Another Opinion Among Many

A few days ago, Lorelle Van Fossen wrote an article for the Blog Herald, entitled Blogging Jobs: How Much Are Bloggers Paid to Blog? Lorelle, in her tireless and complete style, has tabluated and shown how much a blogger has to work to make a decent living at blogging.  Its eye opening when you see how many $5 posts you’d have to do to earn a decent annual income.  I could see early on that this was not going to be a serious money maker for me, so that is why I didn’t get started in the whole mess with paid posting.  Too much work for too little return.  I have gotten much more value out of the time I have spent with my family instead of in front of a screen churning out crap that I didn’t mean about a product that I’ve never used.

Read Lorelle’s article.  If you take it to heart and choose to be paid to write - what you’re worth - then you can help improve the situation for everyone.  176 words.  Hmmm.

Here’s what I bought.  Its a 2005 Nissan Sentra 1.8 Special Edition.  I bought it because of its low mileage (66,000kms) and the fact that its only 3 years old, rather than the alternatives that I’ve looked at, which were 5-7 years old.  This is the first vehicle that I’ve owned that has an alarm, so I’ll have to remember that.  Hopefully, it will meet or exceed the EPA fuel economy ratings of 8.4L/100km(28mpg) city and 6.7L/100km(35mpg) highway.  That would be nice.

The air conditioner apparently works, which is good.  It has air bags and a fairly decent CD stereo with an aux input for an mp3 player.  And, it apparently is safe in a crash.

So, the puddle at the end of our driveway is becoming the lake that is swallowing our driveway. I hope that we have a few days in a row of really sunny weather so that the snow will melt off some more, and, with any luck, the ground will thaw a bit and absorb some of the wet stuff. It would be nice if this was truly spring. After all, it IS April. I remember that this time last year, the utility that I work for was waiting for the run of warm enough days so that they could go and shut off the delinquents. Its amazing what you can scam out of your local utility in Ontario. No wonder the prices are going up, thanks to those who know how to fleece the system repeatedly.

My grandfather’s funeral consumed the weekend, of course, so we (Angela and I) spent much of Saturday and Sunday traveling. Despite the short stay in Nova Scotia, it was a pleasant time, with the exception of the funeral itself, of course. Saying all that, the minister who did the ceremony was excellent and his eulogy was that of a family friend, rather than that of a stranger making up encouraging words, which really made a big difference. He stirred up some memories with his own recollections, which was nice. Something that I didn’t know is that my grandfather (and great uncle) had two deceased infant sisters. I wonder how they coped with that as kids. I don’t really want to find out personally, though.

My brother gave me an old camera of his, a Kodak DX4900. Its not a bad camera - not quite as sleek as the Olympus, but it actually works as intended. I went to Future Shop and got a replacement Compact Flash card for it so that I won’t be limited to the piddly 16MB card that it came with. So, now instead of taking 24 pictures on my regular card, I can take 999 pictures on my Sandisk 2GB Ultra II card, which is supposed to be faster than a normal Compact Flash card. Its too bad that the camera doesn’t get recognized under Linux as a flash drive. At least gPhoto picks it up and wants to import your photos for you. Perhaps I should get a card reader for a situation like this.

Wow, what a buzz about Wordpress 2.5. I’m not going to say anything new about it, as the net is saturated with goop about everyone’s new installations. One thing I will warn, though, is the same thing that I warn every time. Back up your site before doing a major change to it! With Wordpress sites, that means, for sure, backing up your database. If you have cPanel, use its convenient backup feature, as its just a mouse click. Do the same for your home directory if you’ve had a lot of changes since you last backed up. At the very least, back up your /wp-content directory, so that your customizations on your theme and plugins will remain intact elsewhere in case a back up is needed. It can’t hurt to export your Wordpress blog via the built in export facility. There’s a lot of goodness in that .xml file.

Do you need a job? Do you live in the Fredericton area? My employer is still hiring. If you want the details, email me. I will refer you and you’ll make me rich! (okay, not rich, but their is an incentive, like a head hunter’s bounty). You’ll also get the chance to work hard and make lots of your own money, of course.

I took Wednesday off work so that I could be around to see my children’s Christmas concert (and to ferry them back and forth for the evening performance).  This was Abby’s first and she performed smashingly.  In fact, the kindergarten classes did a great job on their song, which was quite funny.  Caleb had a snappy tune to sing with his class, which I still kind of have stuck in my head.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad.  LOL.  If I get the roll of film developed soon, I’ll add a few pictures to this post (maybe with the other kids faces blurred, as I won’t be getting publication permission from them or their parents).

Christmas is around the corner (at least the commercial bonanza that is called Christmas).  What are you going to be doing? What have you done? Ready? Celebrating something else?

Why this title? Our son, Caleb, has been reluctant to read anything that his school library offers, or anything else that has been “suggested” to him. That is, until now. He has discovered the Goosebumps series of books and he will read one for quite a stretch of time now. So, our eight year old is reading books for as much as an hour or more at a time. This is a refreshing change from his obsession with video games, as the write ups on the RPGs and FPSs that he plays were the only things that he would devote his attention to. This was not all bad, of course, as he learned some big words like “disembarkation” from these games.

Monday is the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday (we planned it that way so that we will like turkey again before Christmas, you see).  Although its not a statutory holiday in New Brunswick, my company recognizes it as one (because they’re global and have several offices in this country, in different provinces).

With unusual foresight, I booked today and Tuesday as vacation days, effectively creating a 5 day weekend, of which I will still be paid for 3 of them.  To say that its been busy at work would be an insulting understatement.  So, I’ve been looking forward to a bit of a break.  The finances are lining up slowly, so I thought that  this would be a decent time to take a trip to visit my family, whom I haven’t seen (with the exception of one night with my parents) for nearly a year.

As long as everything goes without any major strangeness, it should be a good time.  And, with 5 days and a car to help get there (we’re taking the ferry - maybe there will be pics if the porpoises or whales decide to swim with it), I think that there might even be a moment where I might relax.

I hope so.

My mom and dad came over to visit from Nova Scotia.  They arrived last night with cake and presents for me (and belatedly for Abby and Caleb).  Angela had baked one as well, so it was nice and toasty warm in the apartment last night.  I’m glad that they didn’t insist on putting candles in either of the cakes.

We had some time together this morning and they are now off on their return trip back home.  Its such a shame that we couldn’t have been together a bit longer, but they have cattle that need supervision and my brother could only reliably check on them last night, as he’s on “reserve” duty this weekend (he’s in the Air Force) and has to be within an hour of the base at all times.

These times remind me that a car would be good to have, as I could take the family there more often.  Oh well.  Treasuring the time that we spend together is what we have to do, and I have.