General

May042015

I-Challenged I Conquered

And before you know it, it’s a new month!  Greetings all, it has been awhile but that is mostly due to some very productive birding outings with my brother and the official opening of the 2015 race season.  I would be underestimating the blog fodder to say I’m covered for birding posts for the rest of the year thanks to those outings.  Since I ended April with a bird themed post, let’s go with the race season to start off the month of May.  April 23 was the beginning of the Illinois Marathon festivities.  It started with an evening 5K run to get the kinks worked out and the muscles warmed up.
Illinois Marathon 2015

Unfortunately, the weather really wasn’t cooperating with us that weekend with a heavy dose of rain scheduled for that Friday as well as the rest of the weekend.  Figures the wet stuff would come down after a string of nice days leading up to it.  Oh well, that’s how the weather gods treat us runners.  We pretty much lucked out for that 5K.  It was nice and cool and besides being overcast, the rain basically stayed away until after we had finished.  Oh, forgot to mention there was a “we” this year.  My running buddy Sung signed up for the festivities as well.  It is ALWAYS funner when you can run with someone especially someone that you have been training with through the cold snowy days of Winter.  Here we are before the start of the 5K – relaxed and focused on not getting hurt during this short 5K run.  I can’t remember the last time I entered a race under 7 miles – general rule, if it takes longer to take a shower than run, might as well just take a shower.  However, this was a special 5K and trust me, worth skipping the shower .. at least until after the race.

LL

One of the cool things about this race is it ended up on the 50 yard line of Memorial Stadium.  Even after going to the U of I for four years, this is the first time I’ve ever been on that field.  We started together in the first corral thanks to Sung having a small math mix up.  The first corral was meant for 27 minutes and under.  That fit well within my expected time and easily in the expected time for Sung.  Only problem was, he did the conversion from kilometers to mileage incorrectly – simply halved it so 27 minutes for 2.5 miles … oops, 3.1 miles. I think he was a little concerned about his start position after I reminded him how far it really was – NO WORRIES.  We carried an 8:34 pace through the course – congrats to Sung for owning that course.  Granted, there were a couple of incentives during the race – like the rabbit in the orange shirt with the number 5 on it and the frequent course crossers in very attractive dresses and high heels.  Guessing there were sorority activities going on which we both agree should be made a requirement for all future races!

Final numbers – 26:39 42 for 45-49, 544 for males and 741st overall.  All this fun and they even gave us a medal for completing the short run.  Here we are for the official post race shot – happy faces and most important no injuries.

 

KK

Hit the jump to see what the race weekend really had in store for us!

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Sep062014

Welcome to Benny

Wordpress 4.0 Upgrade It’s cause for celebration here at LifeIntrigued.  5 years ago to the month (the month coincidence being a complete surprise when I did a quick search) I went through the scary and stressful process of upgrading the WordPress engine that powers this blog.  My complete admiration to the WordPress developers for putting out a solid product that hasn’t failed me once in that timeframe.  From one developer to another .. bang up job!  During the course of those 5 years there has been a number of upgrades that were released but when something is working perfectly you generally don’t risk destabilizing it.  There is one situation that does cause concern and that is when a security issues is identified and that is exactly what happened about a month back.  My provider (Go Daddy) informed me that my site was vulnerable to takeover and highly recommended upgrading immediately.  To that point I had not discovered any issues, but about a week after that my site was being pounded by spam comments all written in Chinese.  Akismet successfully caught every one of them but it was unnerving and the timing with the vulnerability was too close to ignore.  7 years of blogging wasn’t something I wanted to risk losing so started the long process of backing up the control files and then started investigating what it was going to take to perform the upgrade – the last time was fairly involved and assumed I needed to dedicate some time to learning what to do.  During that investigation I learned that the last upgrade included a new upgrade tool that basically did all the work for you.  Could this be too good to be true… well, let’s just say the actual upgrade process took me an amazing 10 minutes to complete and most of that time was simply validating the upgrade.  Once again the WordPress crew have delivered a top notch product.  The blog is now officially at release level Benny or more precisely WordPress 4.0 which was released on Sept 4th.  I probably won’t hesitate to stay a little more current on releases from this point on but for now this one happy blogger.  If you experience any user problems let me know and I look into it.  I went through all features I use to develop posts and previewed the outputs but I actually see a slightly different view of the reader’s perspective that has a few more controls for me to manage the content.

