The Prudent Hedonist

Nerd 2 says that I should post here more often…perhaps he is right.

I did end up finding a motorcycle that a liked with the help of Craig and his list, and The Unnamed Suzuki and I have been spending some time getting to know each other. She’s even had her first $200 service… I guess it won’t hurt to read up a bit on motorcycle maintenance this winter (no, this does not count).

Went to a LAN Party on Saturday (in a freakin’ hanger), and again got the urge to quit my day job and open up an internet cafe/gaming lounge type of establishment (because hey, if you give nerds computers, games, food and energy drinks, they will give you money for doing almost zero work).  It looks like I’d have a few competitors, but the market is far less saturated than that of, say, yarn stores, and I’d probably needed less $$ for inventory.

I’ve been up to all sorts of other mischief since we last spoke (camping, 3day, yardwork, etc) but maybe those can be posts for another day…

I don’t usually do birthday shout-outs on this particular forum, but given that I good chunk of my traffic comes from his general direction, I think it’s only fair that you guys all go visit Keacher and wish him the happiest of birthdays.

And a happy birthday to he-without-a-blog (aka Kyle).

We miss you both in the Twin Cities these days, and hope to see you in Alabama in this summer.

She said, not necessarily to anyone in particular, “if I keep this up for just a few more days, I’ll have done it.”

“Done what?” no one in particular queried.

“30 days, 30 posts. They once said it couldn’t be done.” The smuggest of smirks growing was on her face. “They said I couldn’t stick to any of the challenges that I set to myself on this blog.”

No one gestured about the screen, “Well, it’s not as though assumptions weren’t based on empirical evidence of past behaviour.” That’s when she remembered the sidebar. There was a progress bar there, one she’d almost forgotten. It documented for the world to see her lack of dedication, motivation, time in the f-ing day.

“Damn you 1000 mile goal! Damn you right in the ear!” Her smile was fading, but not the mischevious glint in her eye. “At least I made it a damn bit farther than the progress bar ever showed, it was probably for the best that I stopped keeping track, it would have just demotivated me.” She expertly swiped her mouse across the screen and executed the sequence of clicks and key presses required to remove the slanderous control.

“Hmmm,” she pondered as she playfully bit her lower lip, “whatever shall I replace it with now….?”

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Please pause for a moment and envision 50,000 words of that. Then thank me profusely (in your head is ok) for knowing how to pick my battles. And yeah, I have no idea of the correct punctuation rules for dialogue, and I’m just fine that.

There. I’ve said it.

October is the month for fun really, with its fests and its dress-up parties and its winter squash and its giving of thanks and all. November, however, is when things tighten down. It gets cold out, the clocks roll back, and you really have no excuse not to winterize the yard or prep your car for winter. November is the month for doing things, productive things, useful things. Preferably for/in a month.

Yep, it’s Na[syllable][syllable]Mo. I had considered trying my hand at National Novel Writing Month this year, I even started a gdoc with rough plot ideas, but I remembered the garbage that I produced in creative writing in high school, and realized that even I wouldn’t want to read 50,000 words of my own writing. Then I remembered my attempt and failure at National Blog Posting Month last year, and pondered why I shouldn’t just try that again, 2007-style.

So that was the deal, NaBloPoMo, plus rake the leaves and look into getting snow tires. A nice, not so painful masochism month. I could handle it… Then, during a very suggestible week back in September, two things happened. First, a friend informed me that both he and his wife would be doing NaNo, and that NaBlo was lame and too easy (peer pressure, my constant nemesis). And secondly, KnitGrrl announced her second annual National Knit a Sweater Month. And I had a sweater just barely started, that I knew was going to take me months unless I focused on it. So, here we are.

I’ve got a jump start on the sweater, since I’ve already done about 40 odd rows on it (and I’ve decided to knit it straight to pattern instead of embellising it too much), and here’s my first post of the month, so maybe this will be too easy after all.

Do you think I should add a 30 minutes of cardio a day goal too?

I admit it.  I’ve got a problem.  I’m addicted to web stats. Nothing strokes my ego more than watching my page hits go up whenever I post, or using my referrer logs to figure out what people are searching for when they find me.

