My Desultory Blog

Posted By RichC on December 10, 2015

20s?? Well for Drew (photo) … for only a few more days!

Katelyn and Drew are in Arizona celebrating Drew’s 30th birthday with his family this week and they sent me a  couple photos from the desert and in a hot air balloon flight — beautiful!  It is great to see all three kids (Taylor went to England in June), enjoying their vacation time. As I recall, our 20s were just the beginning … the best years are yet to come!  BTW … Happy Birthday Drew, a few days early.

Category: Personal, Photos, Travel | No Comments »
Tags: arizona, balloon, birthday, drew, family, katelyn, Travel

Posted By RichC on December 9, 2015

For the most part this is really all about testing the latest updates to the new Digital Ocean micro cloud server while attempting to run WordPress 4.4. I’m also using an alternate server for image hosting so that I can continue to post with the long in the tooth and no longer updated Microsoft LiveWriter (I sure wish they would continue with this software???)

Anyway the Farmers Almanac has those of us in the Midwest “snow filled and frigid” as will be much of the country. Are you ready?

Category: Weather | No Comments »
Tags: farmers almanac, test, weather, winter

Posted By RichC on December 8, 2015

Warmer forecasts, no production cut by OPEC and inventory surplus is keeping energy prices low and crude oil has moved to seven year lows. The impact is being felt by small leveraged U.S. oil companies who are on the brink of bankrupcy and even creating waves throughout the economy. As I tweeted…

Oil prices fell to their low­est point in seven years Mon­day, ham­mer­ing en­ergy in­dus­try stocks as many in­vestors bet that heav­ily in­debted pro­duc-ers, hav­ing weath­ered months of low com­mod­ity prices, are now at greater risk of go­ing out of busi­ness.
WSJ Link

Category: Energy, Financial, News, Social Media | No Comments »
Tags: economy, energy, investing, oil, wsj

Posted By RichC on December 7, 2015

After fastening aluminum angle to the floor and leveling the corner with sand, I packed and filled the base with brick to continue adding our old catalytic woodstove to the shop. Then it was time to start the dry-stack walls … until I ran out of spare brick. Thankfully the brick is available so should be able to pick up this week and eventually cut and stack about 70 more bricks. I’m using a drystack technique (fastening to the wall) so that it can all be easily disassembled.  Once done, I’ll attach the flue to the new chimney and figure out the cap/mantle area to cover the brick. It will be nice to use some of our piles of wood to add heat to the shop.

Category: Misc, Personal, Photos | No Comments »
Tags: brick, pool house, woodstove, workshop

Posted By RichC on December 6, 2015

Actually needed a photo to test the new server running WordPress.

Category: Holiday, Personal, Photos | No Comments »
Tags: christmas, house, lights

Posted By RichC on December 6, 2015

Slowly but surely I'm rebuilding the archives and associated linked images from my old back ups for MyDesultoryBlog. There may be a reason to keep things in multiple locations BUT it does make upgrading servers a bit more difficult.

The long story is that through Consolidated Printing and Publishing, I have worked with the same hosting company for my customers since 1997. I've been through upgrades before on our dedicated and VPS reseller account, but unfortunately times are changing. My current host is selling to a company who has acquired a number of hosting companies … and the feedback has not been all that positive. Consolidation in a competitive business I suppose? Anyway, I already host a couple clients on shared servers who have merged with the bigger company and facing a change, I decided it was time to restructure.

I've moved most of my customers, with mixed success, over the last couple of month and decided it was time to move my personal blog as well. Unfortunately I had forgotten the convoluted combination of domains and varied storage servers (images/pdfs/video) I've added and tried over the years. Just to name a few, there was my Webstar home server, the out of business Posterous, Amazon's S3, Flickr photos, items added through WordPress.com (different than one's own install), items served up on a couple of my own co-hosted domains (myarchive.us and richcorbett.us) and finally media within the previously two server upgrades with my WordPress.org install. A quick and painless move it is not!

So after my first attempt was to consolidate on an Amazon “instance” (their name for a cloud based Linux server) was unfortunately a complete failure. Their EC2 server worked out to be a bit pricey besides making it difficult to manage. My second choice was a DigitalOcean cloud based server … very lean and self-modifiable with their security restrictions; the biggest issue for me is the lack of the unsecure but widely used FTP (must use SFTP which is not supported by my iPad Blogsy App or my laptop's Microsoft LiveWriter). Still … WordPress has improved it's web interface since the early days so maybe I can adapt?

Back to the start of this blog … I'm thinking about a work around so that I can still use a WordPress “posting client” like Blogsy and LiveWriter. I'm contemplating serving all WordPress and database files on an inexpensive DigitalOcean cloud-based Linux LAMP set-up while spliting up images and video to one of my company servers which permits FTP and manual uploads of video and large docs to Amazon's S3. It's not all set up yet since I'm uploading Gigs of gzipped directories before attempting the move. This post will be the first attempt from Blogsy to the DigitalOcean WordPress install. Crossing my fingers.

More to come …

Category: Blogs, Misc, Personal, Tablet | No Comments »
Tags: blogsy, digital ocean, hosting, mydesultoryblog, server, upgrade, wordpress

Posted By RichC on December 5, 2015

Testing the LiveWriter access to Digital Ocean with sFTP.

