A great photo makes for the perfect filler blog post

| February 9, 2019

Although I’m not fond of birds that mess up the topsides of our boat, this Osprey made for a great photo from Aruba. Above is an Osprey is catching a blue reef fish.

Spent time chatting rather than finalizing the days work

| February 2, 2019

One never knows who you will offend and who you will connect with when posting on an open social network, but Friday I had an enjoyable back and forth with Troy from Missouri. He is a like-minded political conservative, a patriot (a Navy veteran who served on the USS Stonewall Jackson) and seemed to also enjoy […]

It is cold and windy. Another layer of warm clothes please.

| January 30, 2019

An ani-gif of our Canary driveway cam early Wednesday Morning – 1/30/2019 The … dare I say a hated and banished phrase … “polar vortex” has swooped down from the north and frozen everything. It is brutally cold, but then it is winter. Schools, of course, are closed and even mail delivery in Cincinnati has been suspended. […]

Music Monday: And for something totally different from Annalyn

| January 14, 2019

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Music Monday: Starting with a change for 2019 – Kenny Chesney

| January 7, 2019

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LSSU’s banished words and phrases from 2018

| January 2, 2019

Each year since 1976 Lake Superior State University posts its list of “banished words.” Usually, we’ve all heard (or used!) the overused words and phrases — this year is no exception. I thankfully have only repeated a few, but have certainly heard most of them overused. The 2019 list, along with reasons for banishment by […]

Tech Friday – Finally fixed the slideshow plugin for WordPress

| December 7, 2018

A couple years ago I added Simple Slideshow Manager to MyDesultoryBlog as a way to include a series of photos in a single post. Having “attempted” different approaches that fail in one OS, Browser or device before the above plugin seemed to work … that is, until it didn’t. Having posted to the forums, trying […]

Any recommendations for video interviewing?

| August 19, 2018

In preparation for an upcoming work related project, I need to record a video for a client’s website and include both their voice and that of someone asking questions. I was hoping to keep it as professional as possible and will be using my Lumix GX8 DSLR.f I am using my external Rode shotgun microphone […]

It is time to hand over control of GroupBibleStudy.com

| July 31, 2018

I’ve mentioned GroupBibleStudy.com before as a website I work on and have helped develop for my friend Pastor Keith Thomas, but didn’t realize I’ve been doing it for 7 years — shocker. It is now time to hand it over to a new volunteer … and I’m finding it difficult to relinquish control, but also know Keith would love […]

Preparing HTTPS server and site security for the eventually day

| July 25, 2018

While doing a bit of server housekeeping on the CPP servers and preparing for the eventual push to make all websites secure for users, I ran across a helpful Qualys SSL Labs site to check on certificates, etc. If you are working to get websites updated and compliant for the day ALL site will need […]

Typos vs speed and efficiency for emails, messaging and blogs

| July 15, 2018

Like most who spend their days using smartphones, tablets and computer devices, I’m prone to making typos along with various written communication mistakes. If you’ve read my blog a few times, you will undoubtedly notice mistakes, even if you have an untrained eye — that is because I rarely proofread. I’ve been criticized by everyone […]

The correct conservative vs liberal economic balance for America

| June 14, 2018

Americans are struggling once again with carrots, sticks and tariffs event though throughout our history we have always been advocates for "free trade" … believing that in the end open trade wins. Unfortunately it isn’t always that simple when it is your job, your house and your life on the line. It is understandable that […]

Will motion exercises on land aid in preventing seasickness?

| June 1, 2018

Tom Hoskins wrote an interesting article on "Overcoming Seasickness by Habituation On Land" and although parts of it seems humorous (lamp shade and swings), the testing of motion sickness on land makes a good deal of sense … especially the testing the meds one might try when going sailing. Better to know in advance how […]

