How many email addresses do you have?

I counted mine and came up with 8. How did this happen? I like simplicity. Having 8 addresses is not simple.

Well, when Jim and I got married in 1998 we wanted a website, so we got www.jimandchris.com. We set up two email addresses at that domain: jim and chris. Then, when we set up our corporation: Guld Systems, Inc., we grabbed www.guldsystems.com and made two new email addresses there. Then, we did work for a couple other companies and we both got email addresses at their domain. I set up a gmail account in order to use Google services, a Yahoo account for their services and a Microsoft passport account email. And now, we’ve come up with a new name for our current business … Geeks on Tour. You guessed it, www.geeksontour.com! I’m chris at geeksontour.com.

Should I get rid of any of the others? Chris at jimandchris.com is getting over 100 junkmails every day. They all go to my junkmail folder – so it’s manageable. I like being chris at jimandchris.com. It’s been part of my identity for 10 years and it’s still my identity. Plenty of clients know me as chris at guldsystems.com – that’s what is displayed on the opening page of programs I wrote for them.

How about I just swear to not make any more?

Does your dog do this?

When Jim and I get up in the morning we go straight to our computers. There comes a time when Odie insists that it’s time to go for a walk. He’ll stare at the door for as long as it takes to get us to open it!

Movie Night

Since the weather has turned warmer, we figured it was time for Movie Night. Greg and Marilyn have the DVD for the movie RV, and Jim said he’d set up our equipment outside. Add some more people, a couple bowls of popcorn and some citronella candles and we’re all set!

Google Earth Seminar

Jim presented his Google Earth Seminar here at the park the other day. Here’s just a little sample of what he showed:
Fly to Peace River, our winter home, using Google Earth.
If you don’t see a spinning globe below – click here.

Potluck Thanksgiving

That’s how RV parks do Thanksgiving. The park cooks some turkeys and all the RVers bring side dishes. We had about 150 people there, overflowing the meeting hall onto the grass outside. Luckily the cold weather had turned a little warmer and it was beautiful.

I love potluck. You get the best food that way. Jim’s and my wedding party was potluck! It’s my favorite way to eat – a little of this and a little of that.

Then Jim watched some football on the TV in the rec hall for the afternoon. Dolphins have now won 4 in a row! And I enjoyed the sunshine and sat outside to read a book.

Plenty to be thankful for!

Meet Greg and Marilyn

While we’re staying here at one place for a while, I thought I’d introduce you to some of the neighbors!

We met Greg and Marilyn at our WiFi seminar and that same night they invited us over for ‘pot-stickers’ (they were really yummy). Here they are trying to enjoy ‘camping’ even tho it’s *cold* outside.

Greg and Marilyn are brand new ‘full-timers’. I asked if they’d ever RV’d before and they said, “no”. The first night they ever spent in an RV was in their own, brand-new, 43 ft, 4 slide Dutch Star motorhome. Wow! That’s a major leap-of-faith I said. Their response? “Yeah, well, we like adventure.”

That’s for sure. They had a successful business in Maine for many years when they were in their 40s. Each year they’d vacation in the winter by going scuba diving in Central America – Honduras and Roatan to be exact. After their last vacation, back in Maine, they found themselves dreaming about Honduras so much that they pulled up stakes and moved there. They sold their business and home in Maine, built a new home in Honduras and semi-retired. After 5 years and a couple devastating hurricanes they decided it was time to head back stateside.

Where did they settle? Cape Coral Florida. In an attempt to recreate their jungle habitat from Honduras, they learned a lot about landscaping and developed a whole new career. Then they managed their property and several others thru 5 more hurricanes! No wonder they’re ready for another adventure! Greg really wanted a Catamaran, but Marilyn convinced him to stay on dry land. They’re still waiting for their house to sell, but all systems are go for traveling the country for at least a couple years, hopefully including Alaska. I hope to get them set up with a blog in the next few days, so you can follow their travels too.

Later … Ok, you can follow Greg and Marilyn at www.gundyville.blogspot.com

Morning Walk

Here’s the view as soon as we walk out our door.

Then, just take a left and we’re on the nature trail.

And, you can even sit and meditate if you wish, overlooking the Peace River.

That is, as long as you don’t mind the feeling that someone is looking over your shoulder.

Picasa Web Albums

From 1st Peace Riv…

We gave our first Picasa seminar here at Peace River yesterday, and, as part of the class we uploaded photos taken during class to a Picasa Web Album. The photo above is part of that album. You can click the link after the word ‘From’ to go to the album.

When you’re viewing a picture in the album there is a link at the right to ‘Embed in Blog/MySpace’. I clicked on that and it gave me the html code for the photo above. This is an interesting option for hosting photos for a blog. It still has them hosted at Google’s free servers, but at least it’s at a url that is mine (picasaweb.google.com/chrisguld/) rather than the photos1.blogger.com that you get when you let blogger upload for you.

