Screws In My Coffee

I watched a DVD on Joni Mitchell tonight. I have been a music fan of her since I was a teenager. I have a lot of her music on my iPod, but I have never seen her perform. It was a very powerful experience to finally her her talk about her music and her life.

It took very little effort to get my BLOG moved over to the new hosting provider.  I still have to move my photo archive, so some of the links on the photos will not work yet.  I may decide to just upload those to the Blog site and give up on having every image that I take on-line.

For the past 5 or 6 years I have run my own Linux and Windows servers. I started out with them in my house in Portland when I first got DSL. When I moved to Texas I had both servers in a data center. Then I moved them to my residence in Austin. Now I am in the process of moving my personal and client web sites to a real hosting service, Site Ground . I have learned a lot over the years about Linux and Windows by running my own servers. The trade-offs of doing this are many but there have been some benefits which I hate to part with. What got me started in running my own servers was that I got tired of my ISP in Portland telling me that I had to pay more money for disk space for my web site. I have a large archive of photos that I just like having online. I also liked being able to configure what ever I wanted on the servers. There are pit-falls in running your own servers. When something breaks and you see the famous error See Your Administrator , then that means you! Fixing my...

I have joined an online social community called Second Life . I heard about it this week as I was watching an episode of Rocketboom on my Tivo . If you would like to join Second Life click here and I will get some Linden dollars as a referral. You can join for free but if you upgrade to a premium account you can get some Linden Dollars to spend in the virtual world of Second Life.  I decided to join Second Life because I have been futzing with computers and the Internet for over 15 years and I have not been able to use them for entertainment successfully. I always rely on using a television and DVD player for my home entertainment. I love listening to music, but I usually do that when I am driving in my truck, working (with computers mostly) or working out in the gym.  So during the 2007 ice storm in central Texas I decided to join Second Life.

Some folks have said that the new year means nothing. The belief is that time is an arbitrary measurement of time. Saying that a year starts at a certain moment really means nothing. So at this time when the western civilized world sees fit to mark an ending of a chapter in time and the start of a new one I am making an attempt to just continue to be consistent in keeping my life going the way that it is. This past year I have become officially divorced. There was a time in my life that I believed that I could not live as a divorced person. It has been very hard living without being around my sona and daughter. My children live in Portland, Oregon and I reside in Austin, Texas. But my problems are nothing compared to what a lot of other people in the world are going through. Katrina  did a lot of damage in 2005 and folks are still re-building their lives and homes. I am happy for my life and I am living the live I love and loving the life that I live.

Zak flew into Houston airport on Saturday December 23, 2006. The first thing that we did on Sunday was to go to a Texan game. We saw the Texas beat the Colts for the first time in franchise history. This was the first time that Zak has attended an NFL game. It was the second time that I had attended a NFL game. I had attended a LA Rams game with my father years ago when I was about Zak's age now (12) The big Stargate Trailer was hold up at the Brazos Bend State Park. We stayed there for a few days and then went back to Austin. On Christmas day we went to Sylvia's son's house for a visit. Zak and I headed for the gulf coast. I wanted to show Zak the town of Corpus Christi. We drove to Goose Island State Park and parked the pig. We did a lot of fun activities like visit the Aquarium, the air crft carrier Lexington and Mustang Island. Houston was the next stop on Zak's whirl-wind tour. Zak wanted to visit a museum so we went to the Houston Museum of Natural Science . Ther...

This weekend Sylvia and I parked on the bay at Goose Island. We had temperatures in the low 80s and we were 10 feet from a beautiful bay. There were fish jumping out of the bay and large white pelicans swimming right in front of us. This image of the sun rise on Saturday was just to the right of our camp spot. Goose Island State Park is about 20 miles north of Rockport and about 275 miles away from Austin. It took about 5 hours of driving to get to the state park from where we live in the West Lake area of Austin. We visited the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge an saw an American Alligator and the endangered Whooping Crane . There are more images from the trip on the Wormley.org photo archive web site.