Tag Archives: blog

Two to go…

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With this morning’s posts out the door, there are only two weeks worth of archive posts left to go. Assuming nothing catastrophic happens between now and then, the last posts will go up early on the morning of December 8th. As fun as it’s been – and as glad as I’ll be to have everything I’ve ever blogged living here under one roof – it will be nice to move on to something else. I’m still not sure what the new Sunday morning focus will be, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something.

If my math is right, by the time the last word is published we’ll be looking at a grand total of about 1525-ish individual posts from June 2006 to the present day. Most days add another to that total. I haven’t come up with a good way to estimate word count, but I’m just assuming the total would be more than enough to stun a team of oxen in their tracks. Even if we assume only 200 words per post, that will get us to 300,000 without any real trouble. Trust me, that’s a lot of words, especially considering most blogs probably survive a year or maybe two and then disappear.

With two weeks to go, make sure you stop by and enjoy today’s update from September 2008 – including my one and only foray into “Eastern” medicine.

Gone fishin’…

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I’m up early even by my standards on a Sunday morning. Despite the mad dash to get the day started, I made sure I left plenty of time to dig through the archive and find your selection of five for Sunday. This week’s posts hail from August and September 2008 – a bit of time when I was really starting to question who I was professionally and when my feet stopped working. Yeah, that last bit probably sounds worse than it really is, but still it was damned unpleasant.

And with that, I’ll wish you a happy Sunday. There are places to go and people to see. If anyone needs me, I’m gone fishin’.

Dogs in the archive…

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Wandering through the archives this Sunday morning, it’s obvious that August 2008 was all about Winston. Looking at him sprawled out in front of the heater this morning, it’s hard to believe that five years ago he was all puppy all the time or that instead of a 55 pound foot warmer he use to be the scourge of kitchen furniture. Bulldog puppies are incredibly cute and, not surprisingly, incredibly stubborn. All things considered, I’m glad to be out of the puppy stage and living with the older, more laid back model. This house is really only big enough for one creature who’s incredibly stubborn and I’m afraid I have that position locked up for the foreseeable future.

There are no rants or raves from the archive this week, but there’s apparently a hell of a lot of dogs in there.

A good month…

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With 1,233 visits, an average of 40 visits per day, and a one day record of 148 visits, October was a good month for jeffreytharp.com. The only sure thing I’ve learned from running a blog this long is that you can never expect success. It’s best to go into each post assuming that you’re writing to satisfy an audience of one: yourself. That’s why I’m savoring the high points when they come – especially since the last record setting month was back in May 2011. What that trend tells me is that apparently people like to see ranting about work (May 2011 I was in the final stages of escaping my previous employer) and raging about government ineptitude (This past October saw the latest government shutdown and endless incidents of political asshattery).

As tempting as it is to chase that trend, I don’t think that’s what I want to spend all my time writing about. The reason I’ve never settled into a topical niche is that I tend to be interested in whatever happens to go on around me on any given day. Maybe that’s a character flaw, but it does give me wide latitude when it comes to picking topics. I very much like having latitude.

So with that said, I’m just going to keep doing what I’ve been doing around here for almost four years now. I’ll keep writing, you keep reading, and we’ll see if we can’t set a new record sooner rather than later. And because I don’t do it often enough, let me just say thanks to everyone who’s reading along at home, those who impart a snarky word from time to time, throw me a like, or even just shake your head in amazement that someone would bother to manage this much schlock on the internet. This is definitely the best non-paying job on the internet, but I still have a few surprises up my sleeve for the future so let’s go ahead and plan for the best being yet to come.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Begging. Tonight’s the night when all you parents out there send your children mixed messages by encouraging them off to talk to strangers for candy. Fortunately the houses in my neighborhood are far enough apart that it’s not particularly lucrative bit of ground to cover, so there aren’t typically herds of children wandering around looking for a handout. It’s not so much that I mind the giving away of candy, but like the 4th of July, it’s one of those nights that threatens to send one or both of the dogs over the edge every time they hear the gate close or someone knocking on the door. Then again there’s the unmitigated glee when I open the door so parent and child are faced with a surly looking bald man with two barking dogs at his back… so at least there’s that.

2. Getting Close. Earlier this month it looked like jeffreytharp.com was well on its way to having its best month ever in terms of unique views. WordPress was regularly reporting daily views of 50 or 60 people. On October 3rd, the site posted its biggest single day. Since this past Sunday the number of views per day have plummeted for reasons I haven’t been able to identify just yet. At the rate they’re hitting now, I’ll be lucky to bring in 50 or 60 views this week. Alas, such are the vagaries of the internet. As October draws to a close, I’ll have to content myself with having the 2nd best month in the blog’s short history… and start worrying about how to keep November from ending up recorded as the 2nd worst.

