Well, now I’m back up here in Minnesota, and even though the weather is wonderful and the countryside is beautiful, I’m not really enjoying it.  I’ve got my head down and blinders on trying to get caught up on everything that has changed so I can get back to being a useful contributor to the plant startup effort, and between that and the fact that my wife is once again forced to take care of our kids all by herself, I’m feeling sort of down. Writing has been one of the last things on my mind lately, even though I enjoy it when I sit down and do it. At least this time around I get to go home a lot more often, and I’m restricted to 60 hours a week of work, so it shouldn’t be quite so frenzied up here once I finally get caught up. Hopefully, at that point I’ll get back to blogging more often, or at least on a semi-regular basis.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFCAAYQILYs

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At the time, I mentioned that the only way to port from Vox to a self-hosted WordPress blog (i.e. on your own domain, not a WordPress.com sub-domain) was to use WordPress.com as an intermediary – exporting from Vox to WordPress.com, and then exporting a WXR file and importing it into your other blog.  While this technically works (I tried it out), it’s a little messy and leaves all the pictures hosted on the WordPress.com domain site, instead of pulling them into your self-hosted site.

Brian Colinger, a developer of WordPress.com and WordPress plugins, contacted me a few weeks ago to let me know that he’s now developed a WordPress plugin that you can install on your self-hosted domain that will do the same export functionality as before, but this time directly to your self-hosted blog.  Yep, now there’s a Vox exporter to self-hosted blogs!

The process itself is pretty easy, and Brian’s post gives step-by-step instructions, so I won’t repeat them here.  You have to install the WP_Importer base class plugin first, and then Vox Importer plugin.  Pretty soon, you’ll be pulling all your posts over to your own self-hosted WordPress blog!

Just like the ability on WordPress.com, this importer should:

• Imports posts AND comments.  Comments are captured exactly as left on Vox, and the link to the commenter goes back to their Vox blog URL.
• Imports photos from Vox into WordPress.  Yes, photos will be native to WordPress, so they won’t just link back to a photo hosted by Vox.
• Imports tags from your blog.  No option to turn this off, but all tags are carried over and used as tags on the WordPress blog.
• Imports ALL posts, not just those made “public”.  Adjust privacy settings before or after you import to account for the fact that WordPress doesn’t have all the privacy modes that Vox does, but you get all your content carried over when you import!  NOTE: If you don’t want a post to be public on your WordPress blog, make it visible to “YOU (hidden)” only before you export/import.  Then it will show up as “Private” on your WordPress blog. All other privacy settings (neighborhood only, friends and family, etc.) will appear on your new WordPress blog as public, accessible-by-anyone entries until you change their privacy level from within WordPress.
• Maintains formatting from your Vox blog – bullets, numbering, centering, font colors, etc all carry over 1:1.  This may cause some minor issues on your WordPress blog if the layout doesn’t support (e.g. white font on a white background), but you can edit this after the fact to suit.

Hat’s off to Brian for another job well done! Stop by his blog and leave a comment for him on the post if you end up using the plugin, and let him know how it went.  Also, if you have any further questions/bug reports, be sure to let Brian know so he can fine-tune this plugin for all the folks out there that had no choice but to remain with Vox, lose their work, or laboriously copy it by hand to another platform!

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When Jeremy was 7, his grandfather told him “laughter is the best medicine.” Jeremy, being seven, believed him. When his sister got the chicken pox, he tickled her mercilessly. He only succeeded in catching it himself, but he wasn’t dissuaded.

When Jeremy was 17, he made an old widow laugh until tears streamed from her eyes. She thanked Jeremy for helping her come to terms with her husband’s death.

When Jeremy was 47, he successfully distilled the giggles into liquid form. Ten years later, his concentrated chuckles proved successful in curing AIDS.

Jeremy laughed all the way to the bank.

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My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Even though a 30-year old male is not the target audience for this satire of the vampire/paranormal romance novels that seem to be spontaneously appearing on the shelves of bookstores everywhere, I found I did enjoy this novel for what it was – a light, humorous take on the subject matter that is sure to be engaging for teens and genre-fans who can take a little good-natured ribbing.

