Domestic Geek

As I sit here weeding out old blog posts (paid links to stuff I don't/won't use again are being purged as well as duplicate or unnecessary posts), I realized that I've been doing this for almost NINE YEARS. Wow. Time flies.

I started blogging back when I was going to school. Between that and a full-time job, the only way I could let family & friends know what was up was to post to a blog. Ultimately, it's become the chronicle of my life and I'm saddened at the holes I find where I couldn't bring myself to write about what was happening at the time.

I'm glad my blogging mojo is back. I've sure missed this place. Now to get her all fixed up and pretty.

I'm in the middle of trying to organize my blogrolls so I can delete my old blogs and I'm finding a horrible trend that is really irking me. NO DATES ON BLOG POSTS! Not as bad, but still annoying, is it has a month and day, but no year.

I know a lot of people don't know anything about coding and just put up themes (especially Wordpress) that they like, but how can a visitor tell if your content is fresh or relevant when it has no date stamp whatsoever. I don't want to keep visiting blogs that haven't updated in over a year. Help a person out here.

My solution has been thus — delete the link. If you don't care enough about your readers to put out accurate information, I'm not going to bother to read it.

I'm already not happy with how our state is being governed. I knew that stupid tax bill they just put into effect went too far, but then I got this email today:

Dear Colorado-based Amazon Associate:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to "voluntarily" collect Colorado sales tax -- a course we won't take.

We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

There is a right way for Colorado to pursue its revenue goals, but this new law is a wrong way. As we repeatedly communicated to Colorado legislators, including those who sponsored and supported the new law, we are not opposed to collecting sales tax within a constitutionally-permissible system applied even-handedly. The US Supreme Court has defined what would be constitutional, and if Colorado would repeal the current law or follow the constitutional approach to collection, we would welcome the opportunity to reinstate Colorado-based Associates.

You may express your views of Colorado's new law to members of the General Assembly and to Governor Ritter, who signed the bill.

Your Associates account has been closed as of March 8, 2010, and we will no longer pay advertising fees for customers you refer to Amazon.com after that date. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to March 8, 2010, will be processed and paid in accordance with our regular payment schedule. Based on your account closure date of March 8, any final payments will be paid by May 31, 2010.

We have enjoyed working with you and other Colorado-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.


Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

I didn't make any money from being an Amazon associate, but it was nice to have that possible income stream at my disposal. I also used associate links in my blog posts for products or books I liked.

I wish I could say that putting Republicans back in charge would change things, but it won't. All current politicians are power-hungry and corrupt. Things are only going to change when we, the people, start taking responsibility and start taking control of our lives back. The economic troubles (caused by government interference), the unfair tax system, the out of control regulations...we're being micro-manged to the point of strangling the principles on which this nation was built — freedom, personal responsibility, liberty. You know, the original colonists fought back against England for less tan we're being put through now. Wake up, people. The government is not the solution nor can they help with your problems. All they do is compound problems and keep people down. I'm tired of it.

One of my goals of 2010 was to purge the house of unnecessary stuff. Well, it occurred to me (while I was sick with Pneumonia) that more than my house is cluttered. I need to start purging my whole life.

One reason I don't blog very much anymore is I've got too much on my mind and no clear outlet to get it out of there and into writing. I currently have 8 blogs set up at the moment (for various purposes). I rarely write on any of them. When I do have something I want to post, where do I put it? Sometimes I want to share to more than one audience, but I don't want the hassle of writing it more than once. More often than not, I'd just decide to throw a quick blurb out on Twitter or Facebook or not to bother writing at all. The problem with this scenario is that my blog is no longer a chronicle of my life. Many times I've referenced this place to pin down a date when some life event occurred. Lately, I've been finding that I never wrote about many important things. Have you tried going back through a Twitter or Facebook account to find specific information? Big old pain in the butt!

Most of the blogs are using Wordpress as the CMS and I'm truly finding it to be a pain. It's like the Microsoft of the blog publishing world. So many people use it that it is the target for hackers and evil-doers. A couple of my oldest blogs had been infiltrated by spammers. I try to keep the software up to date on my personal improvement and craft blogs, but it gets to be so tiresome to have to update all the freakin' time. Then I'd have to keep working with the themes because sometimes the updates broke my theme's functionality. Then I found out from Marcus that my Wordpress blogs put strain on our webserver. One time he even took all of my WP blogs offline because some errant code in a theme was crashing the server. All of these problems aren't really worth being able to use some of the cool plug-ins that drew me to using Wordpress in the first place.

I decided a couple of days ago that I'm over having all these useless blogs. I started researching how to get the content I wanted to save from these WP blogs into this one (which has always been using EE). These are the best instructions I found for importing from Wordpress to Expression Engine. Last night I decided to go for it. I edited the final text files to fix image links and delete extra crap or duplicate posts that I didn't want to import. Except for a little wonkiness with the categories, everything seemed to come over just fine. I do have one blog left still using Wordpress (my 101 in 1001 blog) and I'm hoping that after my days off next week, that one will be migrated over, too. Now I can concentrate on this blog. Without being mentally overwhelmed, I can concentrate on fixing this design and begin posting on a regular basis. Maybe I'll even get some of my coding skills back. When Marcus gets home, I'm going to ask him to delete some database tables. A couple of domains will be let go when they come up for renewal.

The purging has begun.

I was finally starting to feel well again, then...

Wham!

My weakened immune system couldn't fight off the cesspool of germs floating around my workplace. I am sick yet again. *sigh*

I'm not exactly sure what it is this time. I'm guessing stomach flu. I started getting stomach pains around 10am, threw up my breakfast at work and then had the runs all day. Fever was 102°F by the time I got home from work last night and I slept most of the time between 5pm and 10am this morning. My fever broke sometime last night. I remember waking up at one point soaked in sweat. Gross. My stomach is still queasy now, so I'm hesitant to eat. I'm a bit dehydrated, so I'm trying to keep some water down. I know it wasn't regular flu because I never felt weak and sore like regular flu makes me.

It's amazing how many people at work are sick and still come to work. I wish our supervisors would send these people home. Instead, they are worried about work not getting done. I wish they'd realize that by making that one person stay away, there would be more work accomplished in the long run instead of having the whole staff under the weather and not being as productive.

Anyway, hoping I'll feel better soon. I'm way behind on my Ravelympics* scarf. I had hoped to be at least halfway done by now, but I'm only about a third. Between coughing making me drop stitches and having to go back and fix them to just not having the energy to even knit, I'll be lucky if I pull this off. Also, I've got housework piling up and lots of things I need to take care of. Please send me good health vibes! I need all I can get.