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Feb092014

EddieSoft Photography Website Released

It’s kind of a big day around here and not just because we can see the sun and it isn’t snowing for a change.  Why are the corks popping about the house and the party favors distributed?  This is the answer!

The new EddieSoft Photography site (link here) is now finished and released to the world.  For the last 6 months at least, SmugMug (our chosen photography website provider)  has been urging us to switch to their new framework.  It took me awhile to get the first version up and running so going through that again didn’t really excite me.  Kudos to their marketing team who managed to get a banner on my management portal nagging every day to get converted.  This is the same banner that overrode my exit button whenever I looked at an image forcing me to use the back button on the browser – uber annoying but at least there was a workaround.  The plan was to take on this project during the Christmas holidays but Project Chekov consumed all my free time instead.  I put web work right up there with plumbing – only start when you have plenty of time and during Menards business hours.  No matter how much you prepare, not matter how much you test and validate, Murphy is going to happen!  Unlike plumbing, SmugMug did something quite awesome by allowing us to work on the new site without impacting the legacy site so our customers were not impacted in the least.  Kudos for that feature but this did have an interesting side effect.  If you wanted to have the legacy users see new content before the modified website was released, you had to be sure and use the legacy tools.  This bit us when we created a new folder for a Dog Show Linda shot and it took us awhile to figure out why our customers couldn’t see it.  Beyond that, the dual sites worked out quite well.  For those not familiar with our legacy site, here is a screen cap of that.

That version also took awhile to get right but Linda wanted a more professional look to our business presence now that is getting orders on a regular basis.  The main issue is that our legacy site was multi-purpose providing the engine behind this blog and any of our personal and family shots we wanted to share.  We certainly didn’t want customers stumbling on these – ESPECIALLY the shots that enrich my non-photography blog entries since those can get a little edgy.  Because of the heavy use of the site to host most of the 6+ years of blogging the biggest concern was breaking the links when we reorganized our galleries.  Hat tip to SmugMug again for implementing a master identifier for the images.  Even though the initial folder location is built into the external link, the image identifier is key into their database so as long as we used the proper link (which I did), any movement was transparent to the published link or in this case to anything referenced in the blog.

With that concern out of the way, it was on to figuring out the look and feel of the new site.  Credit goes to Linda on this one.  She scoured the internet and would send me samples of things she liked from the various templates she found.  I just needed to figure out a way to implement that in the new SmugMug customization tools.  Having done web programming in a former life, I can appreciate the difficulty in providing a flexible set of tools and templates that meets the needs of all their customers.  Because of that experience, I am pretty accommodating of glitches and nuances encountered when trying to realize Linda’s concepts.  For the most part everything went pretty easy.  The master template was created with the preferred coloring and fonts and then started building all the individual links and required pages.  The Home page was a piece of cake as well as the About, Pricing pages once the create pages feature was figured out – had to go into the organize area to make those new custom pages.  The folder areas like the Browse, Portfolio, Dog Events, Portrait sessions etc. were slightly more difficult since I wanted a different look and feel beyond the standard template as well as hiding some of the folders.  Once I broke them into separate customized folders instead of trying to use the master folder layout it went a lot better.  Main problem was getting the thumbnails to look right and the order.  After a bit of work those were all manipulated into a very close approximation of the original vision.   All that was left was to figure out how to do the Blogging capabilities.  Having used WordPress for a looong time I have expectations on how a blog toolset should work (LifeIntrigued is a breeze to manage thanks to that software).   This is the area that SmugMug needs the most work.  They really do not have a blog solution but rather a toolset to create pages that you can cobble into a blog.  You literally have to create each blog entry from scratch – and an image section, add a text section, and this block and that block and eventually you have a page put together you can write your blog on.  Hopefully they will improve this functionality in the future but with that said, let’s all welcome Linda to the wonderful world of blogging (link here).

