theparkerfamily.org

Tag: Website

  • it’s been a good run…

    it’s been a good run…

    so, it’s been a bit since this site was last updated. the daily updates stopped in early 2016, about 6 months after my father passed away.

    but that’s (mostly) a coincidence. life got busy. i started taking fewer pictures. adobe lightroom, a subscription now instead of a one-time purchase, started seeming really expensive for someone who was taking fewer pictures. it got harder to sort. it got harder to post. trump got elected — i can blame him for everything, right?!? — so posting effectively stopped.

    late in the pandemic, maybe 6 months ago, i resolved to get myself caught back up. i did — yay! — at least in the picture processing department. i swapped over to Apple Photos, which made everything easier. i actually went out and got a negative/slide scanner, and i’ve started running through a bunch of pre-2004 photos too.

    truth be told, Apple Photos made everything easier EXCEPT getting the pictures onto this website. in the last many months, i sorted 8,145 pictures (since 2016) into 447 albums, but there is no easy way to put them into wordpress posts and get them shared out to the public.

    so they’re locked up in my Apple ecosystem and shared only with the people i have email addresses for.

    but i guess that’s okay. the main enjoyment i got out of the blog — remembering wonderful things that my notoriously weak memory can’t keep track of — i now get out of my TV. i figured out how to get these favorites you see on flickr hooked up to our Apple TV as the screensaver, and the whole family will legit sit on the couch for a quarter of an hour or more watching the pictures scroll past.

    it’s lovely.

    i’ll keep up a flickr account, certainly — pulling together my favorite hundred or two photos a year — and I’ll get those photos posted out in the ether. and maybe, someday, Apple will change their sharing function to make easier to share an album towards a blog or a website.

    but until then, we’ll pause at exactly 3,200 posts over the last 17 years and 10 months. hopefully there will be more, but if not … it’s been a good run.

  • #20,000

    []
    Apologies for two consecutive navel-gazing posts, but there are a couple of auspicious milestones that demand attention. I’ve just ticked over 20,000 photos since I relaunched my photography habit back in 2004, and it looks like I’m up to my 2,500th blog post.

    To make things more dramatic/traumatic, I just realized next spring will make it 10 full years of blogging. (I started blogging the same month that I started dating my beloved wife, so a decade of blogging will clearly be the second most important anniversary celebrated that month.)

    It’s stunningly hard to explain the number of things that have changed over the last ten years… and it’s hard to believe that I’m even the same person.

    Speaking of, my kids are yelling at me, so I have to go.

  • web: welcome to 2014

    shuttershot
    After three years, it was about time for a new look and feel for the family blog.

    I launched the last look shortly before sparklet’s first birthday, which means it’s been up and running just over three years. now, one all-nighter later, we’ve got a design that looks like it’s been designed in this decade, which should be quite the upgrade.

    Talk to y’all again in 2017.

  • the abridged version of the last 124 days

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    i’m not going to even pretend that i’m a good blogger anymore.mighty quinn is walking, sparklet’s getting ready to go to school, we left the country, had a couple of birthdays, and basically spent the last three months outside. it’s been 124 days since my last blog post, and here is a selection of the 150 posts worth of life i missed over the last four months:

  • midnight run to the apple store

    []
    we suffered the first hard drive failure of my life this weekend. turns out there is a defect with some iMac hard drives that cause them to spin until the burn up. thank god for free warrenty/recall repair, time machine, and regular back-ups.

  • cold snap (#2000)

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    as of yesterday, i was nearly two months behind in blogging — the longest cold spell since sparklet was born three-plus years ago.

    good news is that not much happened:

    the mighty quinn is tottering on the edge of crawling (and has been for most of the last two months.) he’s on to baby foods, and just this week started some real food (blackbeans, just like his sister.)

    he’s also officially a beast, off the charts on both height and weight. seriously, however big you think he is — double it. and then double it again.  and then burn whatever you thought you were thinking.

    for her part, sparklet (who just turned three) is having entire conversations now, mostly with herself. she makes up songs from scratch, and they are often are laden with not-so-hidden messages. (“riding on ca-rou-sels is funnnnnn! i’d liiike to riiide on a ca-rou-sel todaaaay.”)

    moreover, she has figured out how to say the two worst words in the world — “no” and “just” (eg. “no, no, no, no, i don’t want to eat lunch, i just want a snack.” and “no, no, no, no, i’m not eating — i’m just checking to see if there are snacks in the bag.”)

    finally, i realized that i have ten tons of unused vacation days that i’m going to lose in December if i don’t start taking them quick — so i’m cobbling together a better-late-than-never paternity leave from random days across the remainder of the year.

    oh, and that election thing happened.  oh, and i got an iphone that takes neat panorama photos.  oh, and halloween happend (sparklet was a fairy, and mighty quinn was yoda, and we picked pumpkins).  and, oh, this is my 2,000th post since 2004.

    back in the saddle, and i hope it lasts.

  • the layoff

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    the number one rule of blogging is don’t apologize — not for posting too much, not for posting too little, not for posting “stupid” posts, and not for a long break in between posts.

    no matter what you think you’ve done wrong, chances are (a) people aren’t paying close enough attention to have noticed, and (b) you are being way too self important if you think they care.

    that said, holy crap it’s been a long time since i’ve updated this blogthing.

    seven weeks. 1,689 photos. 45 minutes of video. 9 extra lbs of baby. 441 diapers. but, i think we are starting to come through the other side of the madness.

    the mighty quinn is getting up to 6 hours of sleep at a shot, and — as we have more time for her — sparklet’s terrible twos are receding just a little bit. kinda. sorta.

    so, no apologies for the lack of posting because you probably didn’t notice, and — if you did — i just wrote (and backdated) 76 posts for posterity (and you) in the space of 18 hours.

    that was penance enough.

  • jasonbucy.com

    turns out that i know funny people.

    another side project — this time for a really funny guy (and brother to the couple of the century) who does stand up in L.A. if you do nothing else, visit the site and watch the “jesus chrysler dodge and suburu” clip up top. (oh, and “like” him on facebook while you’re there, too.)

    funny stuff.

    Jason Bucy
    http://jasonbucy.com/

  • lynnbrook.org

    as part of the sale, i’ve created a brochure-ware site for our building — i doubt i can get it onto the first page of google results for us, but it’s worth a shot.
    The Lynnbrook
    http://www.lynnbrook.org/

  • emergency! emergency!

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    i got a text message from the m.o.h. last night:

    What happened to your blog?!?

    what happened is that 1,101 individual, lovingly crafted blog posts had been spontaneously replaced by a single, solitary “sorry, no blog posts matched your criteria” message.

    #$%&$%.

    i logged into the wordpress admin and the dashboard welcomed me to edit my 0 posts.

    #$%&$%, @&#$%^.

    when i logged into the super techie backed (phpmyadmin, which administers that database that powers the blog) it said that the my wp_posts table — the one with the content for all 1,101 posts — was unavailable because it was “in use”.

    #$%&$%, @&#$%^ — #%$&$%.

    suddenly, the notion of replacing the notion of sparklet’s babybook with a happy, communal blog seemed like a pretty stupid idea.

    suddenly, the notion of only backing up said blog twice in the last two years (August 2010, July 2009) seamed like a pretty bad idea.

    at some point in the week hours of the morning — after two support tickets and 45 minutes of googling/panicking — i figured out that the database had “just” become corrupted, and i “just” needed to repair the table. after another 30 minutes of googling to find out how to do such a thing, i did it.

    and it worked.

    and now i’m successfully procrastinating on a plan to backup the website — at least until after the *next* disaster.