Today is one of those bittersweet moments in my life. A little less than 13 years ago I decided to try out this blogging thing. Ron had put up his Dead Reckonings blog and I thought it was pretty cool.  I was lucky enough to be at the forefront of the web evolution at my day job and was in the first formal organization created to research and learn how to leverage this new emerging technology – what better way to learn than to spend my free time tinkering around with the latest browsers (Mosaic/Netscape for those that remember back that far).  Ever since those early days I’ve managed several personal websites.  A blog was just another step in that evolution that paired well with my interest in capturing my thoughts on the things going on around me.  Eventually, the wildlife side started taking hold to the point I broke that off to isolate it a bit from my general musings.  I opted to use the WordPress service to host this new wild side of Intrigued.  It was a bit rough going at first as I was used to having total control of the branding and presentation.  If I didn’t like the default, I just went into the code and changed it.  Now I was reliant on the service to manage the servers, upgrades, etc. Over the last couple of years I became pretty comfortable with the service offering.  Unfortunately, my personally managed WordPress install was taking more and more time to manage.  Upgrade after upgrade was taking more and more time.  Making sure all the security patches were applied to the supporting systems (PERL, DB etc) was getting to be a pain through my hosting provider and then I was constantly fighting the fact I didn’t have SSL enabled which caused the newer browsers to put a warning on my site implying to my readers that I was compromising their security – don’t even get me started on the GDPR crap.  Hard enough to deal with that at the day job, but to come home and fight with it was getting too much.  As I am retiring and leaving that hassle behind, decided it was also  time to shed the overhead of managing my personal WordPress blog.  That is the bitter part – feels like letting go of a good friend – one built from the ground up with blood sweat and tears.

Now for the good news.  I am still just as hooked on blogging today as the day Ron introduced it to me.  With the success of the Wildlife Intrigued Blog using the WordPress service, I’ve decided to redeploy LifeIntrigued on their platform.  If there was a tipping point, it was the ridiculous price Go Daddy tried to charge me for an SSL certificate.  Not to get too technical here, but that is needed to encrypt the traffic to protect your logins etc.  That fee would have covered the next 10 years of my subscription service that comes with this feature by default.  Long(er) story short, I now have another WordPress account and procured another URL to reference it.  Still working out the kinks so please bear with me as I get everything transferred over.  The posts should all be over there now, but still have some branding tweaks to make and trying my best to preserve all the internal links that reference the old site.  From this point forward, you should reference my mothership Life Intrigued blog with the following URL:

www.Life-Intrigued.com

This does mean you will have to update your links  or bookmarks if you have those saved.  If you do happen to “follow” this blog, you will also need to update that as well – simply “follow” when you navigate to the new site or update whatever RSS feed tool you might be using.  Apologize for any inconvenience.  It was time, and at this point in my life,  I’d rather spend my retirement out in the field to bring you new blog content rather than sitting in my den making sure all the technical glitches are kept to a minimum.  Hope to see you on the other side – you will find that the branding is slightly different, but it will look almost identical to the Wildlife Intrigued branding so there will now be consistency there.

…. and now, a simple goodbye to my old friend.

“Folks that throw dirt on you aren’t always trying to hurt you, and folks that pull you out of a jam aren’t always trying to help you. But the main point is when you’re up to your nose in shit, keep your mouth shut.”

Okay, I am going to give you a break from all the insect and wildlife pictures that have been dominating this blog as of late and bring you a rare topic – me ranting about something…err .. I mean something that doesn’t happen that much – me complaining about a service…err .. I mean a short comment at the expense of someone in service … oh screw it, I’m just going to pull out my well worn soap box and once again pontificate about something that happens to be a pet peeve of mine.  In some small part I have my parents to blame for a cringe that awaits me almost daily.  Most of the time, I sigh, archive the incident if it happens electronically and move on.  Then again, there are those days that it stares back at you for a truly annoying amount of time.  Just happens I have a couple of examples.  Take this trip to Panera back in March.

Was going to make it a mystery and then realized I pretty much handed it to you.  I cannot even begin to count how often this happens to me.  I actually keep a Brain’s folder on my corporate email account that I copy in every time it happens at work.  Yes, I agree I am probably overly sensitive (call it my snowflake moment).  The problem is it happens ALL the time.  Dear Brain, How is Brain today, Hey Brain you pissed me off today and on and on.  To be honest, Brian is not that hard of a name to figure out.  In fact, both my brother’s name are fairly simple but I never see my brothers addressed as Ran or Don – nope, it seems the spelling issues originates as soon as there are more than three letters in the name.  Very few people call me Bri (pretty much reserved for my Mom and Linda), but since it is three letters I never get Bra or Brie.  So there I was staring at the receipt wondering how this was going to play out when they called me for my food.  Put the odds at 60-40 their brains (see what I did there hehehe) would automatically reverse the error or they would be too ashamed to yell out Brain.

