Party Like it’s 1999!

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Kinda, anyway; I noticed that I am going thru another cycle and wanted to write it down.

back in 1999, I quit a good job, stopped doing what I was doing in bike racing and promoting, and left all my friends behind.  I moved from Cincinnati to Lafayette with a van full of stuff and a girl and started anew.

Two weeks ago, I quit a good job, stopped doing what I was doing in bike racing and riding (nothing), and, well, I’m keeping all my friends around me this time.  I have a house full of stuff and a different girl and a few kids this time, but are starting anew again.

When I woke up this morning it seemed more like a connection between the two starts. As I write it now it is a little more vague…

Anyway, I quit my job in IT and am working exclusively for our travel business. Today is my first Monday at the ‘new’ job.  Just like last time though, this is the culmination of months of planning and work.  Last time I took a three-week tour of the west to find out where I wanted to go.  About two years of planning and exploration to get from the idea in my head that I was not happy with living in Cincinnati to living in Lafayette.

This time we started the company in four and a half years ago, the wife quit her job more than a year ago, I started preparing to quit three months ago; many, many years of planning going into this day.  Here I am, working for myself, my family. Ready to tackle the new challenges.

At least I think we are ready…

JEMC

A Busy Month

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I have been sick since before Thanksgiving and barely keeping my head above water.  I managed to get everything done that really needed to; gifts for the wife, wrap the kids gift, tree decorated, etc.  But I was so wasted I could not do anything else that was not super important.

Getting ready now for next month and the new year.  A few things need to be done in preparation and we are checking each item off our list.  Then starting on the next list…  Sigh.  So much to do and so little time.

Hope your holidays were good!

JEMC

More tips for WordPress

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Found a few articles and links and want to keep ‘em handy.

This one will help make the permalinks look less ‘bloggy’: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-no-category-base/

Better search experience and styling: http://txfx.net/wordpress-plugins/nice-search/

Better CMS functionality within WP: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fresh-page/

An explaination on how to utilize multisite and some coding to leverage it: http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/17/wordpress-multisite-practical-functions-methods/

Enjoy!

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Random Photos

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the fog off the lake and the sun on the trees

So one of the things I really like about the smart phone I have is all the functions that are always in my pocket.  I have all my phone numbers and email addresses, nearly infinite music, web surfing, directions, and my favorite- photos.

It’s not like we don’t have a camera, we have kids and all, but it’s a point and shoot.  Kinda fancy so I can do stuff manually if I want but in the end, it’s only 7 mega-pixel.  And my phone is 5 MP…  The lens is nicer on the camera, optical zoom and what not but I don’t carry it in my pocket all the time.

With this respectable camera along with me all the time, I have started taking more photos.  Fall is here with the colorful trees, some snow on the mountains, random shots of the kids doing something fun.  I have a number of interesting things that I would not have captured otherwise.

The problem I have now is the camera has not been set to take a full 5 MP photo.  It has been set to take 640×480 photos for at least a month.  So photos that I took and planned on cropping later, photos like the one above where the light is good, the weather is just so, I can’t do much with. I am so grumpy about that right now.  I reset the camera to take the largest photos it can, but I don’t know what happened to make the resolution so small.  It might happen again and I’ll have more unuseful photos.

Anyway, here are the small but hopefully still interesting photos I took with my camera-

WordPress tricks

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I am trying to get started more seriously on becoming WP-Guru and ran across this nice addition
http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/14/advanced-layout-templates-in-wordpress-content-editor/
This allows you to create a template within the text editor for various post types.  As you define these and then populate them, it drops preset HTML into the new posts/pages/whatever.  Then tied to additional styling and/or JavaScript on the front end you have a simple way to keep the layout and site more consistent without teaching a lot of code to the end users.

When I start working on custom templates this seems like important knowledge-
http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/12/developers-guide-conflict-free-javascript-css-wordpress/

I found this on social media plug-ins: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/top-social-bookmarking-wordpress-plugins/.  I have a like button (feel free to click it) but there is more than Facebook out there! 

Otherwise I am reviewing lists and lists of plug-ins and other tools to see what works best for me.

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