It's News to Me

My blog has always been just a place for me to test whether I could put things on the Internet and a way for me to comment on things I find interesting as I surf and experiment with them. Although I've been blogging now for about 5 years, I've never added advertising to this blog to make money from it because I didn't anticipate having much of a readership. However, I've been pleasantly surprised to have gained more readers than I would have ever thought possible. And those readers are gradually becoming accustomed to commenting here occasionally. For that, I'm grateful.

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Today at 9:30 AM I turned off the computer with the intent of leaving it off for two hours. Actually, however, I left it off for 2 and a half hours. It wasn't so bad. I didn't get the shakes or suffer severe anxiety. I'm sure that I'll be able to manage the 24 hour shutdown on Saturday; in fact, I'm looking forward to it.

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Details of this online experiment can be found at this site. It's simple actually. The challenge is to go for one day without turning on your computer, and it's planned for March 24th. A blogger who calls herself Moonair suggest 7 ways to prepare for it in this post which is pretty funny.

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Tonight I attended a gathering of a number of bloggers from here in Knoxville and the surrounding area at Calhoun's on Kingston Pike. Glenn Reynolds was kind enough to post links to the blogs of those in attendance. The affair was surprisingly well-attended as we overran the table set aside for the fifteen that the instigator, Rich Hailey, had told them to expect, so I'd guess there were at least 25 or more folks there. It was a very civil gathering, I thought, despite the fact that a group of that size represented almost every variation of political, social and cultural perspective imaginable. I'm pleased to have met them, and I've added each of their blogs to my bookmarks so that I can read them periodically and learn more about them and their respective points of view as time goes on.

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This morning both of my sites, this one and The Fun Addicts site, hosted at Dreamhost have been up and down intermittently. Obviously this blog is up right now. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to make this post and you wouldn't be able to read it. So if you attempt to view the site or make a comment here and you only get a blank page, please just check back later. I reported the outage to the support team at Dreamhost and they have since reported back to me that they couldn't find anything wrong. So who knows what the cause was, but now it seems to be back up and functioning again.

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As you can see, I've changed the theme (a.k.a. template) again. This time it was sort of out of necessity.

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Yesterday in a series of email exchanges, Mike and Daryl and I discussed how we might modify what we are doing with the KnoxBloggers group so as to encourage more people to participate and at the same time place less demands on those with busy schedules. We came up with some ideas that we think might achieve those goals.

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Back in the late 1970s while I was still a member of the S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A., Inc. (now called the Barbershop Harmony Society), I was privileged to be a member of a quartet called the Fun Addicts. Bob Wilson (tenor), Forrest Umberger (lead), and Phil Petty (bass) were the other members. We sang together all over the country for only about three years, but we used to have great times together.

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With apologies to David Bowie, I've made a few «ch-ch-ch-changes» just for variety's sake. I'll probably let the site stay like this for a while to see how I like it and how you react to it. Feel free to comment, pro or con, in the comments to this post. I can always revert to the previous theme if I decide that's what I want to do, but for the moment I sort of like the cleaner look. The fact that the pages are listed across the top will allow me to eliminate the pages section currently in the sidebar at the left. So, we'll see what the feedback is.

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An article in today's New York Times (free registration required) discusses the many, occasionally-confusing widgets a reader of a blog might encounter and suggests that a blog author would do well to explain them to his readers. Being the nice guy that I am, that seemed reasonable to me, so I thought I'd give you a brief tour of this site so that you aren't in the dark about what these little items are. Today is an appropriate day to do that because I've just added a new one in the sidebar that I'll explain in a moment.

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