Tech Friday flashback: A technology blog post from 12 years ago

| May 25, 2018

Noticed a blog post from 12 years ago discussing “portable” computing and how things have changed. In 2006 the average laptop weighed about 7 pounds with batteries, compared to 20 years prior where my Compaq was 28 pounds … and required 110VAC power. LINK to post Now an iPhone or iPad can run circles around […]

Books: Robert Kurson’s Rocket Men and my very own Moon Rock

| May 24, 2018

A moon rock? Yes, my very own moon rock … or perhaps "rock" or even "stone" is too big a word – maybe moon chip or flake is more appropriate? Nevertheless, the publisher’s promotion to encourage social networking assistance in marketing Robert Kurson’s new book Rocket Men, The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the […]

A morning of backups, archiving and updates

| April 7, 2018

After an exchange of text messages with my cousin regarding old 35mm slides that her father and my father had taken through their lifetime (all YEARS ago), I mentioned I might try to digitize them someday and that if she wanted me to keep them I would. That triggered the back up and archiving bug […]

Avoid fly by night services, plugins and linking when blogging

| March 23, 2018

Here’s some advice from someone who as blogged daily since 2005 — AVOID using data, photos, video, etc archived on other services. Over the years, I have been frustrated by “what seemed great at the time” using services offered by companies who specialize in hosting data for users. A little history: It started for me […]

Tech Friday: A Periscope chat with a Twitter management team

| March 9, 2018

Enjoyed the opportunity to ask questions and exchange thoughts with a Twitter management group working on improving online #health (safety/abuse). The live Periscopechat was a way for Twitter operate as transparently as possible. They will be opening an RFP process (request for proposal) from academia and the community. Twitter along with most of Silicon Valley […]

Information on the collusion-Russia-Trump investigation

| March 7, 2018

The long time investigative correspondent for CBS, Sharyl Attkisson did an excellent job of “fairly” building a timeline in the “Collusion against Trump” details on her website. If you really want to understand what we know so far regarding the Russian connections, it is worth at least skimming the points below. On a separate note, […]

Try Vinegar instead of Acetone to Clean Hands

| February 15, 2018

Using acetone to clean up after nasty messy projects such as epoxy or sealant? There’s something that works better, is cheaper AND is less toxic! … Vinegar.

How big or little is the Elio going to be?

| February 5, 2018

Although there are quite a few reservation holders starting to doubt whether we’ll ever see production (last update was 2019 deliveries), the marketing team continues to tease (update) on this small commuter car. The original low price has been inched up, but it still will be a bargain if Elio Motors can afford to put […]

TechFriday: Servers, webhosting, pricing and performance

| January 19, 2018

Besides my personally server and fading Raspberry Pi server projects (just too small), I been using several different companies to host Internet connected servers for Consolidated Printing and Publishing’s customers – traditional servers and virtual Droplets. Having used a variety of dedicated servers and virtual shared machines over the years since first getting into archiving […]

Tech Friday: Handbrake video compression testing

| January 12, 2018

Testing and tweaking the Handbrake software I use for video encoding and am hoping to improve the .MP4 compression settings for MyDesultoryBlog and others. The test video is an 18 sec knife sharpening iPhone clip and the new setting should average about 25-30 MB per minute at full 30 frame/sec at a reasonable 1280 x720 […]

WordPress post scheduling problem?

| January 7, 2018

After tweaking WordPress last week with AMP plugins, I noticed several posts were missing their schedules. I added a Schedule Post Trigger plug-in that corrected that issue, but never deactivated it after removing both AMP plug-ins. This past weekend, scheduled posts were not triggered at the correctly dated times so am testing with this post […]

Tech Friday: Played with AMP plug-ins for blog but gave up

| January 5, 2018

In order to improve efficiency on WordPress sites (my customer installs) I often experiment with updates on my personal MyDesultoryBlog first since very little on this site really matters for paying customers. So over the Christmas and New Years holidays I fiddled with a few highly recommended updates to the LAMP server and WordPress installs. […]