I guess the biggest disappointment was the pre-built Contact page.  Way too much time was spent trying to get that page to look right.  Their pre-built page can be quickly added to your homepage link but it refused to inherit the overall site design master template.  This prompted an online chat with the SmugMug Heroes who quickly informed me that page wasn’t customizable and recommended I build my own custom page – they confirmed my response that I was unable to make a page with the standard submit buttons and pre-filling of the user’s email address – why in the hell would they not allow you to do that!?!  Who would want a contact page that didn’t match the rest of the site?  Needless to say I left them with an enhancement request.  The new contact page was created but forced to just give them the addresses to reach us rather than the customary email page.

Linda released the new website this morning!  Take a look and let us know what you think.  Best news of all is the LifeIntrigued blog had zero impact.  Another project in the books.

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Dec312013

2013 Is In The Books

The end of 2013 is now upon us bringing with it the chance to reflect on this year of blogging.  LifeIntrigued will turn 7 at the beginning of the year – truly hard for me to believe this has been a 6 year effort so far.  It is interesting to see how this blog has transitioned over the years.  In the beginning it was really a vehicle for my ramblings and musings on the many encounters and observations that result in everyday interactions in a society.  There are still posts scattered on this topic throughout the year, but over the last few years I have been leveraging the blog more and more as a mechanism to promote my photography interests.  Not only does it allow me look back and see how my own abilities are maturing in this field, but I enjoy putting my products out there for my viewers to enjoy and critique.  There is no better way to improve than having a third party weigh in on your efforts.. and trying to win over all of Linda’s fans out there.    This is the third year in a row I have met my goal of at least 6 posts per month.  Trust me, this isn’t getting any easier as the years go by and in truth, this year seemed like a little bit more work than the last two – considering all the near misses I had and a number of last minute posts that had to be made while out on the road. I blame project Aaaauuunooold for a lot of that and running took an extra toll on my free time thanks to the decision to fix a number of problems with the mechanics.  Some of the extra work was self imposed trying to up the overall quality of the images used throughout the year, especially the ones related to photography.  It probably doesn’t show in the optimized images used in the posts, but I spent a LOT of time in the digital darkroom this year trying to find the best shots I could and working  those to their maximum potential.  This can take days to get through which is the common cause for the tight deadlines at the end of the month – it’s a special moment when I can hit that publish button and reveal to all my viewers what I’ve been spending my time on.  The good news is the “at least one image per post” goal received another check mark this year! (admittedly the custom artwork has taken a back seat to the camera this year and likely going forward).

On the project front I took on some pretty big ones this year and yes, one is going to be moving into its third year come January.  My promise to you is Project Auuuunnooold will be closed out this year even if it kills me to do it (translated.. if it doesn’t get done this year Linda is GOING TO KILL ME).  Book recollections was an underperformer this season but some of that can be attributed to alternative sources of material that I figured would not be interesting to you.  There is a lot of reading that goes on during the course of a year, but a lot of that is technical manuals or skill augmenting for work – next year looks to be one for the latter due to new work responsibilities which will have my nose buried in a complex third party system.  I have a number of books queued up for this year to give some balance to those technical books, but time will tell how that goes.  Birding is still a huge attraction for me and a hobby that gives me plenty of challenges and equal amount of happiness.  Those around me know I like a challenge and birding gives me all I can handle – traveling to different regions of the U.S., searching for new birds for my list in all kinds of terrain, doing my best to get a decent picture of them (many times in harsh conditions) and working them in the digital darkroom to a point they are worthy for your viewing.  You will continue to see a large amount of bird posts which should make any fellow birders happy – I’ll try my best to mix in other topics so as not to boar those that lack a similar affinity to the feathered ones.

In closing I would just like to once again extend my heartfelt appreciation for everyone that takes the time to read my little blog and every time I see someone taking the extra time to write a comment I smile a little bigger.  Thanks everyone for putting up with my meanderings and <cough> political opinions </cough>.  I think there’s at least another year left in me (granted with a few more tweaks coming your way), so here’s to next year!

And now, the completion of the final blog goal for the year – the year end summary.

