Creeva Dry Chili:

1 Pound Ground Beef
1 Can Diced Tomato
1 Can Kidney Beans
1 Green Pepper
1 Red Pepper
1/2 Packed Cup Collard Greens
Black Pepper
1/2 Cup Spiral Noodles
Optional – Grated Sharp Cheddar

1. Brown the ground beef
2. Dice the peppers
3. Finely chop the collard greens
4. Boil the noodles
5. After the noodles are soft add them and everything else to the browned ground beef.
6. After simmering for five minutes remove from heat
7. Add black pepper to taste
8. Serve in a bowl with optional grated sharp cheddar on top of it

So there you go, an original recipe that works pretty well. I would have added some onion if it was available, but we were all out.

This is the dreaded post that you find everywhere over the web.  The one where I am apologetic about not getting writing done in a timely manner.  The post where I promise that tomorrow will be different, that this lapse has been only temporarily.   I will say things like I am going to turn a new leaf and that content will be flowing out of my fingertips like the biblical ambrosia and honey promised in some holy book.

I will come up with excuses such as work has been busy.  Maybe I’ll pull out time with family.  These of course are not lies or even untruths.  They can be exaggerations.  The truth is closer to the fact when I would have time to write I’m sitting on the couch vegging out instead of being a productive blogger contributing the internet society and the link economy.  I could easily be doing how-to’s on projects I am working on, writing about books I’m reading or have read, and even just daily life.

Do I have a lot of projects and good intentions in doing them in a time manner? Of course I do, but you the reader aren’t quite sure you will ever see them at all with my track that has been going the last few months.   Will I blame you for that?  Of course not.  It is completely believable and acceptable.  I can say I haven’t been playing farmville or any facebook games (ok a little bit of bejeweled blitz).

Will tomorrow be different?  As Button Bright would say “Don’t Know”.  I can say that I’ve made this far into adding content my blog, my life-stream hums along (not as flowing as before, but life happens).  I hope I haven’t ostracized anyone that wasn’t done so by my bluntness, rudeness, or general mannerism.  If I’ve lost you for those reasons – then I deserve it.  If I have lost you for the laziness that exists trying to get something to come out of my relationship with my fingers and the keyboard – I (well I’ll say I apologize, but you’ll see right through that).

Until the next post…..

Now those are some rims….

Speed, it’s a wonderful thing

Over the last few months I have been reading Lex a bed time story every night consisting of a chapter from Frank Baum’s Land of Oz books. The first thing Xie said when I told her that I wanted to work through these books with him was “There is more then one?”. It seems that there are quite a few people that think the story begins and ends with “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”. Obviously this is not the case.

Baum composed a total of 20 books to the series and it was then picked up by other writers after him. I’m not sure if we will go into the books by other author’s (which canonically add another 20 for a total of 40 books), but currently we are at book seven.  Some of the books are great – others it seemed Baum was just “phoning it in”.  So when you are starting the next book, you can’t be sure of the quality you are getting into. Though I have a feeling over my life I’ll be reading these again. Lex is still at the stage where he is listening to my voice, but not really paying attention to the story yet. So when he is I’m expecting to have to go through all of these again.

I got into the Oz books when I was around 9 or 10.  I used to check them out of the Amherst public library and just devour them (hence why I was aware of the series).   I doubt I ever read them in order, I never read any not written by Baum, and I’m positive that I did not read all the books that he wrote.  I loved reading them regardless.

Working through the thought process I take that back – I didn’t read any other canonical books by other Authors.   I did have a science fiction-esque book that took place in Oz. It was titled “A Barnstormer in Oz”- my parents bought it for me when I requested to pick it up when I saw it sitting at a Big and Small Lots store.   I got it home and low and behold the story it told.   Well really I can’t tell you the story since I don’t really remember it, but there was nudity and sex in the book.  This was one of those cases where the child never tells the parents what the book really contained.

My parents bought be Wizard of Oz smut and never realized it.  You can’t blame them, it would be the same as if I bought Alexander a Harry Potter spin-off book in a few years and never read it myself.   You would go, oh Harry Potter – go ahead kid knock yourself out.   All and all I don’t think it was all that graphic – but it was graphic enough to shock a ten or eleven year old reading it.  Somewhere around the time I went to college the book disappeared from my possession.  It is just as well, it’s not one of the book’s I plan on reading to Lex anyway.

Most nights we get through a single chapter – some nights he falls asleep quickly so I don’t finish the chapter, other nights he is bouncing around and refusing to sleep so we get through two or three chapters.  This is done every weeknight after his bath and before my dinner. He get’s top priority, so every night we have the routine down to maximize my time with him.  Get home, feed him, play for a little bit, give him a bath, and then read to him until he is passed out.  All in all, it’s not a bad routine.

I’m hoping to do a blog write up on each of the books, ideally I was going to do a write up as I finished each of them.  Doing the math of not a single write up so far, and the fact I am on the seventh book – that doesn’t seem to have happened.   This isn’t something that is alone related to the Oz books – I’ve finished a few other books this year that I wanted to do write ups on but haven’t yet had a chance.   Life the universe and everything like that.   Hopefully soon these will get written, published, read, and commented on – or more then likely ignored.

Until then I hope you all have a pleasant journey with me as I travel down the yellow brick road one chapter at a time.

I thought you said you were going to wash my mouth out. I figured I would just beat you to the punch.

Is this how daddy does it?

I’ve always been one of those boring guys that kept a standard black background on his computer – especially his work computer. Sure occasionally I would branch out and for a month or so keep a new interesting background – but it was always a temporary thing.

