Marc and Morgan’s spot on the web

I’m somewhat less than proud of it, but the new goEcoReno.com just launched.  Consider this version 1.0.  I’m already looking ahead to a major revision in coming weeks.  Maybe I can time it to launch when the store opens for business!

Busy as all get out trying to keep my head above water at work, open a store, and keep my sanity.  I thought my Vespa was finally out of the shop after 4? 5?  weeks sitting, waiting for a part, first from the east coast, then from Italy, but then it turns out Italy sent the wrong part and tomorrow I’ll find out what comes next.  Sigh.  For a moment, I imagined myself riding it to work tomorrow and a few more times before fall chilliness makes it too uncomfortable.

Frustrated tonight at my inability to create a simple quarter-page flyer for EcoReno to distribute to nearby businesses as advertising.  For perhaps the first time since I started paying attention to such things, I wish I had a Microsoft program (Publisher) to use instead of the free alternative (OpenOffice) that I have installed on our laptop.  I feel like a total rookie trying to do the simplest tasks, and even once I figure them out, the (admittedly miniscule and feeble) part of brain that thinks like a graphic designer has taken a leave of absence and I can’t think of what it should say or look like.   Same thing with the website – my website creation skills were decent in 1996, but there are so many technologies that I don’t have a clue about that are practically mandatory to include in this day and age to create even a very basic site.  The site you are currently viewing is easy – the Wordpress software is easy to install, run, and configure.   So if any of you loyal readers know any good, inexpensive freelance web designers, send ‘em my way, huh?

That all said, the store is coming along.  In the few nanoseconds between child-rearing tasks Morgan has, she’s got some merchandise ordered and a few boxes have started to arrive; we have phone, DSL, computer and cash register up and running, carpet is clean, and signs are in progress.  With any luck, in about 3? weeks, you’ll be cordially invited to a grand opening.  Not sure how grand it’ll be exactly, but…

OK, well, enough wallowing in my own overwhelmitude for tonight.  Check out this cool little timesuck.  I wish I had even 1% of the skillz it took to create that.  Oh, and this little gem if you want to make yourself totally insane.

Just added something new here – to the right, below the photo of our house, you’ll now see a little box that will automatically display links to posts from other blogs that I find interesting and want to share.  You folks who subscribe to posts via email are missing the boat here.  It will eliminate the need to write a new post here linking to whatever item of interest.  So make sure you actually visit the site once in a while to see what’s new!  That first one on "Last Night’s Summer Rain" isn’t really all that great, I just needed one to test things out.  Enjoy!

I’ve been receiving Harper’s weekly review email for some time now and really like the weekly roundup of world news with that special Harper’s tone to it.  Here’s this week’s.  I may start sharing these more often.

Went to enjoy the opening festivities for Artown last night, ended up on the late news.  Trying to capture and retain the video, but for now, it’s on KTVN’s site.

That’s all for now.

After much blood, sweat, and tears, I think we’ve successfully made the leap to our new home.  After about 3 and a half years with ipowerweb, I got fed up with their crap (support is awful, how about 45 minutes on hold before you get to talk to someone?), and their move to a new “improved” interface was horribly mismanaged and a bad implementation in the first place.  I’m now happily on HostGator and it’s just as cheap, a lot quicker, and overall, a much nicer host.

I’ve poked and prodded everything I can find around here in the last few days, and hopefully found and fixed all the bugs.  Please let me know if anything doesn’t work as it should, so I can pull the plug on the old site after I’m sure I don’t need anything from there.  Only things I’m aware of that didn’t survive the move is the old guestbook and one comment on Morgan’s last post (sorry Ryan!).

Really cool, Google Maps now has Street View for Reno!  Photos appear (at least in NW Reno) to be from sometime around spring 2007.

As opposed to update time, whereupon I actually post some new content, this time it’s all about the tech. Wordpress, Gallery2, all plugins. Everything around here has the newest, best version of its respective software as of a few days ago. Cool new feature: you can now send any photos from the photo gallery as an e-card. Sweet! And RSS feeds there as well for you readers that do RSS feeds.

