Quality Time with the Mrs…

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The last couple of days have been a lot of fun…

Yesterday was my wife’s birthday, so I tried to carve a little more time than she’s usually been getting lately out of my schedule, and not to sound all mushy or anything, but it definitely reminded me of just what I was missing out on during all of those late nights spent hunched over a keyboard in search of words for this, that, and the other thing!  Saturday we celebrated part 1 of her birthday with a grand tour of Epcot’s Food & Wine Festival, whereas today we took things a little slower and did some shopping to pick out her birthday gift, then enjoyed a nice and quiet dinner at The Melting Pot, and despite being her birthday, the whole thing felt sort of extra special for me just because our personal time together has been really sporadic lately between pacifying the puppy and work changes and me trying to focus on writing.

It can be tough sometimes because as much as I want to really knuckle down and focus 150% on making my writing career become a reality, at the same time after days like this I can’t help but sit back and think that it’s all in vain if these are the kinds of days that I’m missing out on in the meantime.  Not to mention I’ve found that all work and no play tends to get kind of boring after a while and doesn’t really leave me much to write about anyways, hence I didn’t do nearly as much writing back in 2004/2005 when I was single and sat around the house all day playing video games!

It’s definitely a tough balancing act – obviously I want to spend as much time as I possibly can with Sara because, well, I did marry her and all, and yet at the same time it’s also important to focus on my career so that, well, so that I can actually have one someday!  In the meantime, I guess all that I can do is really try to make the most of my writing time so that I can be as productive as possible and thus leave more time for her by default.

A constant struggle, yes, but for what it’s worth, we’re talking two really good days and if anything, I guess that should serve as a source of inspiration to work harder and do better! 😉

Nope!

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Today is my wife Sara’s birthday, so instead of wasting the day away blogging, I’m just gonna leave this here for your taxidermic enjoyment while we go out and celebrate…

Give it a few listens before you pass judgment – it’s actually catchier than you’d think!

migrating from LiveJournal – a technical love story

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So if there’s one thing moving my blog from LiveJournal over to WordPress has reminded me, it’s just how much I absolutely, positively love WordPress!

This is something that I’ve been planning to do on and off for quite a while now, although it kept slipping off the radar due to other priorities.  Well, last weekend for whatever reason I was feeling particularly unmotivated with whatever I was supposed to be working on, so instead I decided to start digging into this new little project.  I found a theme that I liked … well, technically a couple of them that I ended up mashing together to get what you see here today … and after a few hours of hammering away at the initial theme setup, the question came – just how ugly was importing all of my posts from LJ actually going to be???

I was ready for the absolute worst (i.e. copying and pasting them one by one into new posts ad nauseam), but instead it turns out I was both lucky and happy to find that not only does a script already exist to pull in content directly using LJ’s API, it even already has hooks built into the WordPress core!  It was literally a 5-minute job – click to install the actual plugin to do the heavy lifting, enter my username and password, and then wait while it churned through some 2,000 blog posts spanning the last eight years of my life!

The only problem that’s still outstanding is for some reason the importer isn’t pulling the comments down after it finishes with the posts themselves – instead, it just says that I don’t have any comments and then finishes, whereas apparently I have about 800 comments!  So I still need to keep an eye on that – I already found where a WordPress.com user is reporting the same problem recently, so hopefully they’ll fix it sooner than later and we’ll officially be in business.

In the meantime, next steps are to finish polishing up the interface a little more, although so far I’m already very happy with the aesthetics, then for the blog side of things I do actually still have to go through each and every post manually – both because I want to refine my tags and also need to tag a good 80% of the older posts before I started using them, and also to address a few small issues where Flash videos, etc… didn’t actually get embedded like they should’ve.

So mostly small stuff, but still time consuming – once I can get everything sorted out so I know what all to look for, I’ll just pick 50 or so a night and slowly start pouring through them until they’re all done.  In the end, I do think that it’s going to make for a better site, and besides, being the nostalgic doof that I am, I never really mind pouring back through old posts that I wrote years ago all that much anyways… 🙂

So in summary, thus far probably my easiest redesign I’ve done in a long while!  I still have one more that’s on the docket to knock out later on this month before Thanksgiving, and I can only hope that it goes as smoothly as this one did.

There was some food, and also some wine…

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Yesterday was a good day.

I’m sure I’ll write something up in more depth over here sometime in the next week, but yesterday my wife, her sister, and I went over to Epcot for the Epcot International Food & Wine Festival.  This is probably one of my favorite times of year over at Epcot, second only to Christmastime itself, but not only is the weather a bit cooler so that you can actually stand outside for more than 10 minutes at a time, as if Epcot’s selection of dining establishments wasn’t already amazing enough…

So cut to the chase, we ended up eating for about 7 hours straight.

Well, make that 5 hours because I guess technically we did have to take a break around the USA (going counter-clockwise) because we just couldn’t stuff anymore!  And here I amusingly thought that we’d actually make it all of the way around, but instead we barely made it halfway and then picked up a few choice favorites throughout the second half on our way out.  For what it’s worth, between the three of us we were ordering just about everything at every booth that we passed, which in addition to being kind of expensive also ended up being a lot of food, even if only at a bite or two at a time!

