Exonym

The name of a country assigned by people who don’t live there. (Germany, Japan)

Endonym

The name of a country decided by the people who DO live there. (Deutchland, Nippon, Nihon)

Demonym

What you call people from a place. (German, der Deutsche (male, singular) or die Deutsche (female, singular). Collectively, the people are called die Deutschen.)

Eponym

A person after whom a discovery, invention, or place is named. You may also have heard of eponymous music albums, Led Zeppelin’s first album was titled “Led Zeppelin”

Toponym

A place name. Baton Rouge (red stick) Louisiana is named for the red poles that French explorers found there.

Allonym

The name of another person taken by an author. A pseudonym is a made up name, whereas an allonym is someone else’s real name.

Ananym

A name written backward. When I make local WordPress installs, my password is usually ‘rehpot’

Aptronym

A person’s name regarded as fitting to their occupation. They’re aptly named. Some real examples: Dr. Pain: Oral surgeon, Dr. Finger: Urologist, Dr. Katt: Veterinarian for cats, Dr. Stork: Obstetrician/Gynecologist, Dr. Bonebreak: Orthodontist,

Backronym

A phrase coined to fit an existing word, like the USA PATRIOT Act, MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), and the AMBER Alert.

Contronym

A word with two opposite meanings. Fast: Moving rapidly or firmly fixed in place (hold fast).

Heteronym

Words spelled the same but have different meanings and pronunciations. Close, bass, dove.

Retronym

A term for an old object that is modified to differentiate it from a newer version (e.g., landline).

There are lots more in this post from Dictionary.com.

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The storm builds in the west,
lighting the sky over and over.

Then the rain comes rushing across the field,
with the sound of thousands of tiny feet
beating down the grass
fleeing the wind from behind,
seeking the house before.

The wind and rain slash at the house,
seeking to get inside.
But the unflappable house quietly ignores it,
And protects us, as it protected Grandma for 50 years before.

Eventually the storm moves on,
though it continues to mutter and grumble.

We sleep.

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For a while now I’ve been disappointed by the lack of features in the default block, and overwhelmed by features in more advanced blocks, and been looking for a happy middle ground. Let’s see if this is it.

• A paragraph!

• A heading

  AND a paragraph in one item!

  Ok, so I like that I’m able to add block inside bullet points, that’s cool. Adding new bullet points requires clicking a button, rather than simply hitting enter, but that’s a consequence of allowing blocks inside items I guess.

  I did notice you can easily change between ul, ol, and no marker.

  I also just realized that hitting enter twice does NOT take me outside the list, I’m still in the bullet point above.

To get outside the list I had to click to the parent block and click after.

Another feature is the ability to change orientation, from vertical to horizontal.

Here’s an example:

• Item 1.

• Item 2.

This is a cool block, an I admire what it can do, I haven’t seen that elsewhere. That said, it doesn’t help with what I had to do to make this:

Which is to use the list block and then manually write styles for it.

Maybe there it would be too hard to make a block that does what I want as well as what everyone else wants. Maybe I simply need to make it myself and I’ll be the one happy user in the world.

So while I don’t think this is the block for me, I can tell it’s quality and scratches someone’s itch. Well done to Aurooba.

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Then I realized that nearly everyplace I’ve ever had anything posted has an RSS feed, or I could make one relatively easily. Then I could use something like WP All Import to simply import it. Not only that, most of the RSS feeds update themselves, so I simply need to run my importer occasionally to get the new stuff.

So I did it. I made Topher.How and started importing content. It’s not 100% yet, but there are several hundred items.

There is lots of content I’ve made that is either behind passwords or is actually lost, so this isn’t truly everything I’ve ever made, but it’s a good start.

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But surely I can get another job, right? I got the last two pretty easily. Alas, no. I’ve applied to nearly a hundred jobs since then, and I’ve learned a few things. Here are some things I’d like employers to take to heart. These are things that the majority of places I’ve applied to failed it.

Send me an auto response

I can’t tell you how many jobs I’ve applied for and once I hit submit nothing happens at all. Did it go through? No idea. Send me an automated email saying “Thanks for applying, we’ll get back to you!”

Tell me when I’ll know either way

Include it in the auto response. “We plan to make a decision by Date”. Then I don’t sit staring at my inbox for days. And then weeks. And then months.

Let me know if I don’t make the cut

Don’t ghost the people who don’t make it. Give them closure. Waiting is super painful. “But we get 5,000 applications!” Fine, send an automated message to ALL of them.