Hit the jump to see the 2013 stats!

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Jan052013

Cinco de Blog Celebration

It is celebration time around LifeIntrigued!  With the end of 2012 I am proud to announce that LifeIntrigued is officially FIVE years old.  Just remembering back it seems like yesterday I decided to jump on the blog bandwagon and flood the internet with my musings.  On the other hand, looking at the output it is pretty stunning at the amount of words and images that have piled up over those 5 short years.  Mimicking last year the goal was to minimally hit at least 6 posts a month.  As was pointed out to me over the holidays, a large number of the posts start out with references to racing the clock to make that happen…. and happen it did.  Fulfilling another New Year conviction, each month in 2012 indeed had at least 6 posts – one could argue over the quality of some of them, but there was no guarantee on that (that would be downright crazy).  For the record, the posts did tend to be more robust than the previous years so the fingers were cranking away.   Along with the quota, the image commitment was also met.  Every post had at least one graphic whether that be a custom graphic (like the header on this post) or a photo.  Photos continue their dominance in this category but there is a hidden agenda for that.  I am trying to grow my photography skills and being able to compare images throughout the year is a good indicator on what’s improving, what is regressing and areas that could use some renewed emphasis – flash photography is definitely in the latter category.  It is also very useful to get other people’s opinion on what they like, what makes them ill and most of all which ones to submit in the UB competitions – Note, that didn’t work out so well for me this year.  The blog format also provides some background on the various photographs which would probably be lost forever without it.  I said it last year and I’ll repeat it again this year.  LifeIntrigued would be meaningless without the loyal readers.  You carve out the time from your busy days to process my musing and provide validation and new perspectives with your many comments.  I’ll forever be indebted to you and extend my sincere appreciation.  With that, let’s keep another blog tradition going and provide the year end summary.

Hit the jump to see the 2012 stats!

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Aug152012

The 2012 UB Results Are In

UPDATED 8/18/12 – see jump for further details based on biased comments

Well, it’s time to let the cat out of the bag, quell the suspense and end the betting.  That’s right, the results of the 2012 U.B. Competition are now compiled and ready for the reveal.  Sadly, I must admit that once again Linda and I were shut out of the ribbons in the local Heart of Illinois Fair Photography Contest.  The good news for me is that my Honorable Mention earned previously at this prestigious competition still reigns as the big pond champ and therefore is the overriding decider for any close results between us in little pond events.  And let’s just say that previous win did come into play in what turned out to be a close race.  As is customary, we picked up what remained of our confidence from the HOI fair and headed on up to the Knox County Fair.  Historically, we have done quite well at this smaller venue and we were optimistic with this year’s batch.  Well, I was until Linda revealed she actually stayed behind on picture drop off day to help “arrange” the pictures for them.  As she was telling me this she had a sly smile and evil glint in her eye.  This was clearly tampering putting the whole competition under formal protest.

After work we headed up to see how the judging went.  Note, a ruling on the protest had not been made yet but it would not matter if I came out ahead.  Turns out, it was really close this year!  Here are my entries.

Not bad eh?  Not one, not two, but three first places, only one 2nd place and what turned out to be a tipping point – one third.  One of my pictures (and only one for me) did get blanked.  I am not sure what the deal is, but these photography judges have no love for B&W Raven pictures.  It isn’t pictured above, but I personally think it is a great shot with a nice gray range.  The moth was in the Insects category, the two birds were obviously in the Birds category and the squirrel and bear shots were in the Wildlife category.  The latter took us awhile to figure out since there was another category called Animals which we eventually decided (correctly) was for pets and domesticated animals.  This is probably a good time to point out that I let Linda basically pick the shots I entered into the HOI Fair.  It occurred to me (after the fact) that there was waaaaay to much at stake to let my opponent choose my entries – we all know how devious she is!  Learning from my mistake, I went back picked my own entries and re-worked some of the post processing.   The Stilt, Moth, Squirrel and Bear were all new entries for this fair.  The Ravens in love shot was a carryover (but Linda was doing her best to get me to replace it with an inferior shot).  All turned out to be good decisions.  Another important point I’ll make is Linda decided to encroach in my domain and enter the Wildlife category with her Tiger pictures.  Let’s just say my little squirrel ate it for lunch.

