Hello All… Just a brief hello and a small update that I’m still around if anyone is interested. Also, I’ve updated the site address to peterlbrett.blog from peterlbrett.com and for those who are wondering is that there is some possible changes to the focus of this site.
Here is a church that is down a street in Virginia City, Nevada.
At least I’m going to try to post more to this site after the first of the year. Since I’ve moved to a different state and trying to give myself a good kick in the backside about getting stuff done.
I’m the process of writing a long post that I’m going to try to publish before Christmas – if not by the end of the month.
Merry Christmas to all and have save travels for those might be traveling.
I’ve imported the posts from my old blog that I had at this domain when it was active from 2002 to 2011. There are few post’s that I’ve imported that had photographs that won’t show up at all – for some reason those photographs became corrupted.
One thing that I’ve noticed between all the posts is that my writing style had or has changed. All I have to do now is to go through all the post’s to see how they look and what not.
Though, I’m most likely going to wait til after the first of the year when I settle into a new place. Plus, I want to have a second larger display to show the back-end of this site when I do.
Just want to post an update about the site and I’ll be posting anything for a bit of time in part that I don’t have internet access at home anymore and for sometime to come. Plus, there are still a fair amount of photographs that I still need to go through before posting to this site. One of the images that I’ve already upload is the featured image on this post.
Also, I need to spend time looking for a job that I could enable to stuff with my life and to expand this site further.
Some sunlight on some trees and tops of shrubs in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
I have had in the past some and many thoughts about topics to post on this site and when I would sit down to write these ideas – they come across as half-baked thoughts, ideas. I would start writing down these ideas and I would get to a point where I would pause to consider where I could continue on with the thoughts for the post but I wouldn’t past this one point. I would leave these posts as drafts and or I would cut these posts completely.
I would toy with these thoughts for a few days or for some time and majority of the time I would just abandon the post ideas completely. These ideas would be half-baked at best and they would just be a waste of words and space on this blog and in general.
I took this in the late afternoon and very early evening in September 2014.
Though, I’ve wanted to share a fair amount of photographs that I took in 2014 and 2014. For some reason I’m would, having some lack of follow through about uploading photographs that I took. Part of the problem is that I don’t want to go through and update all the meta data that’s included in the Photographs that I took during this time. I know I could and can use Adobe Bridge to do this with a bunch of photographs at one time and I want to wait until I have more computer memory installed before I update and change the meta data on lot of photographs.
You could some of the photographs that I took as featured images or inserted in posts during the last year or so. Getting back on topic – I want to write real posts or short of a length of page while working in a document for a class but I seem to come up short on more positive topics to write about. If I write a good lengthy post that it seems a negative type of post which I’m tired of writing and thinking about doing; or I could be complaining or sound like that I’m complaining in some way.
Today, I’ve noticed that I had become a registered user on WordPress.com ten years today and I can’t believe that much time had passed by. Hope the next 10 years would be interesting times in life and in blogging.
The PHP logo displaying the Handel Gothic font. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I took a PHP programming class back in 2004, and obviously PHP has changed considerably since then. I’m “kicking” myself for not keeping up with PHP since then, and I’m trying to learn the scripting language again. My problem area is developing queries, loops, and a straight forward log-in system. The log-in script that I’ve found and using is free to use that’s found on the web.
All I want to do, is to develop apps of my own without resorting to “freely available” or “pay to use” on the web. Which could be buggy from the onset of such scripts. I know that there are places like lynda.com and others sites to learn PHP. I know that there are some Community Colleges that offer PHP class, but either way I would need to pay for these classes.
I know that PHP is one of many programing languages that the best way to learn it is by siting down and working things out. I have some time to learn it, and would like to build a project with PHP mainly to “prove” to myself that I could complete a project.
Finding someone to do this is for me, is basically saying I give up and I can’t do this.
Php programming (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’m trying to build a web-based “catalog” – well it would be a web-based “inventory” cms for my collection of books, cd’s and movies. Though there a couple of things that’s “holding” me back: patience, computer setup, and a sociological/mental block from not doing more in what’s required while working on whatever. Also, I was basically being screwed by the educational system growing up. That’s for another time and posting.
Anyway, I could be looking at the wrong places on the internet or at books for information. I’ve looked at books, php.net, and at other sites that I can’t remember at the moment. I’ve looked on how to do loops, else, else if, functions; which are my problem area’s and once I understand how to write these. Then I can start developing small PHP projects more quickly and not take months, if not longer, to get them done.