Don’t list jobs that aren’t available

A few weeks ago I spent an hour pulling together a cover letter and tailoring a résumé, and the email I got back said “Oh sorry, we’re not actually hiring for that position, we just list all jobs all the time”. What a huge waste of my time, AND an emotional let down.

Post your jobs on your own site

You want to cast a wide net, I get it. You post on LinkedIn and a zillion other places. The problem with that is that Job Spam is a real thing. People post fake jobs for real places all the time, and I could waste my time, or worse give them my personal info on a fake job. When I see a job listing, the very first thing I do is leave the site I found it on and go to the site of the company and find the job.

The listing is usually much better because lots of job sites simply scrape the internet and de-format the listing, which make it look terrible and is hard to read.

Posting it on your own site lends it credibility, usually tells me a lot more about the job.

Have an RSS feed for your jobs

There are two types of applicants:

• Those who script their application and spam hundreds or thousands of jobs, whether they qualify or not.
• Those who carefully hunt for good jobs and then carefully apply for those they’re qualified for.

You want the second type, and you want to make it easy for them to find your position. Requiring those people to manually go to several different sites daily or weekly looking is a huge blocker.

If you want quality applicants, publish your open positions via RSS. I’m astounded by how few companies leverage this very simple power tool.

If you’re doing it right, your jobs have a custom post type. If you instead simply make them posts on your WordPress site, make it a category. Then WordPress MAGICALLY makes an RSS feed for your jobs. No work involved.

Tell me the pay scale

It’s very difficult to find out late in the process that the pay scale is ridiculously low. Just yesterday my wife sent me a job listing that looked pretty great. Fortunately they did the RIGHT thing, and said right up front that the pay scale was 80% lower than it should have been.

Finding out after interactions have begun, or in a first interview, that the pay scale is wildly out of scope is hard. Tell me right in the job listing what the range is, so I don’t waste my time applying for a job that isn’t a fit.

Be human

Some of the very best rejections and interactions I’ve had were because someone communicated with me personally. I recently called a phone number on a website and the CEO of the company answered. I asked if I could come in and say hi and he said yes. We had a great conversation. He then ghosted me, but that doesn’t change the fact that the whole thing felt more real because I talked to someone.

Summary

If LinkedIn is to be believed, finding quality applicants is difficult. As some who has been trying to be a quality applicant for 2 years now, I can tell you employers are NOT making it easy, and they ARE streamlining for poor applicants. Please don’t do that. It’s bad for you, and it mentally and emotionally depressing for those of us trying to find a job.

Every listing that looks good creates a spark of hope. Not getting a job because they picked someone else is hard, but understandable. They can’t hire everyone.

Not getting a job because the employer failed at the things above is depressing. Having it happen 100 times over the span of years quells hope. And one you loose hope, life can get pretty dark.

Banner image by gabypunk15. It’s cropped, but no other modifications were made.

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Secret Of The Old Post Box was one of them. I did a review of it some years ago.

This is the book that taught me about Ottendorf Cyphers, also know as book cyphers. I went on to make my own out of my blog one time.

When my youngest was 8 or 9 I started reading books aloud to her, and recording them. I used my old phone, and the quality wasn’t great. I intended to edit them, and strip out the talking around the reading, but now 15 years later I love hearing her tiny voice ask questions, so I’ve left it raw.

If you know me, feel free to ask for the password below and you can listen to the whole book.

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Learning HTML

In late 1994 my college got access to the World Wide Web. This meant we could use the Lynx browser on a dumb terminal connected to a VAX VMS machine in the back room. It was pretty cool, but I still liked Gopher better.

One day a friend named James came into the computer lab and said “Hey, look what I made!” and it was a web page! I was floored, I had no idea we could make those. It was just an HTML file on the mainframe, no web server at all.

He said “You should make one too.”

and I said “I could never figure that stuff out.”

and he said “Sure you can, it’s easy, let me show you.”

And that afternoon I learned every HTML tag there was, because there were only about 40. HTML2 wasn’t quite out yet.

It was amazing. Breathtaking. I thought about it day and night. I read about it. I made notes and stuck them in my back pocket so much that it got thicker than my wallet.

Many thanks to James.