3. Indecision. You can accuse me of a lot of things, but being indecisive is generally not one of them. Right, wrong, or otherwise, when confronted with possible courses of action I’ll pick one based on the best information I have available at the time and move out smartly. I’ll never claim to make the right decision all the time, but I’ll by God make one instead of just sitting around waiting for something to happen. Whether it’s where to have lunch or which program to throw over the side, I wish the populace at large would just stop pussyfooting around and figure out what they want to happen. Walking through life having other people’s bad decisions foist upon you is simply piss poor planning. As far as I’m concerned, any decision made on the spot is better than a great decision made ten minutes too late.

Having the world to yourself…

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I think Sunday mornings are my favorite part of the week. Even now when the days are shorter and the sun isn’t quite up at 7AM, I like being awake and moving. That brief hour between 7 and 8 is one of the very few times in a typical week when it legitimately feels like you’ve got the world to yourself. There’s no traffic moving yet, no email rolling in, no tweets, or Facebook posts that need liking. There’s just me, the dogs, a fresh pot of coffee, and a blog. It’s a pity that all days can’t start off like that.

This Sunday, I’m offering up the last of the posts from July 2008 and the first post from August of that year. There’s a nice little rant on July 28th if you’re interested in finding out why I don’t mind the price of gas being a little high. July 27th is a quick note on why I think formal term limits for Congress are a bunch of bunk. The other three posts in the set are a little more spur of the moment thoughts that never quite got fully developed, but still make of decent enough reading. As if I’d say there was every a post you should just go ahead and skip over.

Updates from the archive are the first productive thing I try to get to on Sunday mornings. Once they’re live here on WordPress, I feel like I can get on with Sunday – so enjoy the posts this morning and remember to check back tomorrow to find out what happens on Monday that will inevitably deserve to be written down for posterity.

Ah, Sunday…

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It’s the weekly day of rest that is generally anything but restful. Mostly it’s a mad dash around the house doing all the small jobs that don’t seem to get done through the week and I can’t bring myself to do on Saturday as a matter of principle. Throw in the fact that you can feel Monday breathing down your neck and there’s just not much to recommend it.

On the upside, Sunday morning means its time to delve once more into Ye Olde MySpace Archive to see what the cat drug in for the week. Straight from July 2008, we have a few rants about work, the pondering of a new puppy owner, and the pending revocation of my man card. They all feel like posts I could have written in the last six months. Like they say, the more thing change and all…

On an administrative note, the upcoming week is going to be touch and go. I’ll do my best to keep the posts on schedule, but if I drop a day or two I hope you’ll forgive me.

Rough around the edges…

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I’d love to tell you that I remember anything from June 2008, but the fact is it must have been pretty unremarkable. I don’t recall a single event outside of what I’ve been reading while posting this week’s archive update. That doesn’t necessarily mean the old posts lack juice, though. A coupe of this week’s posts are real gems – maybe a little rough around the edges – but they’ve got good bones. Any time a post pops up that touches on a memory from my four years at Frostburg it’s almost always a good time. I’m sure there were some less than good times in there too, but I really don’t remember them. It’s reassuring to remember that no matter how stupid today seems, in a decade I’ll be looking back on this time fondly, having had enough time pass to suppress the worst of the bad moments.

Be sure to check out the posts on how certain phrases I still use came into being. I don’t know if they’ll give you any insight into how my brain works, but they’re good reads… and had the added benefit of setting me to wonder if there are any new words and phrases in my vocabulary that are worthy of an explanation. It’s always nice when these old posts point the way towards some potential new material, because let’s be honest, ginning up new stuff every day is tough.

Sunday morning coming down…

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I’ve been falling down on by blogging responsibilities this weekend. Between catching up on sleep from my aborted line-standing at the Apple Store and finally getting to spend a good chunk of time playing with this hard to procure new toy, there hasn’t been as much free time as you’d think during this three day weekend. Even so, the fourth thing I did this morning was make sure the Myspace Blog Archive Project was up to date on this Sunday morning – I came after letting the dogs out, feeding them, and making coffee. Even a dedicated blogger has to have priorities, no?

This morning’s archive selections close out the posts from May 2008 and are distinctly “slice of life” posts. No rants, no raves, just the minutia of what’s happening day to day. Hopefully it will be useful a hundred years from now to someone researching what life was like at the dawn of the 21st century. A boy can dream, anyway.

Now that I’ve had a full day with it, I’ve got a review of the iPhone 5s coming up. That will most likely make its debut tomorrow. The short version is this: If you’ve been considering picking up Apple’s latest flagship, go ahead and put your order in now. You’ll be waiting until October, but it’s going to be worth the wait.