Desultory Thoughts

Of all the blogs I’ve come across on the world wide web, most of them have made me curious about the author.  If I look for more information such as some sort of synapsis or bio, I usually (never) find anything.  It’s almost as if I must read every article to find out more about the blogger.

That’s when I realized that my blog has the same problem.  When you click on “About Me” you really don’t find much about me at all, although you certainly could peice together much more about me if you were to read each and every post.  At first I thought maybe people didn’t list info about themselves due to concerns for their privacy, but most blogs include bits and pieces of their private life if not whole chunks (depending on the purpose of the blog).

It is with this intent to more fully detail a little bit more about myself so that when you read an opinion tagged as Politics, you can look me up and find out that my opinion of politics is relatively immature and still developing due to my lack of interest up until a few years ago.  (It will also explain why there are not very many posts under “politics” category.)  When you read something under the Religion category you won’t wonder what type of Christian I am.  You’ll quickly be able to tell that I belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormons.  When I mention my brother, you’ll have a better idea about which brother I might be talking about and you’ll know that I actually have three of them.  That will also explain why I don’t every mention my sister…since I don’t have one.

Little pieces of information like this can be very helpful and I think more bloggers should make it more available.  Of course, there is the matter of privacy, but I love that people can get to know me without ever meeting me.  I follow a blog written by Faye Min who is currently living in China.  I think her writing style is fabulous, especially given her history which, unfortunately I had to dig out of her many posts.  I’m not sure I even have it all right, but nonetheless, from what I can make of her, she’s pretty cool.  If nothing else, I love her writing style and her honesty.

I don’t think I can be as honest as she is in her blog.  People know me as being pretty honest about my feelings in person, but if they only knew the truth.  I’m actually quite sensitive to the feelings of others, despite my apparent honesty in saying what I feel or expressing my opinions, and as a result I often hold back so as not to completely offend.  No matter what, I still want my friends to be my friends and if I’m always saying exactly what I say to my wife about their faults (we all have them) then they might not enjoy hanging around me as much.  They already tolerate quite a bit, especially my family.  I really hold back when it comes to my wife’s family.

Although I have plans to more completely describe myself on the About Me page, it won’t be tonight, or tomorrow night, or even the next.  As a new Elder in our Elder’s Quorum said last Sunday, “I haven’t been coming to church, but I’m going to come every Sunday now.  And that’s a promise I’m making to myself, not to you guys.”  I laughed out loud.  I love that kind of honesty!

So I’ll update the page when I’m good and ready.  I just wanted you all to know that it’s in the works.

I stumbled upon a Firefox extension whilst reading a Slashdot article today that makes reading Slashdot so much easier; specifically when you want to jump into a sub-conversation that is beneath your threshhold. I set my threshold to 3 and above, so a lot of the sub-conversations get modded down because they’re technically off-topic, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested.

Slashdotter 1.5 makes the “9 replies beneath your current threshold” into an expanded tree within the same page without having to navigate away from the page. Then you can quickly read the off-topic stuff without leaving the story. This is all made possible by Ajax. I just love what people are doing with it!

Other Firefox extensions that I’m using and really like a lot are:

• Google Toolbar for Firefox (recently updated to 2.0)
• IE Tab
• FireFTP
• All-in-One Gestures (Mimics Opera’s Mouse Gestures which is why I switched to Opera years ago to begin with. I’m still sad that I had to jump the Opera ship after being such a devoted fan for so many years. This extension is to blame.)
• del.icio.us
• Adblock & Adblock Filterset.G Updater (You don’t realize how annoying all those flash ads are until the page finally loads without them for once!)
• Tab Mix Plus (Again, mimics some of Opera’s great feauture sets, such as saved sessions)

Some that I’ve installed, but hardly ever use are:

• Viamatic foXpose
• Blogger Web Comments (used to use this all the time when my blog was hosted on Blogger.com, but ever since I started hosting it on my own server with WordPress, I don’t use it anymore.)

I’ve been poking around at the yard work ever since the snow melted off the lawn the first time.  But since then (probably February) snow has found its way onto the ground several times since, the latest being just two days ago on April 6.

I use Scott’s Annual Program [scotts.com] for my lawn and the first application should go on in early Spring, March through April.  It should normally be applied when temperatures are generally above 60 and on a day that’s dry after the lawn has been mowed.  I’m running out of days to apply it, so I may just do it today before the forecasted three or four days of rain that is ahead of us.

