Life – Page 25 – Paul's Notepad

November is for Thanksgiving!

Paul Darr / 2012-11-15 / Leave a Comment

This year we saw Christmas items hitting the shelves well before Halloween. What happened to Thanksgiving? This has been out of hand for a while but it keeps getting worse. Now I hear “Black Friday” sales are creeping onto Thanksgiving Day. Is one holiday not enough for the stores? Now they have to steal another? Thanksgiving should be a day families come together and give thanks for what they have, while enjoying a good meal together. All these chasing of sales is nonsense.

My plan this year is to enjoy Thanksgiving Day with my family. The following day we will put up Christmas decorations but not before that day. We will also avoid all stores both days. You should do the same and help encourage retailers to allow their employees to also stay at home or on minimum staffing on Thanksgiving.

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Murder in the Stacks (Library Preservation)

Paul Darr / 2012-10-15 / Leave a Comment

Yes this is cheesy but it does convey the message of proper care of Library materials. I recommend that Library workers view the video and implement it in training.

If your browser does not display embedded video properly here is the YouTube link.

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The WordPress and Debian Experiment

Paul Darr / 2012-10-11 / Leave a Comment

Prior to moving, my wife expressed an interest in having her blog on a simpler platform. I previously had it on a Drupal 6 installation which she often found the admin panel to be over whelming. I was self hosting my blog, her blog and a few other sites on an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS machine prior to the move. The server was in a 12 bay server case with and AMD Processor. I felt the hardware was a little larger and more power hungry than I needed for a home web and file server. Taking that all into account I decided to reinstall on an old Aspire One Netbook that I had.

I decided this time around that I would use Debian as the Operating System. While Ubuntu LTS had been good to me, I run Ubuntu on my desktop and I wanted to diversify slightly. For the blogging platform I decided to go with WordPress as it has a reputation of meeting my Wife’s requirement of simple. I decided to “eat my own dog food” and I migrated my blog over to WordPress also. Since WordPress is FLOSS software it also still makes me happy on that end of things.

The move hasn’t been all that simple. First was the hurdle of migrating blog content. Then there were the hurdles of setting up Plugins. I recently had a Google+ Plugin go haywire and repost a bunch of old content to my Google+ stream which I had to clean up. So far my wife seems to like having an Android app she can post from and I think she is happier with her blog.

If you know of any must have WordPress Plugins, please let me know about them in the comments. I would love trying a few things out.

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New Book Shelves

Paul Darr / 2012-10-10 / Leave a Comment

I just got the book shelves up in our new house and we pretty much have them filled already. So I pulled out the D&D book and cast Tenser’s Floating Disc to get the result’s on the left. I am pretty happy with the results. It’s nice that it’s all out of Hands McGrab’ems (my sons) reach. His books are also on floating shelves in his room and the top of his book case.

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