Welcome to the New Host
The move is complete. You should have gotten here with no changes to how you have gotten to this blog in the past as it is still set up on graywolfphoto.com.
You may have noticed the new look. We are back to using Wordpress as our blog engine again. It is lot’s better than the one I had to use on the free host. The header photo shows my computer desk where this blog originates from. It usually is not that neat.
As well as graywolfphoto and this blog, I have also set up a new website tomrit.com that will be a portal to all my websites. I chose the domain name because it was the shortest, and thus easiest to type one I could come up with that was still available. You will find another blog there too, “A Guy and His Sewing Machine”, which explains where those posts went to.
I had thought that I had recovered most of the articles from the old version of this blog. Unfortunately it turned out I had only recovered a few of them. Most of those are here, using my editorial powers I did forego a few of them. The ones I have not republished are those which I have no intention of doing a follow up on but need one, or I felt were too whiney even for me. The rest are gone into limbo unless I can find a draft somewhere in my archives (I tend to write serious posts locally, then cut and past them here). Also I shall try to get around to relinking the images that are gone; most of those were linked to the websites so are still there.
There are some other things as yet undone, setting up categories and a blog roll for instance, but I felt that it was time to do the transfer.
The new hosting is possible do to the generosity of one of our readers, Jostein Øksne, in Norway. There is supposed to be a slash through the O in his last name but I do not know how to do that. Jostein has his own blog, Alunfoto which I will be giving a permanent link to as soon as I get around to figuring out how to put in a “Sponsors” sidebar.
Changes
Graywolf Photo is going to be moving to a paid host very soon. It will still be the same as at the present. This blog will be reconstructed, with many of the old posts back up, if I can figure out how to do that. I am going to try and get all the articles that I feel have some lasting interest back up.
In addition, I will have www.tomrit.com. On tomrit.com I will have a few blogs, separating my interests, so you will not have to wade through a lot of stuff you have no interest in to find the stuff you do.
“Subject to Change” will remain my general journal, mostly talking about me and my boring doings. It will remain on graywolfphoto.com so you can continue to find it.
The sewing stuff will be on “A Guy and His Sewing Machine” which will be on tomrit.com. That was planned too which is why it had a category all its own.
I also plan on having a blog dealing with my philosophy, if it can be deemed that. It will deal with my sometimes iconoclastic view of the world, its events, and how we deal with them. I was planning on calling that “Meanderings” after my old section, but that stuff is still up on my ISP provided website, so I will have to come up with a new name.
I am excited and somewhat overwhelmed by all this; ongoing projects are not what I am best at, as you who have been reading my stuff well know. So it is a challenge.
From your point of view it means that in about a week or so the site will disappear again until the nameservers track the change of location. That may vary between a couple of hours and a couple of days depending where you are located. But rest assured we are not going to disappear into limbo again. We are just, so to speak, going to be out of town for a couple of days.
In A Hurry To Get Nowhere
For some strange reason I seem to be willing to spend a lot of time effort and money to get ready to do something, but then never get around to the doing. An example is this sewing machine. I have it running OK, to be in perfect order I still need some parts. And I will probably get them, and I might buy the sewing supplies I will need to use with it. However, will I ever do anything with it beyond simple mending?
I do not know, if I go by my experience with other hobbies, probably not. I am thinking of making shirts and trousers that fit perfectly, but really that is a lot of effort and I can buy ill fitting ones for less than the cost of materials. All my life I wanted a few custom tailored (I refuse to use that pretentious English term) suits. I love the way they look and fit (on others), but could not afford them when they cost $300, and certainly not now. I did find a place on the web that sells nice cloth, only $120/yard. Let’s see, six time one hundred twenty dollars, why that is only $720 for the outer fabric the rest of the stuff needed would most likely only bring that up to $800 or so. Now a $3000 suit for only $800 is a bargain, but it is about ten times what I can afford.
Which is another point about my thesis, it usually turns out that I can not afford to do what I want to do at the level I want to do it. Should I lower my standards and make ill fitting shirts and trousers for twice what I can buy them for? On top of that there is the energy problem, I am energy challenged. No, I do not mean I can not afford gasoline. I mean that for some undiagnosable reason my energy level is about 1/20th what it was used to be before the illness that led to my disability retirement. If I spend two hours at something not too difficult I am as tired as if I had just worked a 12 hour shift doing physical labor. That is very hard to deal with for someone who once was described, “He can do anything. If he does not know how to do it, he will learn how to do it, and then do it”.
So those two problems, lack of funds and lack of energy, leave me rather unmotivated. It is very hard to overcome that lack of motivations and do things. Getting ready to do them about uses up my resources. And by the time I have recovered my resources, I have moved on to a new interest.
Your Comments and Corrections are always welcome.
Almost!
Well, the website is almost what it was. One file had gotten overwritten on my computer, and none of my backups is old enough to find the original. So that set of photos is gone (SIGH!).
The transparent GIF on the index page has noise in the background. I kind of like the effect, but would like to figure out why, and how to eliminate it. Guess I am going to have to spend some time with my Photoshop books.
I have no plans for today, Labor Day, just kicking back and relaxing.
I do not like this blogging engine. It does not seem to have the features it claims to have, and the ones it does have do not seem to work. I have to put in html tags to get paragraphs, for crying out loud. Consider this to be temporary, and what I am posting in it will most likely be lost when I switch back to Wordpress.
Gone, But Back Again
Oh well, things change. Not always because we want them to. In this case my old webhosting company, Detail Hosting, went south with no warning at all.
Thanks to my Domain Registar, GoDaddy.com, I have things back up on one of their free hosts. That is good because I still have not for sure gotten payments to Detail Hosting stopped. You have to love PayPal (That is darkest sarcasm, if you didn’t figure that out for yourself). While I was able to transfer graywolfphoto.com with out a problem, for some reason they do not give you access to Wordpress. Subject To Change was done on Wordpress, so I can not just transfer it to this new host. I did not have STC backed up on my home system anyway. I am writing this in LifeType which I know almost nothing about, yet. I do plan on recreating some of the more interesting posts from my notes, but there is no way I am going to bother with the ones that I do not feel have a lasting interest.
My target date for getting things back to operational was the First of September, so I did not do too bad.
So, you ask, anything new in the last month? A couple of minor things. I now have a hardware RAID setup on the workstation. Just the three 500gb SATA drives I already had, but now on a Dell Perc 5/i card I got from eBay for a very reasonable price. I am typing this on a NOS IBM Model-M Buckling Spring Keyboard, also gotten from an eBay seller. It has a great feel that helps my typing accuracy, and a loudish click clack sound that I could personally do without.
That is about it for now.
I do hope you found your way back to here,
Tom