Friday, October 03, 2008

New Address



Apologies. This blog is no longer active. Posts have been moved to my main site todd-wheeler.com.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

-T

Friday, June 06, 2008

Makes Its Own Gravy

"Eating your own dog food." The tech industry uses this phrase to mean one should actually use the software/hardware/wetware that one sells. For example, if everyone working at Microsoft used Mac's, that would be rather hypocritical.

I've been developing a client website using a content management system (CMS) called Drupal. It is cool stuff and I may use it for other clients. In which case, I'd better walk the talk and use it on my own website.

Which is now live. You can go visit the website here.

The Drupal tools make it much easier to update the site. It has a nice blog application which I'll be using. In other words, I won't be updating this blog anymore. All new posts will be on my website.

I know I'm making trouble, asking people change their links or bookmarks. Sorry! But hey, on the new site, the Summer Reading Program contest is now live. Perhaps that will help soften the blow.

As for all these old posts, not sure what to do with them. I'll probably recycle some if I get stuck for a topic to blog about. Maybe the old posts will slowly decompose into a nice rich humus of 1's and 0's.

Anyway, thanks for reading all the silliness posted here. I hope you'll make the trip over to the new site.

Saturday, May 31, 2008

Fishy Business

I mentioned I helped some fish move last weekend. Herring have been returning in greater numbers to spawn, particularly at the Upper Mystic Lake. A dam there makes it quite difficult to get from the Lower to Upper Mystic Lake.

The local paper reported efforts by an annual bucket brigade to lift the fish over the dam. Plans are under way to rebuild the dam with a herring ladder. For now a taxi service is necessary. Having read the article to my daughter, she got very excited about helping the fish and wanted to go out last weekend.

This first photo is one of the nets we were using to snag the herring.


There were quite a few people who showed up, in part due to the article in the newspaper.


Unfortunately, as one of the organizers mentioned in the article, predicting when the herring run to spawn is hit or miss. It's not like the fish have Memorial Day Weekend marked on their calendars to remind them to show up. Last year was a big hit with about 19,000 fish lifted. This year, not so much. My daughter and I did net one which made the trip worth while.

After our success, we gave way to others waiting for a turn with the nets. Here is a view from the dam.


Once the fish are caught, they are put in buckets of water. The buckets are hooked to lines and then hauled up by people on the dam who dump the fish into the Upper Mystic Lake on the other side of the dam. You can kind of see the lines hanging down here.


When we left, they had tallied all of 160 or so fish. A fun morning, despite the lack of herring.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Crash And Burn

MyMoEdBo Daze:
Total Pages: 101

Many thanks for the support and comments. They helped keep me motivated.

I am pulling the plug on this experiment. I will continue editing the book (not giving up) but the daily editing goal isn't working. I'm running up against other projects that need more attention. No use putting anyone through more boring posts.

That said, it did work in that I got through 101 pages (a nice prime number), many more than I would have done without the public posting of progress.

Hope you all had a great weekend. Mine included time with family, scraping wallpaper, and helping some fish move. Photos later on the last item.

Friday, May 23, 2008

Bleh

MyMoEdBo Day 18:
Zero pages. Can't get no worse.

Link of the Day:
Fantasy Friday. Blog for a beer, or something.