All the Strange Hours » All the Strange Hours

What I did on my hiatus

David — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 12:08:27 +0000

I originally titled this post, “What I did on my hiatal vacation,” but thought better of it. You’re welcome.

Here are some things that happened in 2010:

Lost 34 lbs. in the first half of the year. Now well within normal body mass index.
Kept the weight off through the second half of the year.
Exercised quite a bit. Now in much better shape.
Discovered that I am gluten-intolerant. A number of minor health problems have cleared up by switching to a paleodiet/primal/ancestral approach to eating.
Completed graduate-level course requirements for board certification in behavior analysis. Got an A in each course. Yay, me.
Kept my day job and have traveled a lot throughout the U.S.
Stayed married (happily). Kept my son Brendan (Now 4 1/2 years old) alive and cared for.
Stopped painting for about 6 months. Now back to it.
Stopped updating this blog for about 6 months (other than site maintenance, deleting spam, and responding to comments). Now back to it.

Back

David — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:20:26 +0000

Well hey! It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? How have you been?

I now have more time to devote to things like painting, drawing, and writing blog posts about painting and drawing. So in the next few weeks I’ll have fresh material here.

To anyone who’s been checking back occasionally or subscribing to this blog’s feed, thanks. I appreciate your patience and hope to come up with some good stuff to justify it. If you’re new here, please take a look around. I think there’s a lot of valuable material for artists on the site.

Hiatus

David — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:35:43 +0000

This site is currently on hiatus. Please feel free to look around at posts. I’ll also tend to respond to comments or emails. I’ll be back when I have more time. Until then, keep smearing colored mud on flat surfaces.

Update 28 December 2010: Back to posting. Thanks for your patience.

Spam, spam, spam, spam

David — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:47:07 +0000

I get more than 23 spam comments here for each legitimate one. Spam filters catch most of them, but occasionally one slips through and I have to delete it manually. And once in awhile, a legitimate comment gets tagged as spam, so I have to rescue it. (Sometimes I miss those and they get deleted. If I did that to one of yours I apologize.)

Oh, how I hate those parasites.

In case you’re not aware, comment spam is valuable because Google and other search engines rank sites based on how many other sites link to them. Google tends to filter out any site that’s just a bunch of crappy links, so just making sites solely for that purpose is a waste of time. But a link in a comment from a site Google considers legitimate (this site has a Google page rank of 4 out of 10, which is not too bad for a blog with a limited audience) does count. Enough such links, spread out over the internet, gets a site onto the first page of Google search rankings and decreases the cost of purchasing ads.

That’s worth money, so scumbags write programs to scour the internet, finding sites where automated comments can be entered. They are often written to look kind of like a generic nice comment, such as “Excellent points. Keep up the good work!” with hidden links. If you write a real comment that looks generic like that, it’s likely to end up in the spam filter.

Sigh. Sorry for the non-art post, but it’s kind of frustrating.

Blogversary

David — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:00:01 +0000

The first post here was July 2006. Posting has become intermittent, but I still find it worthwhile to keep going. Here’s to another year.

Suppliers page

David — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 23:02:00 +0000

I’ve added a page listing suppliers of art materials whose products I like and who provide good service. Call it the All the Strange Hours seal of approval. Over time, I’ll expand the list.

Working on the guts of this site

David — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:47:23 +0000

I’m working on some changes to the underlying technical structure of this site. So far, I have switched the database from MySQL version 4 to version 5. That seems to have gone surprisingly well so far (given my limited technical skills), and the site is loading much more quickly.

Next, I will attempt to clean a bunch of old, unused tables out of the database. That may cause some problems with the blog and I may have to restore from backups.

I apologize for any problems over the next couple of days. I’ve been avoiding this for a long time, but it really has to be done if this site is to work the way it’s supposed to. Please let me know if you have any problems with the site.

Thanks.

Updates

24 April 2009: So far, so good. The blog is running a lot faster now. I’ve recovered some recent comments that were in the database, but had become invisible. The archives page is now displaying properly. All the posts and other stuff seem to work correctly.

2 May 2009: Still working fine (he writes while superstitiously knocking wood to banish the avenging spirits of tempted fate). I wish I’d done this a long time ago, as it was much easier than I thought it would be.

SNAFU

David — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:51:30 +0000

I thought I had it all worked out, but apparently not. I created a new install of WordPress, for various technical reasons, and redirected to that site. Unfortunately, the migration of data to the new version just didn’t work the way it was supposed to. Missing features, missing images, messed up database…bleh.

So for now we are back at the old version of the site, which seems to be working just like it always was. I apologize for any problems you may have had here in the last few days. I will test much more extensively before I try anything like that again.

Back

David — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 02:16:53 +0000

I’ve been away for awhile, because I got very busy with other projects, including a complete redesign of my employer’s web site.

I think I’m back. I should be able to do some posting, catch up with responses to comments, etc. My apologies to anyone I haven’t responded to in a timely manner.

I’m also considering some site changes that would involve a switch from WordPress (blogging software) to Drupal (Content Management System). Support request: if there’s anyone out there who could help figure how to configure wp2drupal module so that content could be migrated, I’d be very grateful.

Two years

David — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 01:03:00 +0000

All the Strange Hours is two years old today. Coincidentally, the blog is also approaching it’s 100,000th page view. As internet sites go, that’s not an incredibly high number over two years, but I appreciate the attention. Over the next few weeks I plan to re-post some “best of” items that might be worth looking at again.

Thanks to everyone who has come by and stayed awhile. And thank especially to those who have contributed to the blog by commenting or—in Katarzyna’s case—by posting.

I’d like to take this opportunity to reiterate my invitation to others who might want to participate here. If you’d like to blog at ATSH about visual art, send me an email and we can discuss it.