That’s when I looked up and uttered “Dammit”

hit the jump to see the punchline

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Welcome to 2017 everyone!

This month officially puts me in my 10th year of blogging and an anniversary I would have never believed would be reach when I started this little project (you can thank my brother Ron for getting me started on this journey thanks to his blogging over at Dead Reckonings – link here). Keeping with tradition, the turning of the calendar year means it is time to do my yearly assessment of my blogging production.  Over the last 9 years, the blog has gone through a number of transformations (hoping all for the better from a reader perspective).  Today, it is squarely more focused on our photography work at Eddiesoft Photography.  However, I do try to give a variety of other topics ranging from personal events to recollections, which are as much a historical documentation of what goes on during the course of a year in my little world as it his, hopefully, an entertaining read for you.  Kind of nice to have 9 years of writings to go back through whenever I get to a point where I’m wondering how all those gray hairs came to be.  No regular reader should have any question about my political leanings or my views on how our government should be run.  I’m fairly open about it, but usually try to spare you all the gory details but depending on the tone of the news that day it is likely a few barbs make their mark somewhere in the post.  Needless to say, I am optimistic that the change in the guard will bring good things – god knows it could not get any worse than the last 8.  Now we just need to deal with all these snowflakes from the participatory trophy generation.  Losing is character building and if you take that experience away… well you can see what you get – Generation Whine – hope the socialist academics are proud of their handy work.  .  See, there I go again – sorry about that but I feel the biggest drive in my life is competition – to overcome my weakness, to challenge myself to accomplish something more physically challenging than I am capable of now, to produce a better photo than the last.  That is my mantra, a core tenant that defines my existence.  And following that goal, my hope is to be sitting here next year with a better blog summary than this year – although I am pretty happy with this year both in the content of the blog and on the personal side having finally knocked off the full marathon on my life list.  There have been a handful of times in my life when I’ve had to look into the core of my soul and do battle with the demons that try to hold us back.  Those times are memories that are etched in my grey matter never to be forgotten – the last 4 miles of that Marathon are now on that list. I set my goals at the end of this month (gives me time to really thing about what I want to go after) and now that my life list is currently empty it is time to figure out what’s next.  Rest assured, like the rest of my personal challenges, you will get to experience the journey with me (I feed off your comments and encouragements).  Speaking of comments, once again I want to extend my heart felt thank yous for all the comments I have received again this year.  I know it takes time to read my ramblings and taking that extra time to provide feedback is extremely appreciated.  Keep up the good work and let me know about the things you like and definitely anything that could be better.

Special thanks goes to my brother Ron for all the time he has put in on the blog, on my projects and most of all for the enjoyment on those occasion when we get to out in the field and hunt down our feathered friends.  Hoping we can get out there a lot more this year (likely when it warms up for him hehehe).  We also need to give him all the encouragement we can to get his birding blog in full gear (link here) – he has progressed into quite the bird photographer and I’m sure everyone wants to see more of his work on his blog (besides, he needs to build his count up now that he has to abide by the birding rules for the official count).  I did take notice he is now experiencing what it is like to fall behind on the processing queue – he isn’t as bad as I am right now (over 2.5 years in the hole) but he is starting to inch up there.   If it wasn’t for my self imposed post quota, who knows how far I’d be down.  By the way, for the sixth year in a row I managed to hit my minimum 6 posts per month goal (yeah!).

It should be another exciting year around here at Life Intrigued.  The run training season is already in progress, new birding trips are being planned, Halloween projects are in their design phases and most of all… my radar is up and my observations are already being cataloged.  Assume there will be plenty of political fodder to comment on, photos to critique and that all important UB competition is just around the corner.  Hoping you will keep my little corner on the web bookmarked and visit when time permits.  Enjoy the details in my blogging summary below and raise a glass with me – to another year in the blogging books – here’s to wildlife that brings excitement and beauty to our world, to the creativity of others and most of all to the social experiment we call life that gets me up each and every day in anticipation of learning what it is that defines being human.

Thank You!

And now, the annual stats for the year’s worth of blogging.

Hit the jump to see the 2016 stats!

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Happy New Year Everyone. It has been busy around Life Intrigued this year and thankfully this little project of mine is still enjoyable – although those quotas can get a little taxing at times. I’ll get my year end summary up as soon as I can (right now birding like crazy and filling up the queue with all kinds of new birds for the coming year). Looking forward to starting my 10th year of blogging and hope everyone has enjoyed my posts – if there is something that isn’t meeting your expectations or new topics you would like me to consider, just let me know in the comments and I’ll see what I can do. Take care everyone and be safe on your way back from wherever you are celebrating the dawn of a new year. It will definitely be an interesting time and I’m pretty sure I’ll be weighing in on whatever interesting things that catch my attention. Note, I should have extra time to spend now that my list of entertainers that will no longer profit from me has been growing at a logarithmic rate these last couple of months.