Learning MySQL

I learned this pretty differently from most folks I expect. In 1997 I got a job at Gospelcom doing support, and things like user accounts were stored in MySQL. I was given an SGI Indy desktop computer, running the Irix operating system, shown how to SSH to our various servers, and given a crash course in the MySQL command line client. How to choose a database, view a table, find things in it, edit them, etc.

It wasn’t that hard, and I got quite good at it. This gave me a HUGE advantage when I later started making database driven web sites.

Thanks to Brian my boss for showing me how and answering a zillion questions.

Learning Server Side Includes

In 1997 I think I found Server Side Includes provided by Apache. They could do a little data rendering, but the thing I used them most for was including template parts. They looked like this:

<!--#include virtual="/footer.html" -->

They made it so when I needed to change a navigation section or footer info I only had to do it in one place. This saved me an enormous amount of time.

I don’t remember who showed me this, but it was probably a co-worker at Gospelcom.

Learning PHP

In 1999 I was working at my desk at Gospelcom and Carlos came in and said

“Hey guys, I have a side contract that needs PHP, anyone want to partner with me?”

PHP was just coming into its own, with php3 having been released just 6 months before. There was no php2. I really wanted to learn it, so I said

“I’ll do it!”

That evening I went to devshed.com (it’s gone now, don’t go there) and tutorial number 1 was how to use PHP to get data from MySQL. In about 30 minutes I had built a little thing to get data from MySQL and print it to the screen. Again breathtaking. The possibilities seemed endless.

I bought the PHP Pocket Reference from O’Reilly and read it cover to cover many times, learning every function PHP had. Don’t get that book now, the latest edition is from 2000.

Say what you wish about PHP, it turned me from an HTML markup dev to a programmer.

Thanks to Carlos for the push.

Learning CSS

I first saw the concept of CSS when a friend showed me Internet Explorer 1.0 which came with Windows Plus! He had made a link that was a color other than blue. I didn’t get it at first because people were mostly applying styles to individual tags. Eventually I saw how you could set styles from another file and have them apply everywhere.

I struggled to really understand it though, so in the early 2000’s I got my boss to send me to a class taught by my friend Joel at Gospelcom, and he made everything clear.

After that, CSS became one of my favorite parts of web dev for about 8 years. Then I looked away for a couple months and when I looked back plain CSS was not really a thing anymore. It needed Grunt and Gulp and it was being compiled and had turned into SASS and SCSS and half a dozen other things.

I went back to PHP and have pretty much stayed there ever since.

Many thanks to Joel for his patience.

Learning WordPress

Much of my learning stagnated in the 2000’s. I felt like there wasn’t much new to learn. I didn’t want to bother with Javascript, the only thing people were using it for was popup banner ads.

In 2009 a friend asked me to work on a WordPress site. I had tried using it before and wasn’t that impressed. I was able to make it do some things I wanted, but it just wasn’t quite there yet.

Then in 2010 two important things happened. First I quit my job and went freelance. Second, WordPress 3.0 came out with Custom Post Types. Custom Post Types turned WordPress from a blog into a CMS.

Since CPTs were relatively new, very few people knew how to make them or leverage them properly. My 12 years of PHP experience gave me a big leg up here, and I went all in.

Now I’ve been doing WordPress work for 15 years, feeding my family, making my soul sing.

Thanks to Steve for asking me to do that first site, and thanks to everyone who’s ever worked on WordPress.

Everything Else

That’s pretty much it for technology that changed my career. Many other things have changed it, but they were experiential. Meeting people, going places, seeing and hearing things. Lots of those things fade from memory, but the technology that made it all work is still findable on the web.

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After the results were analyzed I got a note that said I needed to have an office based test done as soon as possible. So it was scheduled for 8 months later.

The average person has 5 or fewer “events” per hour while sleeping, where an event is something that wakes you up even a tiny bit. Rolling over, coughing, whatever. 15 is considered a problem and 30 is very serious. I had 89. Also, I had a 3 hour period where my blood oxygen level was below 35%. That’s a point where brain cells are dying.

Fortunately, after only 4 months I got a call that there was an opening, and I could come in that very night. The attendant looked at my chart and said “Oh my”. Long story short I tried a CPAP machine (more on that in a few min) with two different mask styles. The next morning I asked the attendant how it went and she said “Well… you slept.”

So they recommended a machine.

The Machine

A few days later I got a call from AirWay Oxygen about getting a machine. “Let me look up your chart”, she said. A long pause. “Oh my. Can you hold?” A few minutes later she came back and said “Well, we don’t get many of these. You’re getting a special machine usually reserved for coma patients.” As it turns out it’s NOT a CPAP machine, it’s an ASV machine (more on that in a minute).

