Wanderings

General

He’s Back!

After four years away from blogging, I got my act together and moved my old blog to the new server at GoDaddy. Originally, I stopped posting because my server was giving me problems, and then there came that life event called “Divorce.” When I moved out, there just wasn’t the energy or drive to get Wanderings going again. Now, my heart and energy want to use this blog for some things that just won’t quite feel right on Facebook. Some of those long posts on FB make me nervous – hence I want to honor people’s time and energy. If I want to share my thoughts on a multitude of subjects, I figure this is the place to do that.

At first, my mind was made up that this was going to be a real pain to get all my old posts on the new blog. There are many ways to move your WordPress blog from server to server. Actually, I did not think it could be easily accomplished. I had downloaded all the data from the old blog to a file that should have been readable in Excel, but discovered THAT was not going to work. Was wondering how I was going to sort everything out and get all the words in the right place and reconstruct all those previous years of blogging. Started a search on “Import WordPress”,  and there it was. Just export the posts from your old blog to a file, and import them (after you installed the “Importer.”) BAM!! That was it! That was it?

BTW, discovered that the WP Importer tool gives you lots of options about where the files can come from.

Now for some thoughts…that can wait for tomorrow, or some other time when something grabs me, or just makes me think.

Goodbye Windows – Hello Android!!

Was looking for something great from Windows in mobile phones, but that’s not happening this year. When Microsoft came out with their new Windows Mobile 7, they locked up the phone tighter than the iPhone. Everything has to be synced through the cloud – your contacts and calendar have to be on Microsoft’s “Live” computers.

That was not my choice for where I want to put my business – you know, all my personal stuff. There are enough problems with identity theft and personal info getting into the wrong hands. But no, no, Microsoft actually was going to force you to use the cloud. As of this date, they have not provided any way for developers/programmers to get what you need on your phone in a direct link to your PC.

Worse, they just came out with a major update to WM7, and there is still no way to get anything other than your Zune music files and pictures synced to your phone without the cloud. So after spending all that time researching WM7 devices to replace my WM6 Blackjack II, I was disturbed to say the least. Did not really think that I wanted to move to a Blackberry, and was not ready to jump on the iPhone bandwagon. Yes, it is possible to sync my contacts and calendar to an iPhone if I use Outlook. Be still my nervous heart. Outlook is almost the last thing I would want to use – for virus and worm reasons.

My search settled on Android devices, and on investigation, I found that it was possible to sync Lotus Notes with an Android device. That would allow me to keep my stuff on my computers and backed up to my portable drive or CD/DVDs. Further investigation found that the Motorola devices would very soon (it has already happened) have the ability to sync my iTunes playlists. Wow! Now I can put my music or podcasts on my wonderful device!

Settled on the Motorola Bravo, and am quite happy. There are more than enough apps to keep me busy searching and uninstalling the “free” apps that have noxious nagging advertisements. Simple moved all my Lotus Organizer data over to Lotus Notes, and then synced up my new phone.

Stay tuned for the saga as it continues to unfold. Technical items about the Android phones will be posted on my TECH Blog.

Almost By a Thread!

Last night was the second time in a month that I have had a dream about being up high somewhere, and walking across roof beams. This time, I was at some conference, and another person and I thought that we’d go to the balcony for the concert. Well, what we got to was, as it turned out, the open air roof. Kind of like an arbor, with boards laid across beams. We were on the left, but there was a guy on the right, who had traversed the boards, and was cautiously walking the beam toward the stage.

Just like before, the beams had no nets or hand rails.

I was walking across the boards, and got to the edge where it was just beams (that ran from the back toward the stage), and looked down and realized it was a long way down. A very, very long way down. Immediate stop. Looking over the edge, I knew there was no way Joe Suttle was going to walk or crawl out on that beam.

To compound all this, the board portion and beams had a downward slope toward the stage, so I was actually going down hill. Scary! Once I stopped, I had the guy behind me stop and pull me back, while I crawled backwards. There was no way I was going to try and turn around and crawl upward from the edge.

He pulled me back about 6 feet, and then we began the trek back to the stairs where we entered.

What’s funny is that once we got back to the stairs, we both commented on why anyone would build stairs to the roof of an auditorium, with the stairs being accessible to everybody.

What does this mean? You got me, but there has to be a message here, and I’m just not getting it. If you’ve got thoughts, this blog post is open for comments.