FAILED … I’ll keep the photo and update with a “what’s going on” post tomorrow.

Category: Blogs | 1 Comment »
Tags: test

Posted By RichC on December 4, 2015

This content is restricted.

Category: Audio, Music, Video | No Comments »
Tags: joni mitchell, mp3, Music, oldies, taxi, youtube

Posted By RichC on December 3, 2015

I’m not going to repost the lost message from Thanksgiving in Wayzata, MN this year, but some of the personal photos are on Facebook (I don’t post there too often, but in case you want to connect click here).

Category: Holiday, Personal, Photos, Social Media | No Comments »
Tags: facebook, family, thanksgiving

Posted By RichC on December 2, 2015

Thought these were great links:

Here are 30 of the best sites where you can learn as an individual or connect your team to professional and personal development:

1. TED Talks:
Ted is all about ideas worth spreading TED’s tagline is “ideas worth spreading.” usually A video collection of sin the form of short, powerful talks on every subject imaginable (18 minutes or less)..

2. Brain Pickings
Interesting posts drawn from art, science, design, history, and philosophy.

3. 99U
An actionable insights on productivity, organization, and leadership to help creative people push ideas forward.on

4. Lynda
Thousands of video tutorials covering technical, creative, and business skills, all taught by industry experts.

5. University of the People:
A nonprofit tuition-free online university based in California and committed to educational access and inclusion.

6. Learnist 
A collaborative knowledge-sharing site where users create and curate “learning boards” composed of text, images, vide and audio.

7. Alison
Free online courses with certification and diploma options.

8. Mental Floss 
Mental Floss test your knowledge through quizzes, brain teasers, and games.

9. Brain Pump 
Brain Pump learn something new and feed your curiosity, l earn from a vast library of entertaining videos on topics ranging from Chemistry, Physics and history.

10. Peer 2 Peer University
An open education project in which learners gather in lightly organized circles that meet at public libraries and other accessible sites.

11. Platzi
Platzi is a live-streamed courses–many free–on topics including web and app development, online marketing, interface design and server admin.

12. edX
EdX offers free online courses and classes from the world’s best universities, a collaborative project of Harvard University and MIT, with free online courses from universities and other institutions worldwide.

13. OpenSesame
Open Seasame a marketplace for business-oriented online training.

14. Udacity
Udacity you can find free online courses when wanting to make a career change, or get a new job they are self paced online learning with code reviews.Self-paced online learning.

15. Coursmos
Coursmos is a micro-course platform with short video lessons ranging from topics business to lifestyle.

16. Highbrow
Highbrow choose one course receive new knowledge every morning Learn, grow, repeat… in all subjects from  art; health; history; literature; logic; nature; philosophy; productivity …all courses aree super-brief courses delivered to your inbox.

17. Coursera
Coursera is a platform that you can take free online classes from 120+ top universities and educational organizations. They partner with schools like Stanford, Yale, Princeton, and world universities with online courses that are open to all.

18.  University Webinars
University Webinars and Videos for Blended Learning. Top College faculty, staff, and experts in their field share knowledge from their courses and programs. Online learning targeted for higher education professionals.

19.DataCamp
DataCamp is the most engaging way to learn R and data science. Learn in the comfort of your own browser via tutorials and coding challenges. Learn all R programming and data science; monthly or annual fee provides access to all courses.

20. CreativeLive 
Creative Live take free live online classes taught by the world’s most inspiring instructors. From video workshops in photography, video, design, business, audio, music, crafting, and software training.

21. Investopedia 
Investopedia is a premiere resource for investing education, personal finance, market analysis and free trading simulators. Free educational content and tools on topics of investing, markets, and personal finance.

22. Gibbon
Gibbon is a peer-to-peer learning network that connects users that want to teach each other and learn about anything. An enterprise knowledge portal for employee development and learning. Individually accessible courses are also available.

23. BBC Languages
BBC Languages is a free online language learning: courses, audio, video and games, including the alphabet, phrases, vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, activities and tests.Free interactive tutorials in 40 languages.

24. Future Learn
Free courses in categories including law, psychology, and teaching offered in partnership with universities in the UK and around the world. Enjoy free online courses from top universities and specialist organizations.

25. MIT Open Courseware
MIT OpenCourseWare is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. Virtually all MIT course content, open and accessible.

26. Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a digital library of free ebooks. Includes Book listings, search engine, newsletter, articles and information on how users can help create more free ebooks.More than 50,000 free ebooks to read online or download.

27. Quora
Quora: the best answer to any question. Ask a question and receive expert answers on any topic or subject.

28. Udemy
Udemy is an online education marketplace with limitless variety with more than 30,000 courses developed by subject-matter experts.

29. Skillshare 
Skillshare is a learning community for creators. Anyone can take an online class, watch video lessons, create projects, and even teach a class themselves.

30. Inc
Inc is all about advice, news, tools, and services to help small businesses grow. Everything you read on Inc. will make you a smarter leader and entrepreneur–especially articles like this one.

Which websites do you visit that make you smarter?

LINK

Category: Photography, Tidbits | No Comments »
Tags: links, repost, smarter