Nonetheless, we’ve already re-evaluated our technique and have an updated plan of attack for next year – two distinct days of food’ing, preferably as far apart from one another as possible, although if we can somehow swing for an overnight at the Beach Club, I’m all for making it a whirlwind weekend of wine and some-sort-of-food-that-starts-with-a-W…

Now, I leave you today with some of the most delicious highlights from our feast – try not to drool in your keyboard because it’s even worse than soda to try and get out…

 

Thin Post : Fitocracy

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So my latest strategy in the arena of trying to get thinner is trying out Fitocracy. The concept is pretty simple – it’s basically another fitness tracking tool, except it puts it in the perspective of a game where one earns experience points to level up, and of course, you gain points by working out!

I’ve only been using it since Sunday, but it’s kind of fun so far because I’ve always been a fan of role playing games, both video and table top, so it’s been neat to see my efforts build up into levels (I’m level 3 already!), and I’ve even had an instance or two already where I forced myself to go exercise because I didn’t want to miss out on the points, which is always good! My main goal is just to find something new that will help give me that extra little push to get back on the ball, so we’ll see where it goes but so far I’m enjoying it.

If you want to sign up, they’re currently in BETA, so you need an invite code, which almost deterred me, however a quick Google search will find several available. I joined using Penny Arcade’s code that Mike tweeted out shortly before they ran their comic about the service, so you can probably still try that one if you’d like.

Also, I can’t end this post without mentioning an incredibly inspiring story that I already came across through Fitocracy – a guy just posted yesterday that within a year and a half, he was able to lose 269 pounds!!! He posted the day after his birthday about this victory of literally cutting his weight in half, and all of the changes that he’s making to his life. The monthly pictures from start to current are amazing, and I can only hope that finding stories like his and others here can help me get back into the game so that I can see that kind of success for myself.

Losing Faith in Mint…

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I’ve got to admit that as much as I was impressed with mint.com when I first started using it, it’s kind of lost a lot of sparkle for me as of late. Probably because last year we were focusing on debts that it actually recognized, so we could actively watch the numbers shrink, whereas now we’re working on others that it still can’t seem to connect to, and thus 2011 has pretty much looked like a great big year of fail in the debt reduction department.

Also, there was that issue a couple of months ago when somehow they double-loaded a bunch of transactions so all of my balances were off! I honestly still don’t know if they’re right.

So yesterday, to add even more fuel to the fire, I got this:

So tell me, Mint – how am I behind at saving $3,809 of a $500 goal, and yet also ahead by saving a NEGATIVE $99 for a $100 goal???

Seriously, I’d love to hear the explanation for this logic!

Farewell, My Dear Sweet LiveJournal…

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So if you’re reading this on LiveJournal, this will be my last post here.

No need to fear – I’m certainly not giving up the keyboard and moving to the middle of the desert to take up goat farming or any such nonsense! Nope, in fact, I’ve just finally gotten around to doing what I’ve kept saying that I was going to do with this blog for years by finally migrating it over to one of my own domains.

The reasons are mostly in that post, for those interested – basically, none of my friends blog here anymore anyways and I have a lot more flexibility on the new site than I did on LiveJournal.

Not that I necessarily have any beef with LiveJournal, per se – they were a fine host and treated me well for many a year … 8 years, actually! It’s kind of crazy to believe that it was way back in May 2003 when I first joined LiveJournal and started blogging. I was 22 years old, still lived in my Mom’s basement up in Michigan, and was in the very early stages of trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

Now some 2,014 posts and 8 years later, so much has changed – geography, careers, romance, preferences in entertainment – I’ve done so much growing over the years, and it’s kind of neat and cool and weird that thanks to blogging, I’ve got this incredible 450,000-word record of it all! All of the highs, and certainly a good number of the lows as well … not to mention I’m sure a healthy volume of random neutral blatherings that are neither here nor there … but still, collectively it’s all helped to build me into who I am today.

So that said, as far as who I’m going to be tomorrow, well, that’s something that you’re going to have to come visit my new website for in order to figure out!

http://www.scottsevener.com/blog

The site in general I’ve tried to redesign in a manner to better help promote all of the different writing projects I’ve got going these days, so if you’re looking for an easy way to keep up on that, check out the front page of the site in about a week for more info, but as for the blog itself, I’ve tried my best to help preserve everything that I wrote here at LiveJournal over the years – comments and even some of the look and feel that I’ve grown accustomed to over the years. Any of the “private posts” that you would’ve had to be a LJ friend to read are now password protected, so sorry about that – WordPress doesn’t really have a good way to allow access to those without issuing IDs and whatnot, but just between you and me, the few of those that are protected are mostly kinda depressing posts anyways, so you’re much better just sticking to the 2,000 or so freely accessible posts if it’s a happy and pleasant blast from Scott’s past that you find yourself after!

TL;DR – Change of address … hit up this link to come read my blog over at its new home! 🙂

Cleo vs. Her Leash

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I think it goes without saying that Cleo didn’t do so well with our plan to keep her from bounding out the door every time it got opened for trick or treaters this evening…

ONE DAY!!! We got to use that leash for exactly ONE DAY!!!

lazy video Sunday…

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Starting off, a cool prospective video from Microsoft about what the future could be like with fully-integrated technology surrounding our daily lives…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0&feature=player_embedded

Next – I just thought that this was pretty amazing … the idea that this technology exists to stop a 5,000 rpm saw blade within 1/1000th of a second to prevent somebody from losing a finger…

And finally, well, maybe just don’t go in the pool…