Happy New Year and LSSU banished words for 2018

| January 1, 2018

Happy New Year 2018 to all those following or reading MyDesultoryBlog … thank you. A regular inclusion each year has been the Lake Superior State University Annual List of Banished Words. This is their 43rd year of doing it and there are some welcomed ones in this year’s list — highlighting the ones that bug […]

Testing with CloudFlare to secure and speed up blog

| December 31, 2017

After installing Cloudflare in hope of adding another layer of security to WordPress blogs, I noticed a couple issues with sluggishness compared to my own DNS. I wish it were quicker, but something isn’t right since instead all aspects seems slower after switching. Even after bypassing the caching feature things continued to run slow. Once […]

Tech Friday: Wildcard Certificates coming to Let’s Encrypt

| December 29, 2017

In the world of community supported software and Internet applications, there are few better than those associated with the Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects … like Let’s Encrypt. The latter provides HTTPS certificates that are perfect for lightweight Linux OS webservers and it operates on a "donate" for certs services basis. This month Let’s Encrypt plans […]

Stopping to take a house photo on my way up the driveway

| December 23, 2017

Just a beautiful sky (photos doesn’t do it justice) as the new LED Christmas spots and candle lights pop on as I head up the driveway. Good for the blog archive. After a cold start, having sunny but cool weather right before Christmas is welcomed … but should be thinking about getting the blower put […]

Tech Friday: Testing Apple Live Photo to downsized looping GIF

| December 15, 2017

We’ve had a colder than usual early December here in Cincinnati … and has much of the country. The freezing temperatures will likely show up in higher heating bills but I’m hoping the new LED Christmas lighting will offset that cost? We’ll see. I’ve been wanting to test the Live Photo editing feature on the […]

A new spreadsheet for dividend investment tracking

| November 12, 2017

It has been a challenging year to get my old spreadsheets to update property after changes in sources for the dividend tracking financial data. Since the 1990s I’ve used Yahoo as a data source to use with Excel or Google Sheets and for the most part they have been satisfactory. After changes at Yahoo in […]

A welcomed update from Twitter to 280 characters for tweets

| November 8, 2017

It might not seem like a monumental decision, but Twitter upped their 140 character limit to 280 yesterday … so it was kind of a big deal. One of the core attributes for those of us using the popular social networking tool is the brevity and discipline required to communicate with a limited number of […]

Might take a tour of the Elio Motors facility, someday … maybe?

| October 27, 2017

Received an email from Elio Motors (yes they are still alive) with an opportunity that I’m hoping to take advantage of when (IF) I ever get to pick up my "all in" order. I do enjoy reading the updates and hope production begins next year as planned. The big concern for most of us is that […]

Testing WordPress 4.8.2 prior to updating clients

| September 20, 2017

In looking at a few improvements and bug fixes, it also looks like the “widget” process has seen a few changes. Will test the Video Widget in the center column of the blog. So far so good — targeting Friday for customers if all goes well.

Filler post: How about a dumb dad joke …

| July 11, 2017

Question: Why do Swedish warships have bar codes on their sides? Answer: So when the ships return to port, they can Scan-di-navi-an. (Merriam-Webster: Scan·di·na·vian \ˌskan-də-ˈnā-vē-ən, -vyən\ ) 

Definitely Desultory – Who are the four kings in a deck of cards?

| June 14, 2017

#TeamFiona playing cards on sale for short time at Cincinnati area Kroger It is strange after 50 years that curiosity finally piqued my interest as to how the four kings on playing cards came to be …  who are they?  Of course  the beauty of having the Internet at your fingertips is that finding “an” answer […]

Matched content ads by Google Adsense

| May 21, 2017

For those of you who are regular visitors to MyDesultoryBlog and are not running an ad blocker plugin on your browser, you may have noticed a small snippet of new  ad content in the sidebar. Last month, GoogleAdsense offered an upgrade to this blog’s minimal advertising experiment. The new ad content promotes “matched” internal content from similar previous posts […]

Looking back a few years to when I started to blog

| April 28, 2017

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It is always a nightmare when servers go down

| April 20, 2017

My apology for ignoring the blog these last couple of days, but duty calls when servers and networks go down for my clients … yes, for MyDesultoryBlog too. I’m red-eyed and frazzled, but hopefully by the end of the weekend all will return to normal on new hardware, but we’ll see as the tweaks continue.

