how to use spreadsheets may require more time than they realize. I have learned over the years to treat spreadsheets like as if I were teaching people how to use a new desktop, (only the Linux community will understand this) so they are fully aware of all the procedures that are involved with using them. And I use Open Office for this because of the stability and ease of use as opposed to other commercial products that have way too much eye candy and are cumbersome to use for everyday simple items—and it’s free for personal use. So it will be interesting to see how this teaching experience goes. Remember, spreadsheets are our friends in the business world and we need to use them right to keep all our wonderful money in balance.

Posted in Blog Problems, Diatribe, General | 2 Comments »

Video Experiment with VIMEO

December 7th, 2008 Thomasso

I was playing around with my video settings here on the Blog because this is the third time in a month that the Creator of the plug-in has fixed bugs in it. I stuck with Viper’s Video Quick Tags because it seems to have the best interactive control panel out of all the WordPress plug-ins I have tried.

While I was re-setting my tweaks for my Blog, I started viewing some of the other video formats that I never bothered to look at before and came across VIMEO. I never really paid that much attention to VIMEO before, so I went over to at the website and then started poking around. I came across this:

I thought the animation was interesting; I’m thinking that it could be made by an armature, even the music–but sounds good. It is the X-mass story, and the song is in Spanish, I believe. Oh, and one of the wise men looks like Santa in this video! The screen credits said that this was in HD for TV, though the audio was suffering from the bandwidth, and it was is stereo. I really like this type of animation, and I have made a few myself when I had lots and and lots and lots of time to render them. Did I say lots of time to render them right–yeah, even with an Intel Quad-Core it’s slow going?

So enjoy–that’s about as far as I’m going with decorating the Blog this year for the holidays–unless I get really board and I have some time to spend getting creative.

Posted in Blog and Web Tech, Blog Problems, General, Video | Comments Off

Ooohh, It’s Friday: Smile!

September 14th, 2007 Thomasso

Yes, yes, yes, it is Friday. I am tired. I never realized how much running around I did this last week until I finally sat down just a few minutes ago and starting thinking about it. But then again, I probably just tricked myself into thinking I was tired, yet really I am just resting from the mad dash around town getting stuff done and out of the way? So much to do now that I’m in classes, my job is picking up pace and preparations for winter are now being made. I just found out that my house insurance had gone up; another reminder that the rate of inflation, the true index, not the phony one issued by the Government of Canada, or the Central Bank, but the cost compared to my income level that I calculate based on my yearly income. Now I know why I am so tiered:$$$$$$$$$?

Anyway, my friend’s webblog is up and running: www.dianeoutloud.ca. So, pay her a visit and say “hi.” She will be typing away on it once she settles in within the next week or so now that she is staying with her family down in the State of Texas for the next few weeks until she returns to Fort Langley, BC. I am looking forward to reading what she has to say. It could very interesting…. Oh, and read her first “post.” It took 14 day to get it up and running! Ya—I kid-you-not: 14 days!

Posted in Blog and Web Tech, Blog Bugs, Blog Problems, General | Comments Off

A Polling Screw-up

July 22nd, 2007 Thomasso

I was doing some up-grading on the Blog and accidentally erased my tables for all the polls that you see in the sidebar to the right. So I have entered a new one: requiring only a binary answer. Sadly, all the data from the last 10 polls have being deleted.

The top answer from the last poll was “beer,” in which 6 out of the 23 respondents answered as their most favorite beverage for a hot sumer day. A Close second, and only because it had two categories, water with 3 for “just water,” and 4 for “pure-cold water.” My personal favorite came in at number at 5, with 2 votes, which was Root Beer. I should point out that I never voted which could of bumped Root Beer to the number 4 position. But it is nice to know that there are at least a couple of fellow Root Beer drinkers out there: Yea!

But I did finish the upgrade: Democracy 2.0.1. So now I have more options when it comes to polling and creating statistics for myself–all in the name of research….

Posted in Blog Problems, General | Comments Off

Everything is Cool: plus Snow?

April 2nd, 2007 Thomasso

It was a tents weekend here on the website, as some of you saw when you came here during that time, the site was shut down showing only spam and the domain name registration renewal web page. No, it was not a case of a bill payment not being made, or some abusive activity or other illegal stuff; it was an over-site by the company that I deal with and their billing system. Unfortunately, they shut it down on Friday night, and it went the whole weekend before someone could come in today, Monday, to fix the problem and reset everything back to where it was before. It was their mistake, as their billing account was all screwed up showing activity I did over 3 years ago, and was still active and charging me right up until Friday: hitting a grand total of over $350.00. It is kind of funny when you think about it because the bill was quite large, you would think someone have seen it…. Now everything is back to where it should be, I’m good for another year.

SNOW!!!!!! OH come on Mother Nature, give us a break! It is April 2 for crying out loud, it should be spring weather, not snow.

Posted in Blog Problems, General | 2 Comments »

Internet Server Trouble

January 30th, 2006 Thomasso

The site was down for a couples of days due to technical difficulties on my server’s end. I lost the mysql database service that controls how the dates, comments, posts and news feeds are control, organized and maintained on my little piece of the cyber universe. Thank you for being patient during the weekend while it was down. The servers told me that this was a problem that they knew about and that they would have it up and running as soon as they could.Here is a little update for you all regarding my new career. I am at the halfway point in my course over at the Justice Institute and into week 4 of the spring semester of my graduate classes. I cannot believe how fast time is flying by right now, as it feel like I just blinked and the month of January is almost done. I spent the last week going through processing and as of today all of my documentation is in. They say I am “squeaky-clean” to use their terminology. I should have my schedule within the week.

I just uploaded my first theme for distribution for Word-Press, the program that runs my weBlog. I went with the white on black look and tried to keep as clean as I could with just tiny little accents to keep it unique. If you go over at the Word-Press Themes button, you can see a photo of it and download the compressed file onto your themes folder, if you like it. Give me some feed back if you tried it out.

Posted in Blog Problems, General | 2 Comments »