It also turned out that it was $4500, and we were in a tight spot at the moment, so I didn’t get it.

In January 2025 we decided we could afford the monthly payments, and picked up the machine. We met with a nice woman who went over the machine with us. She looked at my chart and said “Oh my. You’re very sleepy aren’t you?” I said “All day every day!”

Some Definitions

So apnea is a brief pause in breathing, often (but not always!) during sleep. There are two kinds, Obstructive and Central.

Obstructive is simply where the trachea becomes closed for some reason. This is common with older or heavy people, it just gets kinked. You stop breathing for 45 seconds or so, and then take a big gasping breath. People with apnea rarely wake up for this, it feels normal.

Central is where the brain forgets to make you breath. Otherwise it’s the same. You stop until it realizes it needs air and then you take a big gasping breath. An interesting thing about this though is that it can happen while you’re awake. Then you notice you’re not breathing and take a deep sigh. This is the kind I have.

It’s not painful at all, but often leads to snoring. I am a VERY loud snorer.

There are also different kinds of machines to help with this. CPAP is the most common, and it stands for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. You wear a mask that might cover only your nose, or perhaps nose and mouth, and there’s a gentle breeze blowing all the time. It forces the airway open and you breath al the time.

What I got is called an ASV machine, Adaptive-servo ventilation. It can tell when you’re exhaling, and stops blowing. Then it starts again when you’re inhaling. There’s a picture of mine in the featured image of this post. My mask covers my nose and mouth, and the air is heated and humidified, to try to make it as much like breath as possible.

How It’s Going

I’ve had it for a few weeks now. My biggest issue is that the head harness isn’t very comfortable. To make a solid seal on my face I need to cinch it pretty tight.

I have a sore spot right under my nose, but I don’t know why. Nothing touches me there. I’ve wondered if it’s drying out from the air passing over it.

My water reservoir tends to run out before morning and the air gets really dry. I can control the amount of water in the air, so I need to experiment with that.

I’ve been quite happy with the app that comes with it. Every morning I can see how I slept, how the seal was, etc.

The whole point of this is to improve my sleep, and it’s working and it’s not. I’m waking up about every 2 hours to reseal the mask or get new water or whatever. That said, while I am asleep, it’s deep good sleep. And I can tell it’s working because I’m not falling asleep in the middle of the day or while driving anymore.

So my hope is that I’ll get used to the harness and this will all feel normal, and I’ll sleep well for the rest of my life.

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My son, do not let wisdom and understanding out of your sight, preserve sound judgment and discretion; they will be life for you, an ornament to grace your neck.

Proverbs 3:21-22

If this your first experience with this series “Letters to my son” you may want to start with the preface, it’ll explain a lot about what’s going on here. Let’s get started.

This post isn’t a long dialog about how to be a pro partner. It’s simply a collection of tips on how to be a good partner to a woman.

Back Scratches

Ok, for those of you that have worn sport socks, you know how your legs itch like crazy when you take them off after a long day? They’ve been squeezing your legs all day, and you don’t really notice until you take the off.

Bras do the same thing to the wearers back. When that clasp comes undone after a long day, a scratch where those straps were is ridiculously pleasurable. This is not a sexual thing, and if its coming off at the end of a long day, it’s unlikely to become sexual. Take this opportunity to NOT try to make it sexual. Scratch how they like it. Maybe gentle, maybe sharp, just ask and listen.

They will appreciate several things from this exchange.

1. It just feels so good.
2. Making it about them, and not you (no sex)
3. The fact that you thought about it, and recognized something about them.

Foot Massages

Many women wear high heels, and many of them become really comfortable with them. That said, anything higher than an inch or two isn’t really a natural position for human feet. Even regular wearers get sore feet.

Take some time to massage their feet when the time is right. In my experience, unless it’s inconveniencing them, the time is almost always right. Here are some examples.

1. She comes home from work, kicks off the shoes and flops in a chair. Because you’re a planner, you swing the foot stool around, sit on it, and pick up a foot and gently begin to massage it. THEN YOU ASK “is this ok?” Consent matters, everywhere all the time. Maybe it hurts too much and she needs you to stop. But you’ve done several things here. You were thoughtful, you took initiative, and you gave her the opportunity to say no. The third thing there makes the first two winners, even if she says no.
2. She’s in bed feet sticking out of the covers. You’re coming in after brushing teeth or whatever. Rather than tickle, just pick up a foot and start massaging. Again you ask, because it’s what you do, but getting a massage in her own bed on her own pillow with her own book from her own partner is usually a winner.
3. Pretty much anywhere she’s barefoot and stationary for a while. Watch for opportunity.

