Raven's Range
Blather around a virtual range

I’ve had a One of Those Weeks for various reasons, though there have been good points. One of those was getting maps working the way I wanted them on Markeroni (not live yet), a feat accomplished by not doing actual paying work for about the first half of the week. ;)

I’ve also been having fun reliving some of my earliest snarfaris by going through old photos and entering them into the Catalog.

I had just about given up on Examiner when a post made it into news, albeit some twelve hours late. I think the problem is that they don’t have someone on site 24×7 to approve the posts into the feed. If that’s the case, then this is silly.

We had another earthquake earlier this week, a 6.0. The RV rolled but we had no damage, and the cats barely blinked. I hope that two sixers two weeks apart doesn’t mean we can expect an even bigger one at New Moon.

It’s rained most of the week, so we’ve been going a bit stir-crazy. We got out on Friday and boy was that good. We arrived home minutes before a real downpour.

Today was amazing; it got up to about 50°F and we went out in glorious sunshine. We went to do laundry and discovered Weaverville utterly abandoned for the SuperBowl. It was like something out of a Stephen King novel.

For the first time in weeks it was a clear night and the stars were fantastic. Orion is very prominent at this time of year and we went out and enjoyed the view of the Milky Way for a little while before retreating to the warmth. February has always been a rough month for me and this one more than most, so these bright spots help.

I’m having nightmares with winter skin. My skin is cracking and chapping, and I look ten years older than I should. Haven’t been doing too well with sleep lately.

I’ve started looking at my road atlas again, and dreaming. I’m also almost done making my 101 in 1001 days list. I haven’t quite tweaked it to perfection but I’m getting there. This blog is getting boring so I figured I needed a new project after scaring away all my readers with how boring it was. ;)

First month of the year is over. It’s been a more or less positive experience. There have been annoyances, of course, but the attitude is there to ride the waves. I guess there will always be waves. I should probably take up surfing, or something. ;)

This month I made more than I made last month, and am just barely meeting subsistence levels. I hope one day to be making a living rather than a dying. It’s sort of hard because I’m obsessed with the programming and some other adventures. ;)

I don’t have too much to report from the last week. Nothing significant has occurred. I worked, programmed, etc. Examiner came back but isn’t archiving most of my stories into Goo$le News which means I’m working there for peanuts, and I’m over working for peanuts. I’m going to give it a bit more time to let things settle down, but I’m not convinced it’s worth the trouble.

We’ve had a few bright sunny days and a few rainy ones. I caught a ride down into Redding on Friday, I think it was. My neighbor had an errand in French Gulch so I got her to dump me off there where I spent a blissful hour or so wandering round its collection of plaques and the old cemetery full of pioneers. I had forgotten how nice it was to just be a tourist again.

Beyond that, not a lot is going on.

It’s sort of interesting to program on a day when my internet provider is fighting with Google and won’t display its pages, and my connection won’t stay up for more than a few minutes at a time. It requires patience and an ability to go do something different, which is hard when you’d got your mind set on doing ABC and end up having to do XYZ.

I’ve been having some Interesting Thoughts about the future of Markeroni, and I’m excited to see if they pan out. No grand announcements yet, but lately I’ve been talking to a couple of people about some different possibilities.

I’m trying to be kind of modular about my approach, handling only one thing at a time. Each part of my key program, the search, throws up new things that have to be handled before progress is made. Instead of putting them on the “later” pile I’ve been tackling them there and then. I’m hoping that as I continue, things will speed up because the pieces will have already been put in place.

I can see this magnificent, fully functional Markeroni in my dreams, like a fantasy landscape with everything interwoven. It’s really a thing of beauty and it’s within my reach. I am enjoying this process very much, despite its inevitable bugs and frustrations.

The big winter storm that I mentioned last week arrived with a bang. We had snow on the mountains, but also had the most incredible rain for the entire week. It pounded on the roof and made my ears fuzz up from the pressure. The river swelled right up to the banks, all the tributories got full, and drainage holes started to gush waterfalls.

I don’t think it stopped raining for more than a couple of hours each day. Trinity really needs the water, of course, and maybe this will go some way towards catching up on the deficit. It’s been a dry few years.

I got a fair amount of writing and coding done. The Examiner/Goo$le fiasco was sorted out on the last day of Prince William’s visit, so I barely got a mention in the news feed. Lots of waste there. Oh well, onwards and upwards.

