I seem to be good at locating strange stories today. So, what do YOU think THIS is? (Don't you just HATE it when people don't tell you what a link is about? In this case, I'm not really sure what to say about it myself! LOL) (link via Blue Moon News)
posted:10:01 AM | link |

If you want to check out the findings that mainstream archaeological & anthropological sciences just may have left out because they don't fit currently accepted theories, drop by Ed Conrad's Site and see for yourself. Personally, the more I think about, for instance, the theory of evolution as it is COMMONLY known, the less sense it really makes, but I don't have my own theory on it yet - it intrigues me, it does. You?
posted:9:50 AM | link |

Heh heh - checking the referrer logs for 'cc', we had someone find the journal archives by looking for "witch" & "sex magic" - SOMEBODY'S up to something! *grin* On the other hand, the main page of the site also came up when someone searched for "inflammatory conscious sucking distasteful fief", presumably because of the word "conscious" - but what do you think they were really looking for? Or is it just someone putting in a string of words to see what would happen? Most likely the latter. LOL.
posted:8:34 AM | link |

YAY, the Eat, Link & Be Merry food blog is happenin' again - wander by and check it out - I'll add a link in the left column soon too. :-)
posted:8:20 AM | link |

I just heard that Disney's making a cheery makeover of the tragic opera 'Aida'... and ONE of the things I wonder is... will they ever bother to write anything ORIGINAL again or is that beyond them at this point? Or is it too much of a financial 'risk' in their eyes. Also makes me get all excited about when they decide to redo Hamlet - HA HA HA. "When people think of Disney, they think of Main Street in Disneyland, and there's a lot more to it than that,'' says Schumacher, who also runs the company's feature animation division. - I DON'T think of main street in Disneyland - I've never even BEEN to Disneyland. I USED to think of the Apple Dumpling Gang, and Escape from Witch Mountain, and Herbie the Love Bug, and Peter Pan and Tinkerbell and that they were on every Sunday (was it?) night. What I think of NOW is Atlantis, and I shudder every time. You know, on second thought - never mind - I just don't really care.
posted:5:26 AM | link |

There's the creating of things and then there's the 'scene' that results from the creating of things. Both have their virtues and their vices. I am a 'creating of things' person - that's what really thrills me. I have some friends who are more focused on the 'scene' end of things.

I realized this today when I was browsing through weblogs and links. For instance, I like reading people's first hand experiences with creating food, meals, and recipes. And I followed a link to a food site that covered the whole 'scene' but didn't really focus on the creative process itself, and got really bored, really fast. I guess that's why I'd rather play with art (and metaphysics, etc.) than go to a 'gallery opening' which is more about the scene. But I'm still glad its there and people are enjoying it all the same. Variety being the spice of life and all that. :-)
posted:4:55 PM | link |

Today's topic: I love pens. It's not a rational "aren't they useful" kind of love, it's a full out "I could just look at them and be happy" kind of love. I have a large shoebox FULL of pens - most of which still write - collected from various and sundry activities over the past tenish years or so - trade shows, free giveaways, gifts, novelty, purchased in stores, you name it.

My favorite 'cheap' pen is the $.89/dozen PaperMates - not because they DON'T smear, because they do, but because of the bright color and flowing ink - no skipping. I also don't discriminate against roller balls and other kinds of tips. Actually, I have this disposable fountain pen that has been around for years and still writes, but they seem to have gone out of favor because I can't find any (disposable) anymore. I also have a lot of expensive pens - cross pens look so cool, but are somewhat difficult to write with if your hand gets warm as your grip slips down the silver metal. A good friend gave me a refillable parker fountain pen which is fantastic, and matte black for better holding.

I tend to lay claim to any pen in the house, unless it doesn't have a cap (and it's supposed to - clickable pens don't count.) All pens without caps are immediately "John's" - LOL. He wanted a pen all of his own that he liked and he came home one day with this huge plastic, shiny silver pen that was in the shape of an alien, head plus body. It's a little top-heavy, but I'll never EVER confuse it or want to subtly obscond with it myself - John chose wisely.

When I was growing up, the pens mom kept in an old flowerpot I had decorated in 4-H in the kitchen slowly but surely migrated "on their own" into my room. Periodically, mom would come upstairs, regather them, and herd them back into the flower pot, and the whole cycle would start over again. *grin*
posted:4:37 PM | link |

I'm glad when people find our web sites and enjoy them. I guess the whole purpose of putting anything up on the web is to share. We don't do anything special to try and drive traffic to our sites, because we figure people who want to find the stuff we have, will. And I have nothing against being listed in search engines - that's a good thing, really - LOL. I have mostly thought of the individual people who access our sites instead of 'organizations'.