Like I mentioned earlier it was a close competition but the deciding factor came on pick up day.  While we were gathering up our pictures one of the expert photography critics was hanging out in the building (obviously waiting to see who we were) heard our name and unprompted turned and said “I really liked that shot of the moth!”  I politely thanked the expert and gave a great big smile towards Linda.  Thank you for the kind comments but more importantly thank you for handing Linda the umbrella for another year.

She is definitely stepping up her game and keeping me on my toes.  I might have to pull out the big guns next year to stay on top.  By the way, we were a little worried when we went to pick up our pictures.  Another individual noticed us stacking up our pictures and recognized which ones we were picking up – he proceeded to tell everyone we were the Doerflers – our eyes started darting around anticipating a pitchfork carrying crowd to come and run us out their county.  It turned out all good, they even thanked us for participating in the categories that actually grew this year.  We loaded up the car, went over and picked up our winnings and called it another successful contest season — well, one of us was feeling more successful than the other hehehehe.

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Jan012012

Another Year of Blogging in the Books

It is hard to believe that I have completed my fourth year of blogging here at Lifeintrigued.  I will admit this has taken a little more effort this year due to the greater emphasis on our photography hobby.  I like to post process our photo images so my readers get to view the best images possible – if you make the effort to come here I want to make sure it is worth your time.  As a result I can’t just sit down and crank out a post as in the past, there is Lightroom work and the upload process to our Smugmug account to get through first before pulling all the resultant image links into the post editor.  Fortunately, I still enjoy the process immensely and being able to give some background on the various photographs gives some insights into our art as well as provides a historical account to review whenever we want – priceless!   But this little project is pointless without you who take the time to not only provide an audience for my ramblings but also adding your perspectives and insights through your comments.  So a big thanks to all my readers and hopefully you will stick with me through 2012.  As is now tradition, I am posting this summary of the year’s output.

Hit the jump to see the 2011 stats!

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Dec242011

The Airing of Grievances

Before my relatives panic, this post is not the airing of FAMILY grievances, but rather a small collection of annoyances that have been piling up on my desk over the last couple of months awaiting an opportunity to get them posted on the blog.  It occurred to me today that this would be a perfect time to get this done.  And why is this the perfect time… well, in tribute to the classic Seinfeld episode, it’s “Festivus for the Rest of Us”.  Taking the risk this post will make me out to be a heartless, puppy kicking grinch, I begin…

  • To Peoria news stations, stop reporting on the fictitious high unemployment rate the area is supposedly experiencing.  Why do I believe this is a waste of air time?  Well, this opinion is due mainly to one indicator that is almost always a positive side effect of high unemployment – the Service Meter.  High unemployment by definition implies there are multiple applicants for just about every job – especially in the service industry.  This in turn means the employer has a choice when hiring.  For example, an employer, could say, choose an individual that has higher math skills to fill a numbers related opening like a cashier.  Additionally, it could be a tipping point if one applicant is very positive and cheerful for a position that interacts directly with a customer.  But alas, this doesn’t seem to be the case around here.

    Example #1: A few of us went out to lunch at a local restaurant that begins with an A and ends with an S that serves cheap Italian food.  After completing our meals we headed to the lobby area to pay.  A friend ahead of me was joking about the condition of his penny looked (looks like it had been found by a weekend warrior with a metal detector) and was glad he could finally get rid of it.  It occurred to me that I didn’t have a penny meaning my change due would likely result his penny heading to me.  I gave the cashier my $6 for the $5.27 bill.  As soon as she rang it in, a friend behind me gave her two pennies to apply to my payment (jokingly to prevent me from getting the bad penny).  What proceeded stunned us both.  She literally stared at her register tray picking up random coins and looking dumbfounded.  After about 30 seconds my friend told her the change would be 75 cents which was met with “Thanks, I’m just not good at this thing”  I would have laughed if I wasn’t mortified.  Of course, this is the same restaurant that charges more for two half loafs of bread than one whole loaf (trust me, there is a picture of that menu coming in a future blog).

