Archive for April, 2007
Little alien thinking dude
I’ve been given a ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ by the Target-riffic Kellie. I’m flattered and honored. And I hope I can live up to the high standard of fun and thoughtful writing she shares with us on her site.
She writes about her life as a new mom, as someone who struggles with silly (and I’m being polite there) neighbors and landlords, as someone who makes observations about the world around her and as someone struggling with a fixation on a certain department store,. These observations and self-proclaimed ramblings have us enthralled and eagerly awaiting each posting. She’s self-deprecating to a fault (is that phrase an oxymoron? I don’t think so… let’s make a new word, just for her… oxygenius. Yeah, that’s it.).
Details on this Thinking Blogger thingie:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think.
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.
3. Optional: proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ button.
With that in mind, I award the Thinking Blogger to these sites (in no particular order):
- Madship
My cycling buddy. The one to which I owe a passion for cycling. Thanks for saying “We should go for a ride together” some four or so years ago. - Rose at Marathon Bound
She left me quite possibly the most creative comment I’ve ever received. A haiku for a haiku. I should have expected no less from this eloquent and entertaining runner and poet. - Umm, this post has languished in my drafts folder for a few days now waiting for me to fill in three more recipients.
- I realize that my online relationships are still numbered in the teens and haven’t grown into adulthood. Nearly all of them have already either received this award or would not be interested.
- So in the interest of closure, I will cut the cord on this post and just click Publish with two nominations.
Flooding update, or How I Just Want to Give Up.
It’s no better. In fact it’s worse. It’s been about 10 days or so. The snow and rain from Sunday and Monday were the death knell for my old sump pump. It just couldn’t keep up. So last night I heading out to Home Depot to pick up another, just in case the old one crapped out while the store was closed. I wasn’t planning on using it, just having it in case… I’m glad I bought it, since in the time it took me to go from home to the store and back, the water content in the basement had nearly doubled.
Hooked up the new one. Had to get all new pipes for the larger fittings and didn’t want to constrict the flow any more than necessary. Set it up, and it worked like a charm. Except… Wait, once the bulk of the water was sucked from the hole in the floor, and it started to just maintain the low level, it started it’s cycling phase. Five seconds on, four seconds off. During the off phase, all the water in the 1 1/2″ pipe (6 feet of it straight up) would shoot back down into the sump well and nearly fill it. Crap. I forgot the one-way valve.
I freakin’ ASKED the person in Home Depot, “Is there anything else I need? Do I need some other kind of fitting, part, whatever?” I TRIED to cover my bases. I’ve been burned WAY too many times in the past in situations like this. And sure enough, I forgot something, even though I did my best to avoid that. I *spiky ball, daggers, fire* hate when that happens! Why can’t these salespeople HELP ME! Now, it’s too late, since the store is closed. I decide to wait ’til morning. The pump will last.
Morning.
Look downstairs only to be greeted by Noah floating by with with a jaunty grin and a soggy box of long-forgotten, soon to be thrown out stuff. There’s three inches of water down there. Mind you it never got about a half inch until now.
The basement is filled with silt. Lots and lots of silt. The pump bogged down at some point last night and was no longer pumping. It was leaning listlessly to one side, gasping for water, but only getting air. Its base completely encased in muck. I can’t believe the volume of muck. It’s so deep, and wide ranging, like manure at a dairy farm.
Off to the hardware store again. This time to the one by my office. It’s a little closer. And they’re a little smarter. Mostly. I get the one-way valve, I learn it’s actually called a check-valve (whoopee). Head home to install it. It doesn’t fit. It’s an 1.25″ and I need it to screw onto a 1.5″ port. Great. Back out for a bushing. I put it all together and the check-valve works wonderfully, though it’s not needed for about a half hour of constant pumping to get the bulk of the water out. Once the level is low enough, then the pump starts cycling and no water flushes out of the pipe back into the well when the cycle is off.
Through the wonders of technology and free online services I bring you boring, grainy, and poorly lit video of the happenings.
The initial sucking.
The nearly-done sucking.
The lake outside.
Oh, yeah. And that hole by the house in that last video? Apparently my ground is like swiss cheese (hopefully Kerrygold) because I sank in up to my knee right there. That can’t be good.
Please let the sun come out and dry things up! But the forecast is for showers until Friday. Fan-freakin’-tastic. It’ll be two weeks, I bet, before the water table subsides. Plenty of time for me to lug a couple hundred pounds of silt up and out. Anyone want to help?
Getting images into Wordpress
Having trouble getting your images to work in Wordpress? The most likely reason is that the image you’re uploading is just too big. You’re not necessarily doing anything wrong, you’re just encountering a limitation/design feature of the blogging software.
I’ve seen this with several people using Wordpress. Once you resize the photo to something like 500 or 600 pixels wide (and whatever height proportionally) then you can upload the photo successfully. I have two suggestions for resizing images–both are pretty easy…
- Use http://picnik.com to resize your photo before uploading
- Install a tiny Microsoft utility to resize your photos.
The first one, Picnik, is a slick website that lets you do basic stuff to a photo. I’ve used it a lot recently and really like it. You just have to register (like every other site on the web) before you can use it. It’s very well designed and pretty self-explanatory.
The second option, the one I generally use for quick and dirty resizing, is the Microsoft Image Resizer utility. Go here and download and install it:
Once it’s installed, you just right-click on an image on your computer, choose “Resize Pictures” from the context menu. By default, it creates a copy of your image with the new, smaller size, and then you upload this new image to Wordpress.
Wordpress has good documentation…
- This article describes the most likely reasons you cannot upload an image.
- This article describes how to optimize your images for the web, so they load faster for your viewers.
- This article describes the 6 ways you can display in image in your posts. I think a lot of people are confused by these options. Scroll two-thirds of the way down and read this.
I hope this helps. And start posting lots of pictures!