I guess I'm just a bit conflicted however, that we're paying for the bandwidth for someone like, for example (not picking on them in particular - they're just the most recent in our referrer logs), www.ja.net, that is accessing all of the pages on the 'cc' site. They are the "United Kingdom Education & Research Networking Association" that says this about themselves, "JANET is connected to the equivalent academic networks in other countries and to many commercial networks in the UK and abroad forming part of the global internet." They also say that they are government funded and it seems they allow use of their services only by "Higher Education Institutions or Research Councils". Yes, on the one hand its interesting that ja.net considers our site worth indexing, but... *I* wouldn't be eligible to use their site... ????

Anyway... I'm not spending sleepless nights thinking about this - LOL - but it WOULD be nice if places like that followed the Robots Exclusion Standards like other search engines do. I suppose this is just encouraging me to create an active "mod_access" ability on our server so I can "...restrict access based on the hostname or IP address from which the user is connecting to your site." I guess when all is said and done the whole ISSUE is just about consciously allocating the use of our monthly allowed bandwidth. Exciting, no? (That was rhetorical!)
posted:11:51 AM | link |

Here's today's "mystery photo", for your visual amusement. And in an unrelated note, I just redesigned (and we 'refocused') the CC Journal - go take a gander. There's also a slightly different design on the archive pages - all 230 of them - now THAT was fun redoing all of THOSE I can tell you - *grin*. I did use an included file for the links on those pages though, so I won't have to update 230 pages each time a link changes. I'm just getting entirely too clever for my own good here. ;-)
posted:9:30 AM | link |

Before referrer/stat logs, I never realized how much traffic on our cc site is generated by search engine robots constantly trolling around. Yesterday we had 1466 page requests and a good percentage of them weren't by actual people. They were using so much bandwidth that I set the robots.txt file to disallow the robots from certain directories, particularly one that has over 230 files in it. Most of the people hits we get from search engines are through generally related terms anyway, not about what's in those specific files. We weren't getting TOO close to our bandwidth limit our domain hosting service allows us, but still. In any case, this will be an interesting experiment to see if and how much our stats change.
posted:8:12 AM | link |

Oh, yes, and Happy Birthday to Harry Potter. *grin*
posted:8:56 PM | link |

I seem to be at another transition point in my life and I remember two dreams from last night that express that well. First, I was out in a diner with friends (that kept shifting around too, and who I was with) and my teeth kept coming out. (Don't you hate those dreams? LOL) After a little while I had a whole handful of them and was still trying to act casual and not draw attention. As I was doing this, I realized that they all looked like baby teeth - like large white kernels of corn - instead of adult teeth. And THEN I realized that I already had a new set of teeth quickly coming in - already evident, as I felt around with my tongue. (teeth often symbolize 'beliefs' in my dreams)

The next dream I remember just the flavor of, but I was Kristen Johnston (who plays Sally on Third Rock from the Sun - and of course, we have the same first name - no, not SALLY - LOL) and there was this large party because she was leaving the show - she was happy to be moving on but also a little sad and saying goodbye to everyone. Certainly sounds relevant! In any case - bring it on, baby - I'm ready for that transition!
posted:8:05 AM | link |

Do you remember any specific moment where you went from the openness of a child who accepts everything in their reality as normal, to a person that uses conscious (critical?) thinking skills? I don't remember a moment myself, but I have distinct memories of being both of these kinds of people. Mostly I remember movies before and after - before I'd just enjoy them as presented, and in the other they bring up questions about it, which was also fun in its own way.


I guess that's one of the opportunities present when we incarnate into physical reality - that razor focus. I know that when I'm dreaming I certainly don't look at things the same way I do when I'm awake in physical reality. But I'm also getting better at being able to access BOTH of these kinds of awarenesses (what a word) at will. I think that often, as adults, we are 'encouraged' to leave that child-focus behind, instead of learning to integrate them both as tools of sorts. People have a tremendous ability to be flexible with their consciousnesses (another interesting plural - LOL) - we should take advantage of that.
posted:10:35 AM | link |

Hey - go check out the new flash animation on the Abstract Weirdness site - it's called, "Red". One of the images in it may look somewhat familiar. (ForkFlinger has excellent taste - LOL)
posted:7:22 PM | link |

Well, tom's only got about an hour and a half left in the blog-a-thon, but I warn you if you visit his page... remember that he's been posting every ten minutes for 23.5 hours now and the page is like 150 KB to load - LOL. And there's a LOT to read - all good stories and thoughts. I give tom a lot of credit, and wouldn't have thought that baby carrots were the key to keeping him awake, but there you go!

In an unrelated note, it's time to trim my hair again. I know it's too long when I try to prop myself up on my elbow in bed and my elbow pins a GOOD portion of my hair to the bed, trapping me in a weird position. :-)
posted:10:30 AM | link |