I’m not learning PHP for any professional job(s) that would required to know PHP, I am just learning it to understand on how things function in PHP.
I heard a phrase once and it went something like this: “How old would you be, if you haven’t learned anything in the course of a year?”
By knowing more information I wouldn’t be considered “knowledge poor” like I was back in high school or be viewed as I was 10 years ago, before I started college. I’ve learned some stuff but not a lot where I want to be a “knowledge rich” person. Even though I’m trying to get “knowledge rich” at the moment, seems like that I’m getting shit from every few turns that I make in daily life, and I’m beyond frustrated, though this topic is for a post for another time.
Getting back on to topic.
I would be trying to work on the design and layout of the pages for the “catalog” before working on the PHP code itself. I’m getting myself worked up and frustrated by working on the layout/design of the site and writing the PHP code at the same time.
I may post something at some point when I have this “catalog” mostly working for my CD, music and movie collections.
Bye for now….
P.S. I may edit this post at some point for errors that I may have missed.
Tonight I finally went through Google Reader and cleared out a lot of dead feeds from sites that I don’t follow or not being updated at all. Though, I followed site that got deleted down over the years. Could have done this age’s ago but didn’t; its one of those things I kept putting it off for one reason or another. I’m just glad that I finally did it.
The amount of feeds that I had ware too much to go through, and since the beginning of the year I’ve gone through less and less of the feeds that I had. I guess that I had about 400 feeds in Google Reader, and now I have 331 feeds in Google Reader. Granted that’s still a lot of feeds to follow. These feeds are from the more active sites that I’ve followed since I imported my feed list from Bloglines which I don’t use anymore.
The sites that I’ve kept in Google Reader are news site, web development site and a couple personal sites.
Some of the sites that I’ve followed had not been updated since 2005 and 2006; others in 2009 and 2010. I know that things change and people don’t blog anymore. I know that I don’t posted as much as I did in the past, either on here or on my self hosted blog which I shut down in October 2011. I may put up another site with a different site address at some point in the near future. I’m looking for another domain name to buy. The one’s that I thought of haven been bought and / or in use. More on this later.
It’s probably going be a while before I would add more rss feeds to Google Reader any time soon. If I do, sites that I would follow would be like web development sites when I go looking for them.
Well I’ve finally moved hosting company’s for this site. I went from Yahoo! Web Hosting to WestHost. Its taken me at least 3 to 5 1/2 years to actually make the move. Partly trying to find a host that I could transition to and not knowing how to make such moves.
I’ve used Yahoo for so long – at first with business email then a couple of years later web hosting. I did that domain/web hosting packing together which I learned and heard over the years wasn’t a very good idea in any way. So now I have this domain and bhchinooks.com at independent domain register and have hosting with WestHost.
One thing that I’ve noticed since the move is that this site is loading faster than before while on Yahoo servers. While I had this site on Yahoo web hosting I’ve noticed that there were many “quirks” that developed which is hard to explain. Though the site seemed stable majority of the time – it was the odd weekend where this blog went “weird.” The last time this blog went “weird” on the June 4th weekend, so it was the “straw” that broke to proverbial camels back. Which gave me a “kick” on the backside to make the move.
Though there is other reason for the move – is that I’ve “out grown” what Yahoo offered on its web hosting site.
If I was running a site with no blog(s) or php scripts I might have stayed with Yahoo.
I looked around at other hosting companies but at the time when I signed up I was looking to pay for a couple of years at a time. Partly to “save some money” each year. At the moment I’m exploring my more options as for my current host goes. There will be an expanded explanation at a later time with the last statement – if you could understand what I just said.
Got a response from my hosting company, but then the way I worded the email to them wasn’t that good either. The problem that I’ve had over the July 4th weekend is that some how this site and a WordPress testing blog that I have on this site got screwed up so now both aren’t working well as they should have been.
The problem that I had over the June 4th weekend was a lot of connection error’s with the mysql server that I have with this hosting account. Though by the time the techs got to look at my account thing’s were generally stable with my blogs.
Problems with this blog might have started earlier than June 4th weekend – not sure though.
After what happened after the June 4th weekend with this blog I’m going to back up all the stuff I need to – like files, databases, and archive mail from the web-based email app.
Once I get things setup on my other host – I’ll post some thing here before I update the dns for the site and see how things go. Hopefully the move would be a smooth transition from one host to another.
In the process of moving stuff over to my other host I discovered that I had a problem with a php script that I made sometime back.
It’s on the links page of my site that’s not working well with my other host. Though it’s time that I would need to update the code and the database for it to work again. it’s going to take time to update the code since I haven’t been working with php on a daily basis or weekly basis.
