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Pardon My Appearance

In Uncategorized on February 8, 2010 at 4:06 am

There’s been a slight change of plans. It’s WordPress from here on out, thanks in large part to my incompetence and impatience. It’s okay, though. I was looking to start over with something fresh.

Originally, the plan was to cut the Blogger stuff loose and start over. Upon doing so, it became apparent that leaving old posts on a blogspot address wasn’t going to solve my one problem: preserving links to images and other files which are hosted on my site. Blogger and WordPress handle those things differently, so basically the links that Blogger made don’t make sense to WordPress. I’m sure there’s some other technical crap involved, too, but I honestly don’t care. The point is, once it was clear that leaving the stuff on Blogger wasn’t going to fix this I figured I may as well bring the stuff along with me.

A bunch of posts didn’t make the cut. A few more will probably be culled in the next few days. Looking back, a lot of the things I wrote give me douchebumps now. Anything causing that reaction is getting deleted. It’s better for both of us.

It’s going to take a few for me to get things set up and looking the way I want them, so it’s going to be ugly around here a while. Sorry about that.

If your feed’s messed up, sorry about that, too. I’m trying to straighten it out with Feedburner as soon as possible.

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And-a-TWO

In Uncategorized on February 3, 2010 at 7:15 pm

Blogger has decided to nix FTP support, which leaves me in a little bit of a jam. I’m forced to choose between the following:

  1. Hosting my site through Blogger and going through a bunch of technical ballyhoo to get things like images working
  2. Migrating my existing blogs to WordPress…and going through a bunch of technical ballyhoo to get things like images working
  3. Cutting the old blog loose and making a fresh start here at WordPress, essentially leaving my old blog in stasis at the Blogspot address and forwarding my domain to this new dealie

Option 3 is the most attractive, of course, because I am reluctant to involve myself in technical ballyhoo. Also, I am lazy. Not to mention the fact that a fresh start might do me some good. The old digs have been feeling a little, well, old lately. I’m a guy who likes to change things around every now and again.

Off I go.

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Halloween 2009: The Night HE Couldn’t Catch a Break

In Uncategorized on November 17, 2009 at 12:38 am

If there was anything remotely negative to say about this Halloween season it’s that the weather was bad on the big day. Wind gusts up to 40 mph and sporadic rain made it impossible to keep candles going in the jackos. One particular prop blew over twice, the second time landing in a cast iron fire bowl and being completely consumed. That was swell. Still, we soldiered on, though not without more than a few choice words from me.

Rather than spend the whole post bitching about what my haunt wasn’t, I thought I’d share some pictures of what it was.

Halloween2009-16

Here’s a bunch of photos (what I managed to get before the rain kicked in).

My aim this year was to go for a darker, more atmosphere-focused haunt. I spent less time on monsters and more time on things like candles, lanterns and pumpkins. The larger props were crude wooden tripods with skulls and other good stuff hanging from them. Lighting was kept to a minimum. The hope was that most everything would be lit from the fire bowl and about 30 different lanterns and candles and stuff.

You can’t really tell from the photos, but the skulls are marked with runes and arcane symbols. I wanted to create the sense that these objects were warnings to anyone wandering past. The layout was such that the trick-or-treaters were led up the driveway to where the props got more dense as they approached the garage. The idea was to make the “warnings” more ominous the closer you got to the goods.

I’d offer you photos of the whole “stage” but, as I mentioned, the rain really revved up before I could switch to my wide angle lens and finish shooting. Oh, well. Next year I’ll have to come up with a better sacrifice for the weather gods, I guess.

Speaking of next year, I’m going in an entirely different direction. Wish me luck.

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