Every Vloging sailor needs a friend and a schtick

| March 25, 2017

Just when you think you’ve heard and read it all when it comes to sailing and telling the story … Guirec Soudée and his chicken Monique goes one step further. Crazy. The adventure of Monique & Guirec Our adventure is going global! Thank you all for your support! Notre aventure se mondialise! Merci à tous […]

Debating political spin, fake news, lies and misleading the public

| February 19, 2017

Having been around journalists and the media most of my working life, I disagree with the broad brush of many who paint them as "knowingly biased and of misleading the public." Most reporters, professional journalists, aspire to gather and report the relevant facts with the purpose of getting a story correct and providing the facts […]

Demographics and Interests of those visiting MyDesultoryBlog

| January 21, 2017

Those who have been blogging for a while learn to monitor their viewership. We’d like to  know what kind of traffic is hitting the servers and often looking at the breakdown as to what generates interest and ad clicks. In the early days, a "hit counter" was sufficient, but as country music artist Loretta Lynn […]

TechFriday: Open Live Writer to WordPress plug-in problem

| January 13, 2017

Twice now I’ve found myself unable to post to my WordPress blog. Once a few years ago using the windows based Microsoft Live Writer (now defunct) and recently using the open-sourced Open Live Writer. The “Invalid Server Response – The response to the blogger.getUsersBlogs method received from the blog server was invalid:” error pops up. […]

What photo is most vivid in your mind for 2016?

| December 31, 2016

The last several years MyDesultoryBlog has highlighted "banished words" from the list Lake Superior State University (LSSU), who puts together a list at the beginning of a new year (and probably still will in early January)? This year we’ll end we’ll end 2016 with a couple memorable photos. The first being serious, and second … […]

Archiving: Great sailing related article on reefing sails

| December 30, 2016

There are much better places to save articles than a publicly available blog like Evernote, GetPocket, Google apps as well as locally archived HTML, Docs and PDFs, but I still occasionally enjoy having them on MyDesultoryBlog. So as with a few other archived articles on reefing (1 & 2), I’m saving this Cruising World Seamanship 101: […]

Setting up WP-to-Twitter after the demise of TwitterFeed

| December 14, 2016

This is a test post after setting up the well documented WP-to-Twitter plugin for WordPress. So far so good. I’ll be tweaking a few of the options over the next few weeks. EDIT 2/17/2024: Updating to XPoster after a server fail.

Blogging question: How many people want to know about you?

| December 11, 2016

A friend is thinking about writing a “subject oriented blog” (unlike MyDesultoryBlog) and asked me if I thought it was important to have an “about the author page.” I said yes, people will want to know if you are knowledgeable on the subject matter or if you at least have the researching and objective ability worthy of reading. […]

Amazon storage server options can be surprisingly costly

| November 13, 2016

Surprise! At least that’s what I found out when I opened a couple virtual invoices from Amazon for my two AWS accounts (personal and business). After moving files for online web content to Amazon’s fast and reliable S3 cloud-based servers a couple years ago, I’ve been happily adding content regularly since then as the cost […]

Neil Armstrong memories … he would have been disappointed

| November 11, 2016

A lot has changed in the 11 years that have passed since I posted on “First Man” Neil Armstrong … but after re-watching the 60 Minutes clip and pondering going “back to the moon and to Mars by 2018,” Armstrong would have been disappointed as a lot hasn’t changed. Click for post from 11/11/2005 WHY […]

