"the editor"
So it appears my little blog is getting some amount of hits these days, likely coinciding with my frequent updates. On the 28th I got 13 hits, none of them me. Since then I have had very few hits, around 4 a day not counting me. I was hoping the hits would start to become consistent after a while, consistent each day. But that has not happened.
I'm not sure where to take this blog at this point. I do have a couple non-sensical rants in mind I haven't written down quite yet.
I will mention I have finally set up a decent
archive page all set up. So should the mood strike you to see what I was writing and thinking last April, go right ahead. It's hard to believe this blog is THAT old. Wow. You'll find a convenient link located to your left. The archive page looks much, much better but still isn't quite finished. I need to add an accurate "return to home page" link towards the top and figure out how make sure search engines don't use all those quotes as matches to searches. Also my counter is on each page and likely throwing off my stats.
As outlined in my last entry I did finally get that movie onto a playable DVD. Unfortunately the quality wasn't what I was going for and I didn't actually use Video DeLuxe. I got the whole movie chunked back together, looked perfect in the editor though I was nervous about the size. I tell it to go through the process, encode it and put on a DVD in SVCD quality. Should be no problem. It goes to put the movie on the DVD and errors out with a simple "error writing to disk". So I close down the program and bring it back up, click the giant SVCD version of the movie and nothing happens. Normally at this point there's a "scanning from number: " progress indicator as it scans and loads every frame of the movie. But not this time. So I try dragging it down to the work area and it shows up as only a 1 second clip, with no audio. So I'm hosed. But I do have EZ CD Creator 6, which as it turns out can make movies. So I use my newly created movie file with that. EZ CD Creator insists on sampling down the quality of the movie or telling me it has to use DVD quality, which requires more space than is available on the DVD. I tried telling it to use SVCD but it just says, "the disk is not a CD". Yes, I know that: use the DVD to make an SVCD movie. Why should that be so hard anyway? If Video DeLuxe didn't suck I'm sure it would do it. Than I was thinking I would put a CD in and then switch it with a DVD when it got to that part of the process, but I doubt that will really work. So mostly I'm stuck with a low quality version of this movie on a DVD. And again I can just here the rational person's thoughts: why not use a VHS? Bah!
I'm still looking for a job. I haven't heard from my friend Steve all weekend or all day today. I have decided I have absolutely no excuse for not being certified as both A+ and Network+. So I need to start that process. Neither of them should pose too much of a problem to get. I don't know why I haven't done this sooner. It's not like I don't have the time.
I'm thinking about taking this blog in a slightly different direction. Not much I can do about the title at the moment of course, I won't be buying a new domain any time soon. What I have in mind is a creative writing rough draft for a short story I've been contemplating for quite a while now. I was working on it separate for a little while via Word. Now that I think about it I think I'll just create a sub-domain and treat it as a separate blog. Maybe if I keep at it I'll start to finish it eventually. There's just so much planning that would go into something like that. And I need a title also. Perhaps I'll just call the sub-domain "story" and change the name of the blog as I go through various ideas for what the title should be.
Update: I'm doing this entry over several hours in an afternoon. I've just done two things: created a new sub domain for my short story brain storm, which isn't up yet and signed up to be an
AllPosters.com affiliate. So the convenient link to your left is more than just convenient, it's to generate some amount of revenue via this site. I'll be surprised if I ever recieve any money what so ever from this affiliateship. So in all discloser:
I'm an AllPosters.com affiliate and
they use "pixel shims" to keep track of visitors.
And what is a "pixel shim" you ask? It's a small, transparent image with the dimension of 1 pixel by 1 pixel (in English that means "an image you can't see"). When you visit my site this image will download, effectively sending a signal to AllPosters that someone has viewed an ad at an affiliate of theirs. Just letting my visitors know up front. You may not be aware an extremely large number of sites deploy such methods of tracking visitors. Visitors have never been known to fill in information necessary to more effectively serving the audience so this method was developed. I don't think it's that much of a big deal myself.
For the record AllPosters seems like a decent company for buying posters. So should the mood strike feel free to use the link on the left and buy some posters.
Another update: I've *finally* setup my subdomain for my story. Took me a while to get my FTP working correctly. Seems it isn't really possible using IE as you FTP client. So I used my favorite: ftp.exe. Then I had to figure out how to make a new FTP account for my domain and use it to login and publish the new blog via blogger. But I finally have it working. Here's the address:
story.etalii-step.com. Haven't got much up there yet. But I soon will.
For the rest of the day today I am going to use Ghost to back up my C: drive to a bootable DVD and have some dinner (it's after 7pm now). Sometime tomorrow most likely I will start my new story blog and get started on that. I'm still planning on making lots of updates to this one however. So even though I would love to continue writing longer I am going to leave now.