Now that I’m a father, I’m not one of those guys that shoves pictures of his kid in your face (unless of course you are coming to my blog then it’s fair game). I do however keep an image of him on my desktop full time, just to remind me what I’m toiling away at work for anyways.

I don’t have a Lex screensaver – since I’m not around to see my screen anyways – why bother? The image above is my latest desktop image.

I had started a year in review for 2009, I was going to write up a link to all my stories of a personal nature over the last year.  Highlight becoming a father, etc., etc.  It’s now two weeks into the new year and I never got the story completed.   Instead of giving up completely, I decided that the year in review was going to be just like Shermer, Illinois.  On a side note – have you notice that no matter how many times you write out Illinois you need to spell check it?  Anyways if you don’t understand the significance of comparing a year in review to Shermer, I’ll let Jay and Silent Bob’s little scene from Dogma explain it to you.

It was a tightly held secret that before Creeva could play trumpet, french horn, baritone, (and very little saxophone) – that he flirted with being a drummer. Thankfully the danger was averted once he learned to actually read music, thereby disqualifying him from being a drummer entirely.

I’ve been thinking about a series about growing up a geek – but quite a bit of those stories would cross with a retro blog I want to get off the ground ( which if you are interested to help write for let me know). I have a few articles where I should get out my daddy issues, but those have been put to bed. I’m not sure I want to dredge up the past that my father and I have moved on from.

There is alot I could write about – just stunted at the prospect for the moment. I can say be on the look out for something genuine this year.

Great – now to decide what in the next 351 days……,

IMG_4162, originally uploaded by Creeva.

If we could all just experience the joy he is showing off in this picture, the world would be a better place.

I hope this is a typo., originally uploaded by Creeva.

Playing with mahalo answers I found this question – what are the chances terrorists are developing nuclear families? Now I’m sure (hoping) they meant facilities, but what if the question is genuine?

Are we concerned that Wars is bring up Wally and the Beaver to be home grown terrorists? When I hear nuclear family I f course think of the 50′s style meaning. Maybe there is something I am still
missing.

IMG_6721, originally uploaded by Creeva.

I finally made it one step closer to my ultimate wordpress theme. There are still a few changes I hope to get a chance to do, but one of the big things is now done – automatic thumbnail generation. WordPress 2.9x does this, but only for locally uploaded images. I mostly host my images on flickr, so generating a thumbnail from those is/ was important.

Now I get to have my home page with a nice picture montage and it gives me more of a reason to do some photoblogging. Now if only o could get it to generate thumbnails from YouTube clips……

IMG_2203, originally uploaded by Creeva.

After wearing her down after two months of dating, 3 months of living with her parents, and 11 months of living in our townhouse together, my wife consented to marry me eleven years ago today.

While it would be naive to say it has been an easy road, it has been a road I would gladly journey down again. Eleven years ago we wandered down to the mayor of vemilion Ohio who needed the marriage ceremony information done up in large print – to fulfill the actual ceremony. We had no friends nor family, but there was the drunk guy from the night before that said he was going to show up – thankfully he didn’t. Both of us who hate winter had to get up early and go through a snow storm to get married. That folks is what you call true love.

To many years in the future and those days that have passed I leave this one message to my wife – I will love you always and forever if you will love me forever and always.

Optimally I would like it to be compatible with mediawiki. It also has to work on an unjailbroken iPhone. While we are asking for features and someone out there is considering this, what would be great is offline editing that syncs when it gets back online.

Other solutions would be an extension for mediawiki that I can throw on a hosted instance that allowed for editing via mobile safari that fixes the issue of no scroll bar in the write window. A last ditch scenario would be a wiki app on the iPhone (there are a couple that allow you to host a server on the iPhone itself) – these are missing one function, the ability to export this data to an external server. I would use something other then mediawiki if I could get this functionality.

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Am I just wanting to much? I think it is insane that there seems to be no good wiki editing solutions I can find.

IMG_4198, originally uploaded by Creeva.

Just a picture I managed to capture earlier today.

, originally uploaded by Creeva.

I jus railed a bit against the wordpress app, and the flickr app is another I use quite a bit – ironically for browsing images. I have a flickr pro account, but I use the pixel pipe service to upload images to flickr. I use flickr’s web interface to blog images. Finally other then quick onesy twosy organizational tasks I need an actual computer to organize my images.

Now the organizational problem could be fixed but I see that being one of the largest pains to get working any better then it does. It should be quite a bit faster and easier to upload bulk images, the reason I don’t use the flickr app to upload. There is also no reason I shouldn’t be able to directly blog an image from the app interface.

, originally uploaded by Creeva.

I love my iPhone so don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the best platform for blogging. Microblogging, sure it’s great. Photoblogging, works ok in some scenarios. Busting out a few paragraphs formatted in a certain style – not really.

I was excites when the first WordPress App was released, an happier when the second one was – until I played with them. On my main blog I like to use an image as the front page lead of the story. When there isn’t a lead image, that means I am writing on the iPhone. Unless of course I log into flickr via the browser and blog an image (like I am doing with this post). There are still some limitations but until I can get all the same editing features in the app that I can via the web interface it is always going to feel cramped.

Sadly I don’t think it has to be. I’ve seen editors on the iPhone that could handle everything the web interface of wordpress offers – so why do I need to know HTML to add a link to a post or an image that us somewhere other then the end? Yes I know how to do this, but I am to lazy to busy that out on the iPhone, nor should have to.

So wordpress app writers – when is the app going to catch up?