Eighteen year-old Algonquin “Alley/Ali/Gonk” Rhodes is the self-proclaimed Ice Queen of the “Vicious Circle” – a clique of close-knit friends who not only run the school newspaper (blog), but somehow are allowed to turn the escapades of their classmates into gossip-rag fodder for mass publication. One of their favorite topics of ridicule is the excessive efforts teenage girls at the school make to try to nab a vampire boyfriend; in Alley’s school, dating the undead appears to be the epitome of cool.

Alley acts above all of that, clinging to her reputation and her independence like a badge. But when reviewing a band at a local venue for her paper’s music column, she falls head-over-heels in love with Doug, who, she belatedly realizes, is not really a really-cute goth boy, but rather a zombie hipster who shares her eclectic taste in music.

Selzer’s world is intriguing – vampires, werewolves, and zombies do exist, and they live (mostly) peacefully alongside humanity. Of course, there was that whole issue with Mega Mart raising and enslaving zombies for a cheap workforce, but now that the lawsuit has been settled and all those zombies are free to live their lives coexist, people have pretty much accepted the “post-humans”, and aside from all the vapid teenage girls wanting to date (and eventually become) “post-humans”, things are pretty normal.

I had a little bit of trouble believing in the character of Alley – here’s a bright young teenager with the scathing wit of a college junior who appears to be able to psychoanalyze her own motives in staying single, yet it takes her a couple of dates (and 60-something pages) to discover that Doug is a zombie. She explains this incongruity near the end of the novel, but by then I’d already written it off as something just to get past and treat the novel as a fluffy, witty (but not sparkly) book that will surely be snapped up by teenagers anxious for a novel take on both teenage romances and the paranormal. This isn’t a book I’ll be hanging on to myself, but if you know someone 13-18 in your life, they’ll probably enjoy giving it a read.

Note: I received this book as part of a contest giveaway.

View all of my reviews on Goodreads

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I still will have a long recovery period. No ladder climbing for another 2 months, and who knows when I’ll be able to do high-impact stuff like running again. But just being able to walk unassisted seems like enough of a treat for me, now. You never realize how much you take walking unassisted for granted until you can’t do it!

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ALSO! Some of the drabble I am writing are part of the 100 Word Stories Podcast Weekly Challenge! Because of this, I will also post an audio recording of my reading of any challenge submissions.  Hope you enjoy!

My Summer Vacation
by Billy Jenkins

My summer vacation was neat. All 20 of my aunts and uncles came to stay with us. They were mad because they couldn’t live in their houses nomore. Uncle Steve said “Those goshdarn aliens should be shot back into space where they came from”. Momma told him “Hush”. Aunt Verna wanted to stay with us when everyone else caught the shuttle to New Montana, but she ended up going anyway. Mom and Dad and Janey went too, so now it’s just me and Xyzzybrax*CK living at my house. That’s ok with me.

The End

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I’ve been out of the office pretty much since last July, so it was only this morning I noticed something interesting – instead of showing the year 2010 as ’10, my trusty little clock has rolled over to ’90.  Yes, I get to live the 90s all over again!

From what I can tell, the clock (made in China) uses some sort of cheap computer circuit board that was programmed with the minimum function set required to provide the features advertised on clock.  Rather than expand the memory/processing power of the clock to handle dates outside the range of 1990-2009, the designers decided to just let the clock roll over and never show the correct date after the functionality-imposed “end-of-life” of the clock.  Probably they expected that the hardware itself would only have a lifespan of a few years, anyway, so those folks like myself who got the clock in 2003 would never have it last long enough to see this bug “feature” in the design.

But my clock survived (against all odds?) and is a great of example of what I like to call the “Just Enough” syndrome.

“Just Enough” can apply to any number of aspects of your life, whether it be you doing just enough work in your job to get the task at hand completed, paying just enough on your credit card debt to stay off the “finance charge” list, cleaning just enough of your house/car/workspace to keep it from looking like a total dump, or studying just enough to get by on your test/presentation/speech.  The results of “Just Enough” work can be described by a single word – mediocre.  Mediocre can also describe the quality of life you might have if you employ the “just enough” attitude regularly.

