I have checked the results of last week’s poll and TechLand came in with the highest total of votes (7 of 9) so that is gonna be the theme I use for my new blog.
I also plan on putting up a small forum, I will be using Simple Machines Forum for the forum software package as I have been running a smapp forum using SMF on a free hosting solution for a while now.
I plan on purchasing the domain and hosting space for the site Friday evening and unless things go totally bottom up I will have everything ready by Monday morning at the latest.
One last thing to note, if you go and look at the TechLand theme you may notice the image at the top. I am looking for a replacement image and as yet have not found anything that would work. I am looking for an image about 900px wide 150 px in height. I have found a few creative commons pictures on flickr (1,2,3) that I like but they don’t fint well in the dimensions that I need the image to fit in. If anyone has any images they would let me use, places to look, etc, I would very much appreciate it.
I have decided on a host as well as a domain name for my new blog/project. Although I still want to be vague on the specifics my blog will consist of a blog, website, and possibly a forum. I am planning on using Wordpress for my blog and I have found a few themes I would like to use. I would like some input though, follow the links below and check out the themes, them please come back here and let me know in the poll which one(s) you liked. Thanks in advance for your help and keep checking back here in the next few weeks as I keep the updates coming on whats goin on.
This are pretty slow over here right now. Look for things to pick up middle of August though.
The pictures that I took at the wedding this last weekend had really bad red-eye. Need to get that fixed before I put em up.
This week I have been placed on after-hours-on-call for the first time since I started working at my current job. For those of you that don’t know when you are on call after hours you are given a pager and when a user called into the service desk with a computer related problem the pager beeps and you are supposed to take care of the problem.
This in itself is not a big deal, pretty easy actually, thing is that last night was my first night and as Linda, my boss commented, “well, on the bright side it doesn’t get much worse than it did last night.” I got home from work at 5:30pm and at 6:05pm I got my first call. This escelated into 5 more calls between 6 and 7pm at which time I got the Windows-On-Call person on the phone and we started rebooting servers. This went on for a few hours and by 1am this morning we had all the servers rebooted and everything was working fine. I then went to bed.
A few hours later I got a page at 3am and then worked until 5am resolving the problem. I then went back to bed for an hour more of sleep until I had to get ready for work. I got a grand total of 3 hours of sleep last night.
On the bright side I get paid time and a half for any after hours calls. Still…I can’t wait till next Monday at 8am…then On-Call goes to someone else.
This weekend I am going to Mankato, MN to attend a wedding of a friend from college. It should be lots of fun. There will be pictures up on my Picsa when I get back.
“Every time I’m heading back to my desk from a meeting (who am I kidding, I don’t get invited to meetings) or lunch, I slow down as I’m rounding the corner because I CRINGE to see that little red light lit up on my phone. I hate retrieving voicemails almost as much as I hate talking on the phone. I’d like to change my work voicemail message so it says “This is Mark Roberts. I’m obviously not here and I will not listen to your message, so please call me back later or, better yet, EMAIL ME!” — What runs through my brain from time to time.
This post is a response to A Good Husband’s post The Ultimate Guide to Winning an Argument With Your Spouse.
At the end of his post Cory asked if anyone had any comments or suggestions, I don’t think I have any suggestions but I do think I have some comments that could be used as suggestions. So, here it goes…
In any relationship (a friendship, a working relationship, a marriage, etc) there is going to be conflict and I have found out that personally my goal is less about completely avoiding conflict but more about how I handle that conflict once it has begun. About a month after I started dating my wonderful girlfriend Nicole (June 30th will mark 8 months, yay!) we had our first big fight. I can actually remember what it was about but I am not going to rehash it, that is not the point of this post, the point is what happened after. We were both furious theach other even after we resolved the issue so we sat down at the kitchen table and each explained the things the other did during the argument that the we thought were not conductive to the argument. With some of the things we realized we were being stupid and should let the complaint slide and with others we acknowledged that we were not helping the argument.
After learning what behaviors we both exhibited during an argument that were not conductive we now do something very simple: when either of us notices one of the behaviors the argument stops, period. We then take 5-10 minutes to do something else (alone or together) and then after that time if we can even remember what we were discussing/arguing about we may continue the discussion. 8 out of 10 times after 10 minutes we can’t even remember what the problem is and by taking a break we avoid getting mad at each other.
So, to summarize:
Now, I myself are partial to clamming up when I am wrong as well as beating a dead horse (beating a dead horse is almost my favorite hobby) but this system works well for myself and Nicole but it does take work. Also, one thing to note, your mileage may vary and feel free to modify this system to your specific situation/relationship.
Woo, this post started off kinda rambling, but I think it ended petty nice. This blog is kinda a splattering of lots of different things but I hope to do more relationship posts in the future, please comment and share any thoughts you may have on this post or my blog in general.
Nuttin exciting going on, I am sick, tired, and I just wanna kick back and relax. Is is August yet? I wanna go to Boson.