Payton Place

Did you ever hear the joke about the dyslexic guy who couldn’t sleep? He was certain that others had similar issues and decided to form a support group. On the bulletin board at work he posted his first meeting invitation with the giant page title, “Insomniacs Untie!”

Ok, so maybe it’s a little cheesy but it seemed like a great opening paragraph for a topic that is oh so apropos this evening. Insomnia. It will suck the life out of you. And although I’ve been resting much more regularly these days, tonight I just can’t switch off the ol’ noodle long enough to doze. I cannot stop thinking about portions of the movie we just watched!

My wife Becky and I watched “The Family Stone” this evening on DVD. It was definitely entertaining and had an amazing cast. It was an interesting story with one of those “home for the holidays” flicks. You know the type. Multiple lives and story lines converge for a few days and eventually result in the happy ending so many of us crave. It was certainly better to see this movie after our own holiday experience for 2007.

One of the concepts within this flick was that of a Matriarch with a terminal illness. And it was interwoven a little too late into the movie for me to simply bail out on the whole cinematic experience. I had invested approximately eighty-five minutes into the crazy thing and simply had to see it through!

Silly me. Such themes are just too close for comfort for me these days. And even though I made a pact with myself long ago that this blog would be about technology and not personal matters, this evening’s post diverges from geek themes a bit. That’s what insomnia will do you . . . it warps your perspective.

So tonight (or is it morning already?) I’m making a new year’s resolution. This blog will contain themes from any topic or category of information that suits me at the moment of inspiration. It’s time to crank up the music and sing to the tune of “It’s My Party,” It’s my web log and I’ll write what I want to!

~SP

Thrashing this site is something I do cyclically. Rather than tweak a little here — tweak a little there, I have?the tendency to store ideas for updates internally and then attempt to implement them all at once to keep my head from exploding! Of course, this leads to creation of entirely too many debugging issues because I’m trying to do too many things at once.

You could almost?term it Binge & Purge?Administration. Hmmm, that concept made more sense in my head than it does?now that its?visible on the page. But this week could certainly be considered one of the purge experiences. Although closer to my original ideas than initially implemented, I still need to tweak some things.

For instance, this week I implemented three new pages:

1. ?A / V (current Audio & Video interests tracking)
2. Micro-Blog (tracking?a new found interested)
3. Webb Alert (a daily technology news feed)

For quite some time I’ve wanted?automated “What I’m Listening to” and “What I’m watching right now” widgets incorporated on the site. Existing widgets are likely to exist but I just haven’t located them. So in the meantime I’ll just stick to two scripts adoped from my Last.fm and YouTube accounts.

The micro-blogging concept is just starting to come into it’s own. It’s a method of posting miniature status updates to a web site directly from your cell phone or web terminal. When using a cell phone you simply send a text message to the phone number of the service. I am using Jaiku at the moment and like the fact it aggregates other web feed information from my blog, my photos, music sites, and just about any service that will generate an RSS feed.

And finally, I added a direct video embedding of Morgan Webb’s Webb Alert, a daily technology blog summary news feed. Actually, I believe the proper description is, “Your Daily Tech Round-Up.” Megan is co-host of X-Play, a computer gaming reviews show on G4TV.

That summarizes the latest thrashings going on at the site . . . let me know if you have recommendations on compact widgets for WordPress that will perform similar functions, OK?

~SP

This morning I worked on updates to links within our legacy web site, ThePayton.Net, and built hooks into all web log references of that site so they point here to the new Blog. A few of my previous postings to that web log are ported to this new site but many still require going through an import process.

Import isn’t really the best word to use . . . and that’s primarily because something with the WordPress import functions aren’t working as anticipated. It’s odd. I jump through all the hoops and the process indicates “Import Complete!” But the legacy posts appear no where within the web space. This may be the result of how the older blog was published in the first place.

The original blog originated from my Blogger.Com account. Because I own several web spaces I opted to publish the Blogger Blog (say that quickly ten times without error) to ThePayton.Net instead of as a subsite of Blogger.Com. At the time I felt this option was the more personal approach which granted me greater flexibility in the future. Now I know such an approach was flawed. Best laid plans . . . C’est la Vie! And all those other great clich?s.

The end result of these oddities is a forced manual posting of all previous articles. [sigh] In fact, all the topics you see within this Blog so far were created manually. Well, manually in the sense that I had multiple editor windows open simultaneously and used copy/paste functions to suck out the old text and blow it into a new location.

Eventually all these outstanding tasks will be completed. Or perhaps by then I’ll have new direction or ideas about how to better leverage the future, leaving old posts in the past . . . where they belong. Here’s to the Future!

~SP