And I guess, as long as I’m here, I can post something more. We have collectively upgraded our coffee-drinking experience around the Tiar house. Or at least we will once Amazon delivers the goods. We’ll be the proud owners of a larger-capacity French press and a hotshot burr grinder here in a few more days. The anticipation is so thick I can hardly stand it. (And, wow, hot-damn…when I grabbed the link to the French press, I see the price doubled sometime after we ordered it. Must have been a mistake, they’re $40 everywhere, we paid $20. WE ROCK!)

Oh yeah, I wanted to post this a few days ago. A recent Lola obsession: YouTube. It’s mind-boggling to think that she is growing up thinking that this is normal…a clip from my childhood TV, posted on the net, piped over phone lines to our house, sent wirelessly to our laptop so Lola and I can watch it anytime we want, sitting anywhere in the house. Amazing. And here we are, two bits of nostalgia…I only remember this first one:

but Gigi has practically made this one Lola’s theme song:

OK, here I am, back again so soon. Still not loading pictures, but my mind was racing last night after posting the last little blurb, full of other little items of note. When I converted the old cheztiar into this blog format, it was in an effort to preserve our little familial goings-on, rather than losing them each time I revised the front page. So at this time, as we approach the end of the year, when everyone is looking back on the past and ahead to the future, I want to toss out a bunch of stuff in that spirit. It may not make for the best reading for you, dear readers; the minutiae of the Tiars’ recent lives, spouted forth like a broken sewer main does not “Ulysses” make. But if you’re into stream of consciousness, random tidbits, and odds and ends recorded here for posterity, read on…

In the kids department, we had another one this year. Young Sid is going on five months old now. Doesn’t sleep through the night. Taking formula isn’t going very well. He cries more than Lola did and takes really short naps. But he’s growing like a weed, cute as a button, and going to turn out OK. Lola turned three recently, and she’s still our little princess. Adorable barely describes her on her worst day. That’s still little comfort when she calls us back into her room 3-4 times for a sip of water or other ridiculous reason after going to bed, or when she wakes up at 4am still, or insists on pooping in her diaper (she still sleeps in one) when she knows darn well how to use the toilet like a big girl. Perhaps some regression due to baby brother and new house is going on… Both kids have had their share of colds lately, lots of runny noses, coughing, etc. but we bought a nice vaporizer that keeps a room nice and humid through the night. Speaking of devices we bought, as of a couple weeks ago, we’re the proud owners of a remanufactured Roomba robot vacuum. It’s still more of a novelty than a real labor saver since you still have to pick up a bunch of toys and shoes and stuff, but it works OK and it’s kind of fun. Returning to the topic of Lola for a moment, Morgan toured a couple preschools this week, so we’re starting to think about it. Expensive! Need to figure out the best schedule and what’s affordable, but we think we’ve found the place when it’s time. No daycare for Sid yet though, we’re not ready for that yet.

(This is silly, I started writing this as a text document that I would paste into cheztiar later, but I’m having to do it in such small bits as time permits, I should just be writing online in the first place…but I digress.)

One other thing I envisioned doing a lot of on this here website was sharing books, music, and movies that I’ve enjoyed (or not) with you all. Not much reading going on these days – by the time I get to bed, too tired to read much, and what I’ve been reading is pretty dull. I picked up a book on coffee, a sort of reference book on personal finance, and one on making beer. I need to get back into some page-turner fiction. Most of my reading these days is Wired magazine, trying to get through one issue before next one comes, or the various blogs and websites I try to hit every day. I guess reading is reading, but a book would be nice sometime soon.

Speaking of personal finance, that’s the other thing on my mind these days. I must be a real grown-up now, I think a lot about ways to retire early, save a lot for retirement, writing a will, and look forward to doing taxes so I can see just how much having a 2nd child and a home equity loan will improve our tax situation. This year, I opened a Flexible Spending Account, another tax break for medical expenses, and enrolled in the Hartford’s 457 plan, yet another way to save on taxes and save for retirement pretty easily. Fat nest egg, here I come.