Behind on WordPress updates — Themes, plugins and WP 4.6.1

| September 7, 2016

Updated WordPress to 4.6.1 and some housekeeping. All running as it should. Summary From the WordPress 4.6.1 release post: WordPress versions 4.6 and earlier are affected by two security issues: a cross-site scripting vulnerability via image filename, reported by SumOfPwn researcher Cengiz Han Sahin; and a path traversal vulnerability in the upgrade package uploader, reported […]

Digital photography: Shooting in RAW, TIFF or JPG?

| August 20, 2016

An aside … I spent my formative years engrossed in photography, back before it was digital and when "souping" film in a darkroom. Nowadays 90% of what I take is on a smartphone due to the simplicity and recent improvements in quality. Still, the best photographic images come from a quality lens and large sensor […]

What was the best present you ever received as a child?

| August 5, 2016

Sometimes there are things that seemed to be written just for me … like the response to a serious of questions posed to Mike Rowe. I can relate 100% to the want of a Crosman BB gun at the 9 year old mark (and dad was understanding, but mom was worried — a "worrywart" was […]

GroupBibleStudy.com website traffic is exploding in India

| August 3, 2016

An online website project that I have the privilege to be involved with is GroupBibleStudy.com. My good friend Pastor Keith Thomas, a super nice guy and one of the more scholarly writers and teachers that I know, writes and teaches small group Bible studies from his home base in Cincinnati, Ohio. His online reach is […]

TechFriday: Testing Amazon S3 hotlinking policies

| April 22, 2016

While learning a bit more about Amazon S3 data storage, it was time to experiment with the hotlinking and leaching of stored content, be it video or photo. Although the S3 storage is relatively inexpensive, every byte that is stored (no biggie) … or megabyte that is downloaded/streamed (photo/video) is billed whether or not it […]

Who is reading what — the top blog posts from the past decade

| April 11, 2016

While cleaning up the MyDesultoryBlog.com WordPress install in preparation for an eventually PHP 7.0 update, I decided it was time to see just what posts were getting the most eyeballs. For years, the top post was the Great White Shark following a kayak … and rightly so. After a few years and a popular Accelerated Medical […]

Updated to PHP 7.0 on the Raspberry Pi 3

| April 8, 2016

American Pi (richcorbett.us) is up and running PHP 7.0 on this Raspberry Pi 3. So far no issues with the Iconic One WordPress theme, handful of plugins or the speeds on this Apache2 server (is it faster?) Click to check PHP Version

Reefing tips from SailingTotem blog

| March 19, 2016

When do you reef? How should you reef? What are some excellent ways to screw it up? A few thoughts from Jamie (filtered through fun with salty sayings and his fondness for puns). Many witty phrases… Source: Reefing, by and large

Tweaking Apache2 on the Raspberry Pi 2 

| March 16, 2016

Updated a bunch of plugins and WordPress themes on a couple of my personal servers … prior to making any mods to my clients sites. I’m pleased with the efficiency improvements after Apache2 configuration changes last week keeping it from hogging to much memory (no restarts since!) In this same trend continued to tweak things in order […]

Sailing into volcanic ash and pumice on the water

| February 28, 2016

Under water volcanos spewing up floating rocks and pumice is something that I have not read or heard much about. It is both interesting and dangerous for those who are voyaging and cruising. In August of 2006, a small yacht called the Maiken encountered a bizarre shadow on the ocean. Upon closer inspection they discovered […]

My Challenger Story

| January 28, 2016

On the 30th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, I re-read a post from my blog back on the 20th anniversary — thought I would share. Saturday morning, January 27, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger and seven astronauts prepared for a cold morning ride into space at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida; they […]

Desultory - des-uhl-tawr-ee, -tohr-ee

  1. lacking in consistency, constancy, or visible order, disconnected; fitful: desultory conversation.
  2. digressing from or unconnected with the main subject; random: a desultory remark.
My Desultory Blog