On Sunday the usual four clans got together for an evening of food and conversation. Don and I have started talking about what we need to do to get out of here and move on to the next adventure. Meanwhile we considered putting water skis on Harvey as the lake beneath us started to widen.

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I wonder if they have review copies. ;)

The time in 2010 isn’t going by any less quickly than it did in 2009, but so far I’m finding it more or less peaceful. There’s a lot to be said for peaceful, I think, and so I intend to do what I can to enjoy it.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been working, a lot, and also started work on the Markeroni rewrite. I’m finding it fascinating, but terrifying. I am literally ripping out my code, replacing redundant code with fresh shiny new functions, and today I started redesigning my database.

At the end of the process, which I am quite sure will take months, the only person who’s going to know it’s a ton better is me. I was flung into a kind of panic attack a few days ago when yet another devastating bug cropped up.

That leaves me with, IIRC, four big messes to clean up and no time, really, to do that in. After my daily writes I have next to no time to program, there is a massive backlog, and I can’t be fixing bugs on the one hand while rebuilding on the other. It’s freaking me out a bit, I admit.

At least it’s interesting.

The New Year hasn’t been without its niggles, but I refuse to let it get me down the way last year did. Last Saturday we had a pretty hefty earthquake which cracked the pipes in our RV fridge and let out all the gas. We are now borrowing a tiny fridge, considering our options, and not rushing into any hasty decisions.

Examiner has proven disappointing as well. On Epiphany the God That Is Goo$le apparently had its own ephiphany and shrugged Examiner right out of its news feed. The trouble had been poor editorial control resulting in people who were supposed to write about local topics writing about anything but, under the guise of news.

My page views have dropped from several thousand per day to under a hundred, which means that Examiner, which since switching to British Royals had been the most fun I’d had since starting Examiner and a good ROI, is now not part of my daily mix until they sort it out, which won’t be until the end of the month.

This means that my coverage of what would have been one of my year’s hottest topics, Prince William’s visit Down Under, is going to be scanty at best. Goo$le could’ve worked with the site instead of just dumping it, but nope. It demands its pound of flesh. I reckon on losing several hundred bucks’ worth of income as a result.

Since Kerry is one of the few people I have ever met who likes anchovies on her pizzas, we have started an Anchovy Pizza club which so far has had two pizzas, involving anchovies. Yum!

We’ve had a few nice spring-like days, but now a big winter system is coming in that will bring rain, maybe snow. We’ll see.

I think that’s it.

Hippy gnu beer! I see that there’s a zero after the new year’s name, which means that both I and my big brother have a Significant Birthday this year. Come March, I turn 40, and have absolutely no ambitions for anything spectacular or exciting.

When I turned 30 I had this whole web page prepared with a picture of myself every year from my christening onwards. Then the keyboard shelf collapsed and landed on top of my computer, which jolted the hard drive, which ripped a scratch in the drive, and blomp! Pictures go bye-bye. Maybe I’ll repeat the adventure, plus ten, this year.

My life has been so goal-driven these last few years that this year I’m trying something different. Mostly I just want to go a little easier on myself. Maybe it’ll work better, I don’t know. I started the New Year with my usual ritual of sampling a little of everything I wanted a lot of in 2010, but discovered that I was writing down a lot more states of being (like “relax”) than I did things (like, oh, I dunno, fix computer programs).

So saying, I’ve started learning some new programming techniques and have begun dabbling in the ultimate Markeroni fix, which of course won’t be ultimate, but if I can get it right this time it’ll be a lot easier to run. In terms of Markeroni I’ll be glad if we can just cover half our expenses, as we didn’t last year (just for a change), and if I can catch up on logging my snarfs.

I’m still sniffing around the edges of 101 things in 1001 days. It’s that time of year. I’ll probably get over it.

Spent New Year’s Eve at Kerry’s and Gavin’s with several of the neighbors. We ate, laughed, compared our chocolate stashes, and all went home early. It is the first time I can remember already being in bed at midnight and we heard the New Year in on the only station we could pick up, a country and western station whose top song of 2009 involved taking someone for a ride on his big green tractor. This is the stuff of legends. About two minutes later it was Zzzz central.

After taking most of the last 10 days off I was a bit reluctant to get back into working, but I’m there now and with a mellower approach. We’ll see how long that lasts.

It snowed a little last week but the rain washed it all away.

Hm, 2010 dates look like binary.

