Weekend Snapshot: Praying Mantis

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We rescued this mantis from the parking lot at the garden centre. Brought it home in a Tim Hortons coffee cup and set it free in the backyard. He was pretty quick to start hunting for bugs on the roses. I’ve looked for him since then but he has done a great disappearing act. Whether he is really gone or just blending in with the garden plants I don’t know. I hope nothing ate him.

Balloon Race… Disappointing

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The Internet Balloon Race is over and I’m not going to miss it. I never saw any sign of my blog being included. Never saw the next site for balloons to go to appear on the right hand side. Never figured out how giving other racers a boost made any difference for them or myself. Never found a way to show I had been on a site which I visited during the race.

Also, there were several bugs and glitches. A pretty long list. For one I had to keep allowing other sites to open pop up windows for my browser. Now I will go in and delete all of those settings. Several sites running some kind of script or code disabled the balloons. I could not boost my own balloon, change it’s direction or boost another racer until the balloon cleared the section of the site which had the odd code. Some sites were totally unusable in this way. Many sites had a note up that they were not available. Many sites had no content at all. Few sites seemed to be participating with a balloon racer of their own. Or maybe they were like me and had added their site but it just never happened.

So overall I would say the balloon race was disappointing. It needed to be better thought out and planned and REALLY needed a much better FAQ, with far more information than was provided. How the race worked is still a mystery to me. I did get my balloon moving along but did not really understand how or why.

LockerGnome: Blogging Should Be Sexy

I revamped and changed the focus of the blog I was writing for LockerGnome. Now it’s called Blogging Should Be Sexy . Is the neon pink too much? Just cause I like it doesn’t mean anyone else will. :)

I wrote an About page for it:

Blogging should be personal, artistic and sexy. Innovative, original and imperfect web publishing for free spirits.

My first blog was on Geocities. Not an official CMS, just something I typed into a text file, added HTML to it and saved to my freebie Geocities pages. I wish I had saved those but I was also writing in my handwritten journal offline so it’s not all gone. Since then I’ve tried several versions and styles of blogs. I’ve stuck with Blogger longest cause it’s fairly simple and lets you focus on the writing and creating instead of figuring out coding and bugs. My current blog was begun June 2004. My first blog was started in 1998.

My blog style is imperfect, experimental and requires creative ingenuity. It’s also a lot of fun! That’s what makes it sexy. I make mistakes, I patch things up and find work arounds. I discover great new ideas and use them. I take risks with my blog cause at the end of the day I’m really doing it to hear myself type. I am pleased to have readers and comments but, I’ll let you know ahead that it’s only me you’ll find behind that curtain. Whatever I am; I am myself first.

There are a lot of sites to find out about SEO, monetization and professional blogging. This isn’t one of them.

Destined for World Domination after All

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Lone Chatelaine has this on her blog. Made me wonder if all my great plans for world ruling were for naught in the end. But, no, I’m still on track, still heading for that whole World Domination thing. Just working out a few pesky bugs…

Which is both kind of cool and kind of scary!

Will you rule the world? Maybe. Maybe not.

But at least you know that you could.


You Are Destined to Rule the World


You have the makings of a very evil dictator…

Resolutions

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New Year’s Resolutions for 2008

I promise to eat ice cream on New Year’s Eve, even if I have to do it all by myself.

I will continue to look at houses (occasionally, not obsessively) in the real estate flyers and buy lottery tickets about once a month or so.

I will try to actually sleep in the hours after my shift at work ends at midnight and the daylight cracks open the sky at dawn.

I will keep seeking out the finest fancy coffee in Ontario, no matter how much of it I have to drink along the way.

I will keep up with the routine for laundry, going to work and all that standard stuff.

I’m going to learn XHTML (at least more than I do now) and finish revamping my site, this year.

I won’t give up on finding a guy who appreciates some of the things I do: being reliable, a little romance, some old traditions and making new ones, intelligent conversation, art and being creative, smiling and the odd bit of sensual kinky sex.

I won’t pick up bugs or other really icky things that make me cringe.

I won’t make promises and commitments I can’t keep and I will try not to let anyone pressure me into making any such commitments. Not even myself.