Musicwise, I just recently started listening to Sublime again. After getting the box set earlier this year, it’s kind of sat on the shelf for a while, so I brought it out to listen to again, and have been really enjoying it, getting back into their music again. I have to say, I really think they claim the title of “my favorite band ever”. Which brings me to a trivial little anecdote. With my renewed interest, I thought I’d look to see what Wikipedia had on Sublime. As expected, a good thorough entry, and good entries on each band member. So, reading through the entry on drummer Bud Gaugh, it mentions he now lives in Nevada. Huh, interesting coincidence. So I visit his MySpace page, read about his new surf band (which sounds great, looking forward to hearing what they put out), and it turns out he lives in Reno at least part of the time. More coincidence. Among all my reading and websurfing, I am referred to a recent SPIN magazine which has a good article on Sublime’s legacy and a tribute band back east called Badfish. So I go to find that issue at the library, and Foo Fighters are on the cover. Foo Fighters just announced a concert date here in February, which I think I’ll be attending. And the final coincidence…Dave Grohl is wearing a Bucket of Blood Saloon t-shirt on the cover…it all comes back to Reno. (I’ve always maintained, besides being a great place to live with lots of interesting history, Reno is forever destined to be the footnote to history…famous people get arrested here, relatives of famous people die here, we’re mentioned in songs randomly.)

Movies…never get to those much anymore. Netflix (and the library) keeps us in recent release, but all our time is getting sucked up by Six Feet Under these days. I can’t give up any more time to TV series!

Changing gears again here, let’s talk food and drink. Morgan and I celebrated our fourth anniverary with dinner at Harrah’s Steakhouse, probably the oldest fine-dining establishment in town. A bit disappointing, mostly the crowd, but the food was nothing that special. We’ll probably return to LuLou’s or 4th Street Bistro in the future. And there’s always our usual splurge that doesn’t really qualify as fine-dining, SUSHI. For now, our attention is on Amish Friendship Bread since receiving a starter for a coworker. I continue to dwell on my love for two beverages – beer and coffee. Someday you’ll all be regular customers of Marc’s House of Barley and Beans (I still need to work on the name…)

In the technology realm, we’re still happily wireless and using the laptop around the house most of the time, but I had an epiphany recently and added 1GB of memory to the desktop PC in the office and it runs SO much better now! Still need to tidy up the hard drive some, and I think I’ve committed myself to migrating to Picasa to organize and tag photos. With two kids being reared in the age of digital photos, we’re rapidly accumulating hundreds of digital photos with little organization. At least I’ve got some piecemeal backup systems in place, but I need something more systematic I think. Picasa and some kind of offsite storage may be the answer. Not sure when I’ll have the time, but at least I’ve started thinking about it… I dabbled in trying to burn a movie onto DVD, wrestling with the matter from every angle before deciding the DVD burner on the laptop is kaput. Sigh.

I’ll toss out a plug here for a game we’ve been enjoying quite a bit lately, courtesy of Grandpa Dave, Apples to Apples is our latest party-game fascination.

And lastly, I just want to give a shout-out to our little dog Daisy. She’s seen some rough times lately, with her diagnosis of Cushing’s Disease, recent stomach issues, difficulty with stairs, and general aging. We still love her, and hope she’ll stick with us comfortably for a little while longer.

And with that, dear readers, I’ll come to a close. If you’ve read all of this, I owe you a coffee or a beer. Keep coming back to cheztiar in 2008.

So, I finally got around to loading some new photos to the Lola and Sidney albums around here. While I was at it, decided I should upgrade Wordpress too. Did that, and that led to upgrading a couple of the plugins for it, which led to upgrading Gallery because the new plugin needed a new version of Gallery to work, so now I’m uploading 24MB of Gallery software while I write this. Computers. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t toss ‘em in a landfill or the heavy metals will pollute the groundwater.

Did find something fun to consume all that spare time I’m always complaining about having – Google Image Labeler. Exactly like the ESP game that’s been around for quite some time. I actually read an interesting article about the guy who invented that; really interesting idea, getting “the masses” to perform menial tasks by making it fun. Go forth, have fun, and make Google Images more useful.