At Home On Piety Hill

Some time ago I created a website for Scott and Carol Kellermann highlighting their work among the Batwa people. The Batwa are conservation refugees, meaning they were forcibly removed from their ancestral home in the Bwindi Inpenetrable Forest to create a preserve for the mountain gorilla. Scott recently completed a very infomative video, which has been added to the site. Check it out.

Denise and I are enjoying our .Mac account and we have two new slideshows up. One records our trip to Disneyland and the other is a collection of Birthday, New Year and Christmas photos. I really like the ease of sharing photos through iPhoto and .Mac. The greeting cards are great, too. I think the feature I use most often is Backup, to schedule incremental backups to a 250gig hard drive and rewritable DVDs, kept off site. My next project? Create an easy to use FTP site for our families to share photos, music, etc.. Peace!

Well, it finally arrived! About a week ago, I began the rigorous process of having my old 867 MHz Titanium PowerBook certified as a bona fide Apple System and today I received the coveted brushed aluminum certification plaque. It wasn’t easy, but you could never put a price tag on the prestige that accompanies such recognition from Mr. Jobs himself. I’m a little nervous going to Macworld in San Francisco this week… I mean, what if he calls me up during the keynote address and makes a big deal out of this whole thing?

Levi and Suzanne had us over for lunch today. She and Rosalyn made Denise and I the most wonderful po’boy, er, I mean, disenfranchised person sandwich I’ve had in a long time. Lily and Jack joined us for this splendid repast, garnished with potato chips, Fritos© and the food of the gods (small ‘g” deities), Crunchy Cheetos©.

Levi and I kept the code chatter to a minimum, choosing instead to engage in the topics of interest entertained by the other luncheon guests. We discussed the elements of the “poorboy” or “po’boy” sandwich, which is nearly identical to the “hoagie” or “fresh italian” sandwich, until we realized that those descriptions may seem insensitive to our less fortunate brethren. So, we came up with a more inclusive, less judgmental or demeaning label for the meat, cheese and vegetable sandwich, served on a freshly baked roll or baguette. Yes, this is a sandwich which knows no class or racial or philosophical distinctions. It is truly the sandwich of everyman… drat! I mean, of every person!

As our refection continued throughout the early afternoon, topics of conversation ranged from the resurrection of the dead, to the dangers of dehydration accompanying the stomach flu. Film, music, books, education, art, napping… we covered it all. What a blessed afternoon!

I have a plan. PietyHill Press, hosted on my own domain, will be my main blog; the hub from which all spokes will emanate from. I will be reworking and tweaking this blog before the watching world. Well, actually, before myself and the one or two folks who may wander in here from time to time. This will be the vehicle I will use to learn PHP/MySQL, WordPress and related issues. The goal is to become an accomplished, sought after designer in about four years, when I will retire from the Postal Service.

I also hope to get a few dedicated blogs going on Blogger, which I will link to from this blog. I want to learn everything there is to know about Blogger.
So, let’s try a few of the WordPress editing features, which by the way, do not work on Safari.

Okay, so I’ve installed the ajax spell checker, which doesn’t seem to be workdibngbso ye.etig. Hmmm. Let’s save teh pots, restrat and trye thiss aagin. Hmmm. Not working… I suppose this is what it’s all about. It looks like the ajax spellchecker is out.

Well, it seems to be easier to write and edit than Blogger. We’ll see how easy it is to upload images and then I’ll have to get into the CSS to work on formatting them.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Well, it starts here… Thanks to Levi for explaining Mac file structure, while passing along PHP/MySQL installation and configuration secrets. To show my appreciation, I am in the process of bidding on some obscure CDs on eBay.

Kudos to GoDaddy. After reading all the horror stories in preparation for installation, I can honestly say your MySQL activation and configuration instructions were absolutely simple. I can close the 40 tabs I have open to various GoDaddy/WordPress discussions and installation nightmares. The big problem it seems is hosting on a Windows server vs Linux. Hooray for Linux! I’m glad I made that decision, when I transferred to GoDaddy.