Day 1653

I moved a client's site from one server to another today. After I pointed the DNS to the correct address, uploaded all the files, and configured the server, everything worked perfectly. The client never even realized the site was offline. I was amazed. Usually, when I try this, there are all sorts of snags and it takes days before things start to work properly again. Even more amazing was that I only had to make a single call to tech support during the entire process and wasn't even put on hold for a long time. Complicated things like this give me hope. Maybe I'm not getting senile after all.

The rain continued today. It would rain for an hour and then stop for an hour, as wave after wave of showers passed through town. The intermittent showers gave me plenty of time to walk the dogs, and since there was no thunder, they eventually settled down and forgot it was raining. Since I had no place to go and the roof no longer leaks, I eventually forgot it was raining as well.

Moving the website took quite a bit of time, but it was tedious and somewhat boring, so I found myself entering contests again. I keep telling clients that they ought to consider online contests. They're about the only thing that gets me to visit a website these days. When I'm bored, I'll enter anything that promises a free guitar, camera, or a chance to get published. That's probably why I get so much spam. I like so called "creative" contests the best. There probably isn't a chance in hell of winning, but I enter anyway. Today I entered a contest that promised that the winner's photographs would be sold as framed limited editions in a major furniture store chain. After I picked a photo and entered, I discovered that to win, you had to convince other people to vote for your entry. That immediately turned the contest into a game and I hate games. I would have preferred that a panel of photo experts judged the entries or something. I'm not going to win this one.

Remember that Amtrak Writers in Residence program that I was telling you about earlier this Spring? This was the program where Amtrak paid selected writers to travel around on their passenger trains and describe their experiences. Well, I wasn't a winner here either. I got a short letter from Amtrak a few days ago thanking me for my entry and encouraging me to enter again next year. I don't know why I kept thinking I was going to get selected for this. Especially since over 8,000 other writers entered. Hey, I like trains and I have plenty of time. I guess the other writers were thinking the same thing.

I'll start on a other new website project tomorrow. I guess I should be glad that I've still got plenty to do, but it infuriates me that I've had to lower my rates to a pittance to compete with all these mass produced template sites. The weird thing is that if I had won that Amtrak Writers in Residence grant, I would have been paid even less for my time than I'm getting for this website. Writing on a train seems glamorous though. Sometimes a little glamor can make all the difference.

Shiner is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1063

One of my assignments today was writing about a contest where the prize was a flight on one of those planes that lets you experience weightlessness for a few minutes while the aircraft follows a parabolic flight path that temporarily negates the effects of gravity. This seemed like a cool and somewhat original contest prize. I almost thought of entering the contest myself until I started remembering my own flying experiences.

Years ago, I was one of the lead writers on the Cessna account. The aircraft manufacturer thought it would be nice if their creative team were pilots, so the agency told us they would pay for flight training. I sailed through ground school with flying colors. It was only when I stepped into the cockpit of the little Cessna 152 training aircraft that I realized there might be a problem. I had severe motion sickness. Every time I banked the little plane into a turn, I threw up all over the instrument panel. I literally could only fly the plane in a straight line. I thought of trying some strong anti-nausea medications but my instructor said it wasn't wise to fly an airplane on drugs. I finally gave up my quest to fly when I overheard one of the flight instructors tell another instructor "You take him up today. I cleaned up the plane last time."

Since that time, I have preferred flights of fancy. Over the years, I've tended to spend my idle time watching science fiction TV series. I've progressed from Babylon 5, to Farscape, Lexx, and finally Dr. Who. Somewhere along the line, I completely forgot about Firefly. I happened to catch a few episodes on a tenth anniversary retrospective of the short lived series this weekend. Pretty darn good show. While I was running errands this afternoon, I popped over to Fry's and got a DVD containing the entire 14 episode series. If November is as dead as it usually is, I'll have something to watch now on the dull days.

Actually last November I was extremely busy, so you never know what is going to happen. I'm always ready and willing to work. I'm just not that interested in marketing myself. Instead of making cold calls, I'd really prefer that people would become fascinated with the blog and decide to hire me on that basis. What the hell, it happened once. Maybe it will happen again.

It's getting dark on our evening walks again. This is the time of year that I start to worry we'll come face-to-face with a pack of coyotes in the park. I don't think Dot and Dash have learned their coyote etiquette yet. Coyote etiquette dictates that you steer well clear of the critters and by all means don't start barking at them.

Jada is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 908

Dot and Dash had a big day today. In the morning, they got to romp around in the city's new 22 acre dog park and in the afternoon they had a party to attend. Our weekly training class has two parties every year. The Winter Christmas party is mostly for people, but the Summer party is all about the dogs. There are lots of games for the dogs and their owners. The games are the kind of things little kids do at summer camp, but they are still fun, since dogs are involved. We entered Dot and Dash in the egg carry contest where you have to balance an egg in a wooden spoon while you heel your dog around a figure eight course. Dash knocked my egg off the spoon five times by tugging on his leash, while Dot just tried to eat the egg. Dash did a little better in the bobbing for biscuits contest, where all he had to do was see how many dog biscuits he could retrieve in 60 seconds from a kiddie swimming pool filled with water. I think the dogs favorite activity of the day was getting to eat some of our fried chicken at the lunch we all enjoyed before the games.

With all this activity, I thought that Dot and Dash would just want to go to sleep after we returned home for the day. Not on your life. They still wanted their regular evening walk. At the end of the day, I think I was the only one who was actually tired. I'm always tired on Sunday though. It's usually the busiest day of the week. Truthfully, this Sunday was quite relaxing compared to a normal weekend filled with vacuuming, grocery shopping and mowing the grass.