Freedom To Change

This one isn’t really just for women, but for all partners. Something cool about long term relationships is that you get to know someone deeply. Something dangerous about long term relationships is the expectation that once you know someone, that person will never change.

“Ugh, I don’t ever want steak again”.

“What?!? You love steak! For 35 years you’ve loved steak! I feel like I don’t even know you!”

There’s a fine line between knowing them well enough to plan something they’ll love, and being willing to re-learn things about them. Things maybe you never knew, or that have changed. People who feel penned in, held rigid in a relationship often begin to feel like they relationship doesn’t fit them anymore. Then they start looking for one, OR simply live a miserable life.

If you can allow that person and that relationship to flex and bend and change as people change, it can be one that fits forever.

“But can I tell if they’re changing?” you ask.

One way is to watch for it. Everyone changes through their life. Music tastes, food tastes, entertainment, culture, sex, etc. But even then assuming is dangerous, so you have to talk about it. And when you open the conversation about it, it shows you care, and they’re important to you, which is a big win right there.

Purpose

Your reason for doing things like the ones I’ve listed above is important. If you do it to be the cool partner, assuming she’ll brag about awesome you are, or worse, bragging yourself about how awesome you are, and how she BETTER love you, since you’re awesome… Your relationship will fail.

This stuff needs to come from love. From making her first, making her important to you, giving her needs, feeling, and emotions value.

It’s a bit ironic that if you do these things to be great, you will not, but if you do them for the right reasons, you’ll be a great partner.

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Update 17 Feb 2026

Still Standing

Jonny Harris is an actor and comedian, perhaps best known for his role as Constable George Crabtree on the CBC TV show Murdoch Mysteries. But he ALSO does a show called Still Standing, where we goes to small towns across Canada that have had some sort of setback, but are still standing. Fires, floods, plants closing, racial oppression, whatever.

He spends time with the people of the town and really gets to know what makes them tick. Then at the end of a week he does a standup comedy show for them, where he tells them (and us) what he learned about the town.

This show is universally positive, even when talking about the hard times. Episodes are just 20 minutes long, so it’s easy to watch one while doing the dishes for example. It’s really really good, and I highly recommend it.

Travel Man

Richard Ayoade Is a comedian from the UK, perhaps best known for his role as Moss in The IT Crowd. He also did a show call Gadget Man, where he reviewed physical gadgets and digital apps etc.

This grew to a new show called Travel Man where he and a companion (usually a fellow comedian) visit a city for 48 hours and experience all that they can.

I love several things about this show. One is that they rarely visit and experience the things that are famous in the city. In Paris they didn’t visit the tower, they went to another building with a view of it. They take tours in things like go-karts, bicycles, etc.

Both people on the show are funny, and even if they say something a little snarky you can tell they mean it in fun and genuinely like each other.

We also get to see many of the non-mainstream fun things in a wide variety of cities.

Down to Earth with Zac Efron

I was wary of this show at first, but I came to love it. Zac and a friend travel around the world looking at unique solutions to social problems. For example, Paris has fresh drinking water available for free about every 100 meters in the entire city. Then they have vending machines full of empty plastic drinking bottles, which aren’t cheap.

Again, it’s just a curious show about how people are Doing It Right and making the world a better place.

Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy

Stanley was born in the US to parents who came from Italy. He speaks Italian, and loves Italian food. In this show he visits each territory of Italy and looks at the foods that come from that area.

The people he visits range from chefs to house wives to farm owners to shepherds. To be clear, he’s a foodie, and only once or twice had second thoughts about eating what he was presented, and generally LOVED everything he ate.

I am not that foodie, AT ALL. But I still loved his enjoyment and appreciation of the quality of the ingredients, the love put into their crafting, etc. It’s a very calm quiet show.

Honorable Mention: Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico

I’ve never seen this, and only found it today whilst researching this post, but it’s produced by Stanley Tucci and Eva travels Mexico trying all of its foods. I have a very strong suspicion I’m going to like it.

I hope these shows bring you the same peace they brought me.

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