It’s been especially wet this year.  I wondered how much I should water my lawn (not that I’m worried about it at all right now) and found that if I use the 1/2 inch rule (make sure your lawn receives 1/2 inch per week) I’ll save a lot of money and water.  You can download a very imformative PDF customized for your Utah area by visiting conservewater.utah.gov.  Hopefully I’ll be able to follow the guidelines and save a lot of water.  Last year when we moved in we had to water a lot to revitalize our dead lawn.  Our water bill was pretty big as a result.  But we probably wasted a lot of water, too.  I found out that if your water is running onto the sidewalk then you need to split up the watering into smaller increments.  That’s good to know and it makes sence.  Sometimes I just have to read it on a website first to believe it.

Other things I need to do is to remove two dead trees in my yard.  One is in the front yard and was dead when we got here.  It turns out the neighbor kids had their way with it when the house was for sale and vacant.  It was reported that they took a hatchet or machete to it “for fun”.

I’m glad that they at least didn’t do what another neighbor kid did to a vacant house directly behind our house.  He decided it would be fun to lob rocks through three windows in the back of the house.  Heather saw him do it and called the police to report the property damage.  A week later the kid and his whole family moved out, much to the delight of the entire neighborhood.  Apparently that was only one of many incidents of hellionism that he had committed.

Now we have two ugly vacant houses behind us.  We need some big 6″ privacy bushes planted all along the back of our fence to conceal the eyesores.  (Add that to the list!  But I’m not doing that today.)

I bought Sami and Griff a Betta Fish [wikipedia.org] tonight. They’ve never had a pet before, so this is their first. They’re also known as Siamese Fighting Fish. You’re not supposed to put two males in the same tank because they’ll kill each other.

I bought a neat little fish bowl that came with a light that shines in it. Sami is really excited to have it in her room as a second night light. When I suggested that she could use it as a night light, despite the fact that she already has one, she shrugged her shoulders and proclaimed, “I can’t really see with my other night light anyway, so I need the fish night light, huh daddy.”

I worked with Sami and Griffin for about 20 minutes to make sure they knew they couldn’t touch the fish, nor should they even touch the shelf that it sits on. I have no doubt, however, that Griffin will pull the tank onto the floor at some point and the fish will die a horrible death. I’m half tempted to buy another male Betta fish and let them duke it out if it is going to die anyway. It’s going to be either Griffin or another Betta fish, might as well save Griff getting in trouble and get a little entertainment. (Or perhaps that’s illegal or I’ll get the animal rights people calling the police on me? I’d better not find out.) Apparently in Thailand fish fights abound, but not within city limits where it is not allowed. Such a fight was described as follows:

When fighting is agreed upon, the fish are scooped our of their bottles and carefully put into a large tall jar. Coming face to face, the opponents are transformed into wonderfully beautiful creatures, their colour deepening their gills quivering and widening, their fins and tails spreading out and assuming a warm glow. Every part of the body becomes vibrant. They lose no time in getting at each other, biting fiercely and cruelly. With mouths locked for minutes or sometimes even hours, they fit up and down the water in the bottle manoeuvring for positions. Parts of gills, fins, tailsmortal combat, the enthusiasts would bet basing their calculations on the amount and severity of the injury inflicted and received by both sides.

It’s hard to believe I bought such a fierce fighter for my kids’ first pet. I guess if I were to buy them a dog it would be a pitbull. (Obviously I’m joking, just in case somebody questions it.) There are some posts on this page that suggest that these fish aren’t the fighters others say they are [aquahobby.com], so don’t worry…I’m not going to buy two males and put them in the tank with each other.

I came across Pageflakes.com today (primarily because somebody came to my site from there) and found the site very cool! The familiar Ajax loading icon that I use for my comments on this blog told me right away that it was made with Ajax. Pageflakes.com is a customizable web portal like unto Google’s Personalized Home that I’ve been using for quite some time now.

I’ll be giving this a try over the next few weeks and sooner or later I’ll make a desicion between this new option and what I’ve been using in the past. I’ll report on my decision at a later date. Things that I like already are the ability to create multiple pages, a feauture I was just wishing for tonight as I added yet another module to my Google Page. Things are starting to get crowded.

Windows Live is yet another “Ajax Desktop” but it looks cruddy comparatively to both Google and Pageflakes.  It won’t be long before Yahoo turns out their version as well.  Come to think of it, they may already be doing that with “My Yahoo”.

A quick search revealed some more options that are out there!  In fact, there are too many to choose from (listed alphabetically in addition to the three mentioned above):

• Eskobo
• Favoor
• HomePortals
• Netvibes
• Protopage
• Zoozio (most recently known as Zimbio)

If you’ve used one or more and you have a preference or opinion, please post a comment.