If all goes well, the rent house sale will close next week. It will be weird not to own this house any more. I've owned the place since I moved to Dallas from Seattle in the Fall of 1977.  It wasn't always a rent house, since I used to live there myself. The Internet as we know it today didn't even exist when I bought the house. I didn't have a computer and I didn't even have any Dalmatians. I did all my writing on an IBM Selectric typewriter. I did keep a daily journal though. Although the journal was hand written in a little leather bound book, it wasn't all that different than the blog you are reading today. Even back then, I mostly wrote about nothing. If you want to know what I had for dinner on April 30, 1981, I'm sure I wrote it down somewhere.

Escher is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 783

A photographer I knew from my ad agency days called this morning to ask if it was OK to refer me for a writing job. Sure. I can always use one more client who wants things done overnight for no money. When the prospective client called later in the day to fill me in on the upcoming project, I asked for some input and she sent me what appeared to be the text for a finished brochure. "This looks done," I said. "What do you need me to do?" She told me she wanted basically the same thing, except different. OK. I've been down this road before. I guess I'll take the job.

As I was getting dressed to go in for a doctor's appointment this afternoon, I got a call from the doctor's office wanting to confirm my appointment for tomorrow afternoon. Oops. I looked, and I even had the appointment marked on my calendar for tomorrow. I guess this just shows that I don't pay much attention to my calendar. It seems like this same thing happened to me less than a month ago.

Sometimes I wish I had more of a competitive spirit. During the past week, I've received two entry forms in the mail for contests where I could be a strong contender. One is a photo contest sponsored by the City of Dallas for pictures taken in the park behind my house. I have taken hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of pictures in this park, so it would seem like I could manage to come up with two good ones to enter in the contest. The second contest is sponsored by Panasonic for short videos shot with one of the cameras I own. At first glance, it would seem that this contest would be very hard to win, but I happen to know that very few people actually bought this particular camera, so maybe there won't be many entries. One of the categories in the video competition is Nature as well, so I could just spent an afternoon in the park on a nice day and probably come up with some great images that could be set to music. Will I enter either of these contests? Who knows. I almost always come up with some sort of excuse not to do these sorts of things.

Tomorrow I need to take Dash to the vet to get his antigen shot. I need to remember that I need to go to my own doctor as well. I wonder how much work I'll get done. The day seems full already.

Landry is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 738

The week is over, but somehow it feels like the entire year is over. Most of my clients have already left for the holiday. I still have some unresolved issues with several jobs, but I have a feeling that it's going to be hard to get an answer to my e-mails until the first of the year. None of this slowed me down today, however. I kept right on writing watch articles and I think I'm finally up-to-date on most of my website revisions.

I send my last file out about 3 PM today and then went over to Culwell & Son to get that pair of shoes I've had my eye on. I really don't buy many clothes anymore, but when I do, I almost always go to this store. Most of the salespeople have been working here for twenty years or more, and they remember everything about you. I almost always walk away with something nice, because these guys won't let you leave the store wearing something that makes you look stupid. Since I often make bad sartorial choices, this second opinion is often invaluable.

I went ahead and made the little contest video about opening a B&H package. It took me longer to submit my entry on the B&H website than it took to make the video. Once I submitted my entry, I realized that I didn't have a ghost of a chance of winning. It turns out that this was another of those contests where the winner is determined by who gets the most votes online. Dalmatian Rescue has entered some of these type of contests in the past to win pet food or money to help the dogs, and it's just about impossible to win. You need to find thousands of friends to vote for you. At any rate, I've embedded the video below in case you want to hear what my voice sounds like. The rules for the contest were simple enough: just make a short video of a package you received from B&H being opened. Since you can only open a package once, the video is a one take wonder. Feel free to leave comments. I don't have any YouTube comments yet.



We gave Dot and Dash a bath this evening. They're both getting pretty savvy about baths now. Dot refuses to even get out of the car and Dash starts howling loudly as soon as he's in the stall. They're both clean now and ready for their role as Christmas Eve ambassadors tomorrow. For quite a few years, Dalmatian Rescue has done gift wrapping at Barnes and Noble stores during the holiday season as a fundraiser. We've discovered that if you bring real Dalmatians with you to the gift wrapping event, people are much more generous with their donations. We took Dot and Dash with us last Christmas Eve and they were actually quite well behaved. Of course, we took a big bag of dog treats with us to bribe them with.

Ziggy is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 736

I got an early start today, since I needed to take Janet to the dentist for dental surgery. Somehow, by the end of the day, my extra hour totally disappeared. For a change of pace, I spent the day writing about process safety engineering in the oil and gas industry instead of writing about watches. A little different to say the least, but it still just comes down to putting words on a page.

I got an e-mail from B&H Photo today. It said they were having a contest to see who could make the best video of a B&H package being opened. Hmm. I ordered something from B&H recently and will be getting a package soon. I make videos for a living. Maybe I could win this contest. The prize is certainly pretty good: a Canon 5D Mark III. There's only one problem. I absolutely hate competitions and contests. This is a tough one.

I wasn't sure if Janet would want to go to dog class tonight, since she just returned from dental surgery a few hours ago. Apparently nothing can keep her away from training class though, so we all bundled up and went through the exercises in the cold, damp December air. I'm ready for Spring and Winter hasn't even officially started.

Tomorrow will be another busy day of writing. With any luck, I'll be able to finish the first draft of my oil and gas article and get back to my marathon of watch articles again. I know there are probably a bunch of little errands I need to do between now and Christmas, but if they involve fighting the holiday traffic, I'm probably just going to forget about them. Hey, the Christmas tree is up. The Santa Paws pictures are done. I've ordered gifts from Amazon.com. Maybe it's time to relax.

Willow is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day