I just finished off a couple more tweeks to the site.  Those of you following at home might notice the “next page” link at the bottom of the screen no longer hangs out in never-neverland and I added the date to the end of every post so you can see when it was written.  If you want to know the exact time, well you are being just a little too nosy.  I’m keeping that to myself!

I have a few more projects to finish this weekend including polishing up the background and adding an RSS subscription button to the sidebar.  I also need to figure out why WordPress and Google Analytics are no longer tracking stats from my site.  Fortunately the lijit wijit has been tracking them so I know people are visiting the site (from all over the world as a matter of fact!) but for some reason Google and WordPress are reporting zero visitors.  That might be a fix that is out of my league, but I’ll give it a shot.  Anyway, it’s been a good week but a long one too and bed beckons.  Later!

Tonight I’m very excited to announce a new little project I will be working on.  Last weekend I made a batch of fudge that, according to popular opinion around the office, is the best batch I’ve ever made.  With the Mount Hermon Christmas Boutique coming up several people encouraged me to enter as a vendor and sell fudge at a booth.  Well, I did a little thinking about it and the more I chatted with other people, the more the project grew.  So I’m not 100% sure what the end result will be but in all likelihood,  I will be opening an online store for selling mail order fudge under the banner of the Wicked Candy Company.  You can find the current placeholder site at www.wickedcandycompany.com.  At this point, some of what I do will be determined by how much money I can make before I have to incorporate as an actual business and how much work I think it’s going to be to actually maintain the business.  If I reach a point where I’m able to manufacture high quality fudge in bulk and save it in the freezer to be used as needed and I can make a few thousand dollars before having to declare myself an actual business, I think I’m game.  Almost more exciting to me was the designing of the logo.  All right, I’ll admit it is mostly a font and a few squiggly lines but you have to start somewhere, right?

Just testing the link between WordPress and Twitter using Twitter Tools.

Welcome, Guten Tag, Wilkomen, Hola, take your pick.  Thanks for dropping by now that I’m up and running with my own hosted site through DreamHost.  I don’t have much to say at this point (I’ve spent most of the last 6 hours getting it up and running) so I just wanted to say stay tuned for content and redesigns as I roll them out.  Later!

I just set up an account over at Tumblr. It’s technically another blog and I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with it just yet, but it will be different from what I post here. I’ve always seen my WordPress blog as more of the clearinghouse for any big ideas I get in my head that I need to work out or any photos I really want to highlight from a special event (such as the red carpet shoot last night). My flickr is then obviously my photos, and twitter has become my “hey look at me!” outlet to let anyone interested (or even those who aren’t) what I’m up to at any given moment during the day. Right now I’m leaning toward using Tumblr as the place where I will collect random webpages, photos, thoughts, quotes, and other things from throughout the day that I come across. Their mobile update system seems to work pretty well at least for text (I have to give photos a try at some point to see if it is any easier than flickr). Anyway, follow the link and head over to Tumblr to check it out. If you like what you see, leave a comment here.

esoterica eclectica

I made it to 78 page views yesterday, a new high for my blog. The cool thing though is it isn’t driven by a Digg post. I’ve seen a noticeable up-tick in views since I started blogging about the EEE.

So I finally got things under control but I think without having complete control over both the html and the CSS behind it I won’t be able to do things how I want to.  Problem is, I have to do a lot more research than I thought about how to put my own blog together on a separate host.  Hmm, maybe I’ll poke around a little.  I’d rather not move again so soon but I don’t want to limit my options either.  Maybe I’ll have to give movable type and typepad a looksee and then decide.  Anyway, I sorta skipped dinner because I got so involved with this so I’m gonna go find some grub.

I apologize for the possible crappy appearance of the blog.  I’m trying to learn CSS and do a more custom layout but for some reason right now wordpress is being lame and not displaying anything correctly.  grr.

So even though I have much, much better things to be working on, I’ve spent the better part of the evening setting up new accounts at various “web 2.0″ social networking sites.  I opened up new accounts at twitter (twitter.com/assinkj) and Jaiku (jonassink.jaiku.com) even though they are basically the same thing, because I’m curious how they work.  I then linked them to each other, and my flickr account, and this wordpress blog, and the last.fm account I don’t ever use, and I synced my twitter with my facebook through their new app.  The really funny thing is that I get such a low level of traffic that it isn’t like I actually connect with anyone over these various networks.  Traffic to this blog has definitely picked up since I switched over from Blogspot but I still only average about 10 hits per day (though my high was 29) and that’s peanuts compared to most of the web.  I guess the one cool thing is that I randomly end up meeting people from all over the world.  The first person to add me as a friend on twitter is some random girl in Japan, which is very cool.  But what usually ends up happening is that I spend hours a day hitting F5, waiting for the page to refresh, to see if any of my contacts have posted something new or to see if my photos have been viewed one more time.  Anyway, I actually need to still make ice cream tonight so I should get on that before I need to get to bed.  Oh, but do check out my flickr.  I’ve got new pictures of surfers down at Lighthouse Point that came out really well.  Later!

Well, WordPress finally is letting people import from New Blogger accounts so I decided to go ahead and make the move over to here. Aside from the fact that I was never happy with Blogger really, it also has the reputation of being where all the noobs hang out. If you are for reals you are either on WordPress, Live Journal, or TypePad. So now I’m at least a little more web 2.0. Anyway. . .

So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in the last couple of days about photography and what it means to call myself a photographer. With how available good camera technology is becoming, more and more people are taking pictures. Naturally this means that more and more good photographers are emerging from the masses. There have started to be debates now about whether or not professional photography is dead because anyone can go out, buy a DSLR and start taking high res images. Now, I don’t have any pretensions about being God’s gift to photography, but I do think this isn’t quite what I did. While I kind of waver back and forth on the photography as art debate, I definitely feel that there is a difference between the people who are paid to be professional photographers and Uncle Ted with the Rebel XTi. First of all, taking great pictures does take a certain eye. You have to be able to visualize what you want the end product to look like or else you really are just crossing your fingers. Sure I will be the first to admit that my style is to just take tons of pictures and then figure out in post-processing what is worth keeping/posting and what is just going to get archived. This is changing slowly for me though with each time I go shoot. I find myself taking fewer pictures and doing more framing and playing with the shutter speeds and aperture settings rather than just shooting away. Taking pictures last weekend at Vintage is a good example. Other than it being a church service, I could have taken a TON more pictures but I focused on taking shots that I liked instead and ended up with them all being ones I liked. I guess my whole point is that photography is more of a state of mind than a simple press of the finger on the shutter release, and as long as people are having weddings, reading newspapers, and buying posters, there will be professional photographers out there taking pictures.

The other thing I was thinking about recently was the whole Apple-Engadget snafu. If you happened not to hear about it you can find more info here. My take on the whole thing is that Apple themselves are partly responsible because of the fact they surround their products and company with so much secrecy that no one knows what the truth is and isn’t and there is a constant competition to see who can be the first to break the next big Apple news story. This time it just bit them in the butt. So was it a good idea for Engadget to post what they did without first checking with Apple PR, sure, but they had what appeared to be an official memo from Apple sent to them by an Apple employee so you can hardly blame them for assuming it was true. If Apple wants to avoid things like this in the future, they either need to be more transparent, or be like the rest of the computer universe and just delay so many of their products so many times that people just take it as par for the course (a la Microsoft and Spore). Anyway, that’s enough for now I think. Later!