Previously, I had been using Tracksy to keep track of my page views.  I liked tracksy a lot because it was easy and free, and I could track some of my other sites from there as well.  However, I always felt that something was lacking, since Tracksy doen’t do stats on RSS feeds, and since that’s how most people with brains read blogs such as this, I felt that I was missing out on learning about my readership.  Laziness and lethargy are powerful forces in my world however, and I never bothered to do much about it.

This changed a few weeks ago when Tracksy’s website wouldn’t let me log in for a few days: “we’re having database problems” was the message.  I was annoyed, but figured I could last a few days without obsessively checking my page views (and being in Vegas away from internet access for a few days definitely helped).  What killed it for me though was when I got back, and tried to log in again, and was told something along the lines of “Due to our database issues, some of our accounts have been lost.  Please sign up again”.

Umm…  Not cool.  I know it’s a free service and all, but how do you lose accounts?!?  A few days of data, fine.  Maybe even forget a couple of the sites I’ve asked you to track.  But don’t forget about my entire user account.  Don’t you have backups? grumble.

Anyways, this finally pushed me over the edge to FeedBurner, and it’s a stat whore’s dream.  Not only is it pretty (trebuchet and rounded edges), but it’s functional too.  It will do simple pageview tracking like tracksy did, and it tells me how many subscribers it detects to the feed, how many times the feed is hit by robots like Google’s FeedFetcher. The burned feed itself even gets a nifty stylesheet thrown on it, so I can point users straight to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThePrudentHedonist, without having to worry about whether they know what to do with some xml gobbledegook.

Setting it up wasn’t quite so easy as I think it should have been (but that’s more WordPress’s fault than anything else, and there are some how-tos on FB’s site), but now that I’ve got it going, I think it’s pretty slick.  Some of their more advanced features are for pay only, but I can’t see myself really needing them right now.  Maybe after I go above 10 subscribers I’ll think about it.

1. NaBloWriMo appears to have been a collosal failure.  I blame my friend Amber how has given up on her NaNoWriMo at 30,000 words.
2. I love having friends who are nerds (conclusion – turn your damn lights off)
3. You’ll hear more of this from me at a later time, but for now, just imagine a couple dozen lovingly hand crafted cookies delivered to your door/cube just in time for [insert winter holiday of choice here].  Imagine also, that the proceeds from said cookies will go towards breast cancer research.  You got that?  Fully imaginified?  Then click here.

Well, so much for posting every day I blame Mr. Hendricks, plumbing issues, and distracting roommates, in that order. 

I’ll try to throw in a couple extra posts this weekend to make up for it and I’m going to modify the goal for the month (think of it like agile software development) to 30 posts in 30 days.

ttyl. 

 

So, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?
When I first started this site, I knew that there would be an ongoing conflict between “useful” content (recipes, tips, advice, philosophy, etc) and personal “chatty” content about what’s going on in my life on any particular day. I really wanted to keep the chatty stuff at a minimum, since really, my life isn’t all that interesting, but I found that it was all that I ever had to talk about. Then I found a personal journaling site (which shall remain nameless, though many of you I’m sure found this from there) and it pretty much provided me with everything I needed to handle my day-to-day ventings and ramblings and social life organization, so this little project floundered.

I’m back now, and ready to give this project the attention that it needs to make it work. It’s going to take time – I’ll actually need to research for most of the articles I post, but I (and hopefully you) will certainly be learning lots.

As a means of getting this train rolling again, I’ve decided to try a little experiment: November is National Novel Writing Month, a phenomenon that I discovered last year – thousands of idiotsinspired individuals commit to writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Last year, I had too much going on (what with the alcoholic boyfriend and grad school and all) to attempt it. This year I thought about it, but really fiction isn’t my forte (yet) and I need to get better at writing short prose before I think I can pull off anything epic, so when my friends over at chocolatemussolini and twodolla mentioned the idea of comitting to one blog entry a day for a whole month, I decided that that was something that I could actually commit to. Lucky you. So, NaBloWriMo starts today – hopefully I’ll be able to keep up with it.