However, attempting to go “Above and Beyond” on everything you do creates a different peril; spending so much time and effort on a single task could mean you end up not having enough time/resources to finish everything else, and have to sacrifice something to make up for it.  This is what I personally tend to struggle against, both at work and at home.

The solution, or course, like so many other things in life, is moderation.  The “Just Enough” attitude is perfect for throwaway work that you don’t need to deal with ever again, or things that would suck up your time without providing you with enough return on your time investment.  You can still go above and beyond on things that are important to you, whether it’s playing with your children, putting together that big report for work, cooking a fantastic meal, working to get out of debt, doing something creative, or participating in a hobby.  The key is thinking about what you’re doing, and really consciously deciding up-front how important the activity is and how much you want/need to invest in it.  Waiting until you’re halfway done (or sometimes, even after you’ve been done for hours/days!) won’t work – you’ve missed your chance to repurpose your time for more important things, and all you’ve got left now is a lesson to learn from for next time.

I hope my poor little clock continues to run.  I’d like to keep it here on my desk to remind me to evaluate whether what I’m working on deserves more than a “Just Enough” solution.  And because that isn’t always the right answer, I’ve paired it with my Staples Easy Button to remind me that I often take things well beyond what is needed, and need to scale back my effort and time investment accordingly.  If I can keep my behavior somewhere in the middle, I’ll have a few new single-word handles to hang on my quality of life – Happy, Contented, Fortunate, and Worthwhile.

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For her birthday today, CP gets an afternoon of Mom and Dad all to herself – Dee’s sister is coming to babysit the Tenacious Bean so we can take CP to her first movie-theater movie (How to Train Your Dragon), followed by a trip to Chick-Fil-A for a special treat of chicken nuggets, waffle-fries, and a milkshake.  She’s going to be so excited!

This wasn’t all of the birthday celebration the CP got this year, though.  We had a surprise party for her earlier this week when all the family could get together – it was an absolute blast:

When the Color Princess walked in the door, she was blown away by the streamers and decorations my wife had put up while she was over at her cousin’s house.  Here’s the CP and her cousin posing in front of the fireplace decorations:

She loved her birthday cards (this one lit up when you pushed a button) and her summer-themed presents (two swimsuits, a play sprinkler, and a giant wading-pool).

She adored her cake (princess-themed, of course), and even her sister got into the festivities a bit.  Everyone had a great time, and the CP can’t stop talking about how much she loved her birthday.  I think it was a hit, don’t you?

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All For the Want of a Horseshoe Nail

All For the Want of a Horseshoe Nail

Richard rushed across the room to his typewriter. Rolling in a sheet of clean white paper, he mumbled to himself as his fingers flew over the keys. His muse was in full force today, and he could feel this, his first novel, would be his masterpie-

*clunk*

With a cry, he pulled apart jammed keys, sobbing as one letter’s head cracked cleanly off its rod. He tried to continue anyway:

“.ucius .amed .achrymose .abradors .ackadaisica..y”

It was no use. He ripped the paper free and buried his head in his arms.

For want of an “l”, the debut was lost.

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I was cleaning out the spam comments on my blog when I came across one that I actually enjoyed – unlike the linkfarm/gobbledygook/viagra ads of most blog comment spam, this one contained a joke that was not half bad:

Moishe had been single for a long time. One day, he excitedly tells his mother that he’s fallen in love at last and he is going to get married. She is obviously overjoyed.

Moishe then tells his mother, “Just for fun, Mum, I’m going to bring over 3 women and you try and guess which one I’m going to marry.”

His mother agrees.

The next day, Moishe brings 3 beautiful women into the house and sits them down on the couch and they all chat for a while. Then Moishe turns to his mother and says, “Okay, Mum. Guess which one I’m going to marry?”

She immediately replies, “The redhead in the middle.”

“That’s amazing, Mum. You’re right. How did you know?”

“I don’t like her.”

Obviously these kind of comments still aren’t going to make it onto my blog, but if the spammers can keep me laughing while I delete their comments, so much the better!

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