I’m enjoying my Examiner gig more than any others right now. It satisfies my need to poke my nose into the posh world without actually ever having belonged there. It’s a bit slow right now but I’m hoping that as the year moves on, so will the topic.

I guess that’s the news. Oh, and my bike doesn’t like to start any more. Again.

Today marks two years since I acquired this domain name Raven’s Range, and almost two years since I posted my first post. As I sit here I find myself desperate for change in the year ahead, one of which is to spend a great deal less time on the computer.

While I just renewed the domain, I’m not sure what my blogging life will look like in 2010. Since I started writing for a living in July, I also find that spending so much time working on the computer lessens my desire to play there. I think I will seriously simplify my blog empire over the next year. Whether I will move the text from this blog back home to Annwn, my oldest website, or whether I’ll keep this one separate, I don’t know. But certainly, change is coming. (more…)

Tomorrow we welcome back the light, which up here will return at the rate of approximately two minutes per day in the beginning but hey, they’re shiny minutes.

Its rained for most of the past week, which has been absolutely wonderful, because if it’s raining, it’s not snowing. I’m hoping it will dry up just a little just before Christmas so that I can get into town and buy Christmas dinner. I’m thinking a nice little chicken, some carrots and brussels sprouts, and the trimmings. And I want apple pie.

The last mince pie mysteriously disappeared last week and I had a frenzy in which I cleared my desk, and promptly messed it up again. But I have one less plastic box to sit next to and my overall impression is of improvement in my work space, so I guess that’s a net gain.

Yesterday I attended the local craft fair and made friends with some neat ladies who seemed to resonate on many different levels. And I even sold a copy of A Little Twist of Texas.

I’m having serious trouble with my lower back on the left, a direct result of sitting at the computer too long. Thus, walking and stretching are starting to become part of my daily routine, along with a growing realization that if I don’t focus on my work, i.e. work smarter, not harder, I’m going to kill my poor body. So, I scheme.

Last weekend I became the British Royal Family Examiner. I have been having lots of fun doing my posts and it seems like the effort will pay off. The first full day I was there I earned more than I’d earned in the previous two months. On the off-chance that anyone is (a) actually reading this and (b) interested, you can subscribe to get an email when I post, or follow UKRoyalsNews for updates instead. Today, I got to mock something that is apparently called a fascinator and looks absolutely ridiculous.

I dabbled my feet in Markeroni waters and figured out how to do the second level of drop-down tags in the Catalog, so that’s a step in the right direction. I know what I’m doing now so the rest should be quicker.

Bread-and-butter work is going well.

If there’s any more news of note I can’t remember it, so it’s probably not that noteworthy. Have a cool Yule, a merry Christmas, and if you go shopping on Boxing Day you deserve everything you get. ;)

Happy Holidays.

Another week has gone by and suddenly I realize that there are only another two or so weeks in 2009, and thank goodness for that. I haven’t hit the introspective time yet, the one where I try to prepare for 2010, but that will happen after Christmas, I’m sure.

Mid-week I caught a ride down into Redding with Kerry and stocked up on groceries and stuff like toilet paper. I also bought mince pies, yay! The weather was incredibly cold the first half of the week, hitting 9°F/-12°C. Then it snowed. I woke up to it and was very surprised.

I went out to see the pristine, thick snow and before long there were hundreds of footprints everywhere: mine, dogs, cats, deer, birds. I stood in my labyrinth and had the first moment of pure, quiet stillness that I’ve had for months and months. :)

The water pipe froze, of course, so after the tank finally ran out we were reduced to manually adding water so we could take a military (super-brief) shower. Finally it began raining and we defrosted, so the first thing we did was take very long showers. I have a new appreciation for plumbing. ;)

The day after the really cold night (the coldest I’ve ever been) Amazon delivered the two electric throws and life has been 100% better since.

I’d been working with Examiner for a couple of weeks to get a different topic, and they approved it. I am now, or will probably be from tomorrow, the British Royal Family Examiner. I wanted something mainstream, and it certainly is that. I’ll make a proper announcement when it’s for real. The rest of my work is going pretty well and I’m steadily making progress.

Lots of positive stuff going on this week. But the real magic moment was when Don and I were outside adding water, and a deer showed up. She was only a few feet away from us, perhaps six feet, and seemed quite okay with the two very still, enamored humans keeping an eye on her. She moved when, finally, we did.

I’m zonked out from long days and such, but we’re warm, have food, and it’s been a good week.