    Example #2: Linda and I went to a Burger King to get a quick bite to eat while shopping in the area.  After struggling to get my order taken (see the hamburger grievance below) we proceeded to wait for our order to be filled.  We waited and waited and waited while they worked on getting the chicken sandwich cooked – note, we were the ONLY people in there.  Meanwhile, they have my hamburger done sitting on the non-heated ready shelf.  Pretty soon the manager grabs up our fries from the heated fry shelf, slaps it on a tray and sticks it up on the non-heated shelf and proceeded to head for the bathroom.  For the next 10 minutes I stood there staring at my cooling fries and hamburger.  Eventually the chicken finishes cooking.  Sure enough the chicken and hamburger are put on the now cold fry tray and handed to us.  Needless to say, we demanded warm fries (note, manager never did come back).

    Example #3: We made a quick run to McDonalds to get something to drink before Linda’s doctor’s appointment.  The drive-thru was pretty busy (maybe 8 cars lined up) so we went inside to make our order (where there was only one party ahead of us).  Our total order was one small hot chocolate and one small Sprite.  I didn’t clock it, but I had to wait over 15 minutes for them to actually make my hot chocolate.  That 15 minutes actually felt more like 30 minutes having to endure their conversations:

    Hit the jump to see the rest of the grievances:

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Jun122011

The Guys Guide to Bathroom Etiquette – A Work in Progress

Updated:6/16/2011 – Bathroom etiquette has been a pretty hot topic as of late with some of my friends… that is when we can tear ourselves away from discussing the drama of Weinergate or Paris Hilton’s latest reality show.  There appears to be some confusion on some of the guy codes associated with the bathroom and I blame it all on our education system.  Just kidding, we all know it’s the fault of liberals.  Regardless, this situation must be corrected or there will be big trouble come the next Rapture prediction.  Clearly god will not take the risk of someone crossing streams or heaven forbid someone talking on their phone while in the stall.  In an attempt to document the major rules, I decided to go ahead and make a reference post…. and to give my friends the ability to quickly look up some protocols before using the bathroom at work.  Amazingly, I was able to find some notes I made about 10 years ago on this subject to use as a starting point (some of the points on that old list were cryptically written and I am having some trouble understanding what those entries were for – needless to say I may have been under the influence of alcohol when that was first penned).  Please post comments if you need a further explanation, desire to contest a rule, want to add some additional rules or maybe even need a call on a sticky situation.

Hit the Jump to see the Guy Code Rules for Bathroom Etiquette

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Jan012011

.. and I Have a Problem

Happy New Year Everyone!  Hope you had a safe return from all your festivities last night and if you are lucky, you are not a Big 10 fan as we took a slaughtering today.  I have not made a decision about the fate of this blog yet, but for now, everything as usual and with that… the first entry of the 2011.

“Hello, my name is Brian and I have a problem.”  There are those things that kind of bother you and eventually you find time to address them and get them resolved.  Sometimes those things are like icebergs and as long as you accept the part you can see, you don’t get a feeling for how big the issue is under the waterline.  Of course there are issue that are right in your face each and every day until it starts to fill you with disappointment and regret.  In the latter case, I think it is jut better to accept it, come to terms with it, and recommit yourself to lifting that weight off your shoulder.  This is where I am at with my problem so her goes….

“Hello, my name is Brian and I have a reading problem.”  There, I’ve admitted it.  For clarity sake, it isn’t really a reading problem, but rather a reading BACKLOG problem.  I actually enjoy reading books a lot, but they do take a time commitment of sorts.  I am always finding new titles to read and my hobbies tend to have a prolific amount of written word on them.  My Amazon Wish List always has a number of books on them and I find myself in bookstores from time to time perusing the latest offerings (which generally leads to purchases as well).  As a result, there is a steady flow in, which is great, but that means there needs to be steady flow of information from the book to the brain or you start falling behind…. waaaay behind in my case.  Every day, I walk into my den and look at my bookshelf and sigh.  That is about to end because the new year has brought a new commitment to get through THIS:

hit the jump to see my 2011 goal:

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