I’m wondering if it is possible to write in a blog everyday and have anything to say to myself? It’s worth a try for a few days, anyhow. It’s about 9 pm and Sunday is coming to an end. In another hour or so I’ll be making my way to bed and before I know it, another workweek will have arrived. For not having much on the agenda for this weekend, it surely has gone by in a hurry. While I’ve gotten a few things done, there doesn’t seem to have been enough hours for everything I wanted to do. So what did I do over this weekend?

Most of the time has been spent working on the weblogs and picture album software. I fixed a problem with managing passwords on the picture album software and also fixed a problem in properly reading and handling e-mail posts to my weblog. The upgrade of WordPress 1.5.2 introduced a problem where an email post could not have an apostrophe or quotation marks. If it did, the posting process would error out. Both of these problems took a while to get fixed. I also upgraded Jim’s software for his blog and made several new themes available for him to try. Perhaps we’ll get a new look from him! Heather wanted the picture album capability so I’ve put that software in place for both her and Jim. I really like the pictures from the family and perhaps this will get more of those photos online. Also, I modified the picture album software to display tooltips when the mouse hovers over the navigation bar. It may be presenting a too-busy look and feel. We’ll see how it works out.

I also did some playing with Flickr. I’ve been trying to decide if I should store the actual pictures on my own website or if I should put them on Flickr and then reference them from my website. I paid the $25 for a year’s subscription to Flickr and will do some more experimentation. Flickr looks to have the ability for me to put up a fairly large-sized image and then have a compressed version referenced from my website, but if someone wanted the picture with better resolution, it would be available on Flickr. They also have the ability now to print photos and that might be interesting as well. Anyhow, it is an interesting possibility. So far my only reservation has to do with what happens if I decide not to renew the subscription? Do the pictures just disappear? Have I locked myself into that service when I might want to do something else?

In the process of working with pictures, I found some 400 pictures on my web server that I had uploaded some years ago but had not put them into picture albums. I started doing that and have about 200 more pictures to go through. These were pictures that used to be on my Earthlink web page (which I haven’t updated in a couple of years). In those days I used to have to delete the pictures from Earthlink from time to time because they had a limit on how much disk space I could use. Now that I’m running my own web server, I don’t worry very much about space. I’m paying for about ten gigabytes of network bandwidth, but rarely use more than a quarter of the allotment. Of course, moving the pictures to Flickr would reduce the bandwidth I’m using as well. Perhaps another advantage?

I did some playing around with soldering irons and power supplies. Even though the power supply went belly-up when I turned it on, I learned quite a bit (including how hot the soldering iron is!) and want to get that project finished. I read a couple of years ago about a fellow who used a vacant high-rise building in New York to make a message board. He put flood lights in the windows in an arrangement so that messages could be shown. Someone could then send an email to a certain address with a message they wanted displayed. They would get an email back telling them when the message would be scheduled for display. Then at the appointed time, the message was scrolled across the windows in the high-rise building. One of the favorite uses of this system was fellows scheduling a message for their girl friend, and then taking her where the message could be seen. I thought this was pretty cool and would like to come up with a much less expensive and much more interesting capability. Message signs are still pretty expensive, but are coming down in price. I’d think I could build one for under a hundred dollars. I wonder what the neighbors would think if the traffic in our neighborhood increased so people could see their scheduled messages? There’s a picture on Make in their 4th issue with a loudspeaker attached to a trailer pulled by a bicycle. This is a similar capability…. Using a cell phone, one can call a special number and leave a message up to a minute long. This fellow rides the bike into some public place, turns on the system, and all of these one-minute messages get blasted out the loudspeaker — anonymous free speach.

Church meetings took up a good portion of the day today. Nina is at the Womens Correctional Center every Sunday morning. She leaves about 7:30 am and gets back about 12:30 in the afternoon (unless she’s scheduled to do an additional meeting and then she gets back about 1:30 pm). Now that our ward meets at 9 am, I’m going to church by myself. Last year she’d go to the Correctional Center in the morning and then meet me at the church (doing double duty!). This year that won’t happen. It’s kind of strange being a church all by myself in our home ward! This afternoon at 4 pm we went to the Stake Center along with the other members of the Stake Sunday School Presidency to get set apart. That will now begin taking some time, but also will be interesting. As a result of that calling, I’ll be speaking in Stake Conference in the 21st of January for 15 minutes. I’ve started preparing, but have much more preparation work to do.

So that was the weekend. Plenty to do and it certainly filled up the available time. The weekend is ending and we’ll see if anything interesting enough happens to be able to write much more often in this blog. I think that’s a good way to reduce the readership!!