Moving sites and dealing with this type of problems – would help me to get on top of things again. A php class may or may not help as a refresher – though doing a trail and error is a good way to learn to make things work.
Seems like that recently I’ve been wanting to write some more either on this blog or on my side blog located on wordpress.com. Though, some of the posts that I wrote were posted as private so I could go back and reread them so they could sound better to me and to see if I would need to rewrite them if needed. Or the posts that I write would get deleted after I spend some time in writing them.
I think its the fact of writing that’s been helping me getting some things out in the open and air out the “dirty laundry” that’s been going shifting through my mind. And what I mean by “dirty laundry” is that things that I normally try to say to some doesn’t get really said after the fact. Then if I like the way the post is edited I would then post it, but some, as I have said, I would delete the post that I spent time on doing. Granted it may be a waste of time doing a post but I think its the fact of writing something is or would be helping me in dealing with stuff – if at all. Plus, there are a lot of things that I could write about on this blog or the few other that I have or had in the past but it wouldn’t be right if I did that. Though if I did write about other people and the stuff that they did or have said to me, I think I would be in some kind of legal trouble and that’s why I tend to keep things in the very general sense when I’m writing stuff.
In the past when I post stuff to this blog or to the ones that I’ve had in the past they’ve been to the point and sometimes very brief. Though looking back on things in regards to blogging in general I might have dong things a bit different, in what way I wouldn’t know how I would do things differently. One thing that I would have done differently would be writing some longer posting in some fashion on many different subjects.
Its just that recently that I’ve been writing more constructive, thoughtful or thorough writings. Or in the past which were to the point postings, like the post about the feed for this blog. Speaking of which, the plug-in that I got through feedburner.com which is a wordpress plug-in redirects the regular feed to the feedburner feed. In the options menu for this plug-in has an option for the comments feed too that if you use feedburner for it. I know what I’ve just said might be redundant but if it is please ignore it.
Plus, I think I’m also making up for some lost time in writing some more constructive and longer posts. As it is that I should be writing more stuff other than those post’s that I’ve been complaining about stuff (look in the archive over the last year or two, I might have a couple still visible to the public).
Another thing that I’ve noticed is that after writing some post I tend to get to sleep sooner at night, and another reason would be that getting my somewhat stopped getting worked up about stuff when I go to bed at night. In the past when I when to bed for some reason I would get myself worked up and wouldn’t get to sleep for hours on end. But for some reason is that I’ve (mostly) stopped doing that. Though I’ve been doing that to some extent, but its not getting me anywhere and nowhere fast.
On a side note that I hope or might have a feeling that the situation that I’m currently in …. hopefully … would be getting better but I’m not totally sure yet. Let me say that I’m stuck in the proverbial “rock and a hard place” especially in the last 6 to 8 months. Though, If I’m able to leave Alaska this summer I will and I would take the chance to do it (see this post and this one).
If I was able to leave a couple of years ago I would have left without looking back. But life hasn’t really been kind to me while living in Alaska, and I think having bad karma for a while might have something to do with it. But thats for another post and for another time.
Though I would like to write some more …. now its time to go for now…
Don’t know why but recently I just want to write of using the web and the internet in general. What I mean is that the internet really no longer holds its appeal to me, or it doesn’t feel like “new.” Granted all I do now is to check email, use bloglines, Google Reader, and visit a couple other websites – including my own site.
Though for the last 2 1/2 to 3 years or so I’ve been using Bloglines which has been great to organize and centralize the things that I like to read the most. Such as entertainment news or follow tech sites. Although I have been using a new computer for the last year – which I use mainly for school work, and in part to work on my website which I haven’t updated that much recently which I should do soon.
I’m getting off track – sort of. It just seems like that I don’t want to have much to do with the web anymore – well not as much as I did like about 10 years ago when I started using the web and the internet.
One thing that I’ve been doing less and less is blogging and I think the problems is that what I want to say and it doesn’t come out right or just unable to put things into words.
For those who follow this blog you might notice the change in the title because 1) I want to see what works and what doesn’t work, and 2) I wanted to change it for a bit of time, finally 3) the purpose of this blog might change to a varing degree by the end of two months time. Though the url/feed title that I have for feedburner will remain the same.
Other updates to this blog would be primarly minor update’s up to any website move. When and if I change hosts there would be changes to the permalinks and other changes too to this blog and site.
I’ll post something well before I’ll actually move this site and the various wordpress based blog’s that I have on this site.
Peter's Journal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.