All Dressed Up With Nowhere To Go

I haven’t had a good outlet for me to express why I am right in a long time. I have started to resurrect some of my old hobbies and the surge of nostalgia that caused brought me back to the blog I used to have. It never was a good means of chronicling my life as entries were sporadic and dealt more with whatever I was thinking about at the time than what was actually going on in my life. I’ve had to do some extra work to bring this back since it was originally “hosted” on the now defunct NuclearToiletPaper.com, but I was able to extract everything from the database there and insert it into the database I have for ChronoMaps.com (more-or-less, my own personal site). Of course, there are still somethings that aren’t working right. Mainly the pictures. They all used specific URLs instead of relative ones, so it’s still looking to find them on NTP. I’ll fix all of that eventually, but until then, no garden pictures for you.

Does anyone still look at this even? I’ve done a couple of half-posts, but abandoned them mostly due to the fact that the blog is more-or-less dead. By my hand, of course (or the lack thereof). Just curious, really.

Also, Guitar Hero rocks (ba-dum kish. But seriously, it does).

     I’d like to thank you all for coming out here.  I have an announcement to make.  To be honest, I feel kinda stupid doing this.  In retrospect, I should have just gone ahead with my plan without the announcement, but I already sent out the e-mail telling everyone to come to my blog for more information on this and I don’t think they’ll want to read about my flowers (pretty as they are).  So here goes.  I, Shaun Carlson, am giving up the Internet in my home and the use of my computer.

     Jerks.  What was that for?  Because I know a lot of you are laughing at me right now.  “What?  Shaun?  The guy who has grown up with computers and who has hardly gone a day without using them or the Internet is giving them up?  What a joke!”

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     As you may have noticed, I installed a little map-thingy on the right of my blog.  It’s supposed to tell me where people that come to my blog are from (roughly).  The big dot around Utah is obvious, but I appear to have a few visitors from the Houston area, and what appears to be one Canadian.  Would you mind posting or something?  I’m very curious to know who my visitors are.

     So I took over chronomaps.com from Hilton, seeing as how he decided against the project for now.  I’m working on getting it to be a genealogy website for my family (and really anyone who’s interested), but it’s a long ways from being anything that useful yet.  I have installed a forum which will be used (hopefully) for discussion amongst family members and researchers, but for now it is just an open forum.  Why not go check it out?  You know you want to. 

     You can also access it by going directly to www.chronomaps.com.  Just so you know, the index page there sucks.  I threw it on there to have something and I haven’t had time to make something more presentable.  I only installed the forums because it’s a (relatively) quick process.  I’m not as cool as Hilton and didn’t create my own, but grabbed a copy of phpBB, which is a pretty robust and cool forum if you ask me.

OK, just a brief notice. Most of you have probably seen the “blog verification” junk comments. Apparently these were a forerunner to the deluge of spam my blog was about to receive. Someone in Amsterdam has recognized my obviously excellent writing style and has chosen my blog to be the one to extend his (terrible) advertising campaign. The problem is that I don’t exactly have a large audience… Either they haven’t noticed this or they figured I would acquire one soon enough (I mean, you just can’t keep writing this good a secret for long!).

So now in order to comment you’ll have to login. I actually have no idea how this works, other than I have a little option that says “make users login and give me their soul in order to comment”, or something like that. I’m not really keen on putting up this extra hassle for any of my 3-5 readers to comment, but I’m also getting sick of baleeting all the $#*&^! junk-posts I keep getting. I’ve had to baleet ~15 of them in just the past two days alone!!!

Hopefully this will stem the tide of unwanted garbage befalling my fair blog and that you’ll understand. When you get to be this popular and famous, you’ll have to take similar measures as well.

     You may have noticed that I changed the set-up of my blog and implemented a new theme.  If you not, I suggest you get your eyes checked or look into the possibility of getting your prescription looked at.  Joking aside, I was never happy with the standard theme that came with the blog but used it because my beloved Neptune theme had issues on quite a few levels.  I put changed under the intention to select a new and better theme in the near future but only now got around to actually doing so. 

     The picture at the top is a picture I took while in Switzerland.  Featured in it are the Swiss Alps, looking down on Lake Luzern (the core of Switzerland) taken from a cablecar.  Those things are fun and scary all at the same time.  It’s really neat to whiz down the mountainside in those things, however I was constantly reminded of my own mortality by the fact we were always at least one hundred feet or so from the ground.  Plus the way it is set up, your perspective gives the impression that you are going off a cliff and then into free-fall, and this happens several times within the same cablecar trip.  What a rush.

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Well, I was hoping to build a ham radio and tune into SuitSat to hear its message and perhaps even get the picture it is supposed to be sending.  Unfortunately, I did not foresee the “Week of Pain” coming.  I have had way more to do than I have had time to do it, plus having to readjust my sleeping schedule to accomodate my new job at 7am didn’t make things easier (lots of naps).  Apparently the SuitSat project turned out to be a bust anyways:

SuitSat

I’ve read that it has sent signals since this article was published, but all of them have been exceptionally weak.  With such a radio intensive area as the valley is, I doubt I would have been able to pick anything up even if I had built a radio.  Alas.  I still would like to construct an amateur radio from scratch as a test of my electrical engineering skills, and for pure unadulterated fun, but it will have to wait until time is not such a precious commodity.

In happy news, I have had a total of three visitors not previously known to me that have come to my blog and left comments so far.  That’s right, THREE!  Two of them commented on my entry about the Mohammad caricatures and one commented on my “Social Contact” entry.  That one appears to be from Australia, and the two more recent ones hail from Chicago and Amsterdam.  How exciting is that!  It is truly thrilling to know that people are slowly trickling to my blog on occasion even without my advertising it.  Whether this leads to me being a respected blogger on the Internet or not remains to be seen (my money is on the not, but I can always dream).

Also, I changed the theme due to formatting errors on other computers.  I loved the Neptune one, but it just wasn’t very adaptable and caused problems in viewing on other computers.  Perhaps I’ll get back and try to get another one that actually works and everything.

I think I resent being represented as a roll of toilet paper. I’m not THAT bad of a person or writer. At least, I didn’t think I was.

So part of the problem with keeping up a blog is figuring out what to write. I could just write for myself, but it’s quite possible that only myself would enjoy reading it. As I wouldn’t mind gathering at least a small audience, I need to figure out what to write on that will be interesting. So that’s where you come in! If you have something you’d like my infinite wisdom and expertise to explore, let me know! Of course, most of Hilton’s ideas will probably get axed, but there’s bound to be a few that make it through.