Yikes! There’s just TOO many choices, with more available every day. I think I’ll go for a walk.

"Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship"

As Rick says to Louis in Casablanca, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

That’s how we’re feeling here at Peace River. We attended our first staff meeting this morning. Jim’s been ‘working’ 3 hrs/day for the last few days, helping people use the WiFi in the Adult Lodge. We gave our first seminar today with about 15 attendees. Pretty good for one day’s notice. Debbie, the manager, came in and took a picture. I gave her my camera and she asked everyone to turn around and smile. One of the few photos where you see both Jim and me giving the seminar, because, usually I’m taking the photo. Thanx Debbie.

This was our WiFi seminar which we offer for free. But, all the rest of our seminars, we’re charging $15/person. We’ll be giving 2 seminars a week all season long. Picasa, Blogs, Safe Computing, Google Earth, Email on the Road etc. We feel so at home here. I’m sure it’s going to be a great season – I’ll have the schedule posted soon. Our neighbors asked us over for happy hour this evening and there was one other couple as well. There was lots of great conversation and laughter. The other couple asked, “So, how long have you known Greg and Marilyn here?” … Since they pulled in yesterday!

Here’s the flyer that’s posted around the park about Jim’s job.

Blogger Beta

Blogger is undergoing major changes right now. I’ve been using Blogger to publish this blog for over 3 years. There have been some minor changes and improvements over that time, but this one is big. They are totally changing the way the back end servers do the publishing. It’s called ‘dynamic’. I understand the concept because that is what I do with databases and Coldfusion on the web. It is generally a very good thing. It will mean much faster and more dependable publishing.

HOWEVER – there is one major hurdle that I don’t like. In order to use the new dynamic publishing that is being done by their backend servers, you must use their front end servers (blogspot.com) to host your blog – it makes sense – they can only dynamically control servers that are under their control. My blog is currently hosted on www.jimandchris.com, space that I pay for, it’s mine. If I start posting on the blogspot.com then everything ‘lives’ on blogger’s servers. I don’t like that. Actually, I could live with the blog entries themselves living on blogspot, but not the uploaded pictures. What I want is to be able to publish my blog on blogspot using their new dynamic publishing, but have the ‘upload photo’ button allow me to upload to my own host.

If you didn’t understand a word of that … and you want to … read on.

You see, the pictures don’t actually live in the blog post itself, they can live anywhere on the web and the code in the blog simply refers to them. Let me give you an example. I’ll show you two pictures and tell you where they ‘live’ on the web.

The picture of the boy and the horse ‘lives’ at www.horsesforthespirit.org (a website I created). It has absolutely nothing to do with jimandchris.com and nothing to do with blogger. I simply happen to know the complete address of it’s location and I can enter the html code to display it here on my blog page. (not something you normally want to do, by the way, copyrights apply – don’t sue me ok?)

The picture of the little girl with the stuffed alligator ‘lives’ on www.diandy.com. A website of RVing friends of ours. It happens to be a picture of me . You can read about it here if you want.

So, what’s all this mean?
Well, as long as those pictures continue to ‘live’ at the addresses I am referring to, you’ll see them show up here. If Horses for the Spirit should ever move, or if Diandy.com should ever go away, the pictures will no longer exist and you’ll see those annoying little red x’s instead.

When Blogger publishes your blog to their servers, they upload your photos to their servers as well. That scares me. Who knows when they might have to replace a server and relocate files? When it’s all for free, I just can’t trust them to maintain the proper addresses so my picture references work for years to come.

If you’ve been following Tioga and George recently, you’ve already heard about this. He switched to Blogger Beta recently, and he’s lost all his pictures from 2003. I actually don’t think it has anything to do with Blogger beta – I think it’s coincidence that the free servers that hosted his 2003 photos just bit the dust. For 2004-2006, he’s hosted his blog and photos on his own website. Now he says he’s going to publish *both* ways. I’m not sure how he’ll do that, but it sounds interesting.

Blogger beta will still work to publish via ftp – but then, you’re not getting the advantages of their new ‘dynamic’ publishing. I’m going to wait to the last minute to switch to Blogger Beta. Meanwhile, I keep watching. Here are some good places to keep on top of what’s going on:

Blogger Help Official help from Blogger/Google
Blogger Buzz Official Blog about Blogger by Google employees
Blogger Support Users Forum Official User forum
Report a problem
BloggerTalk 3d party blog about blogging, with a user forum
Beta Blogger for dummies 3d party blog about Blogger Beta
Testing Blogger Beta 3d party blog

And, I’m sure there’s lots more, but that’s enough for now. More than you probably ever wanted to know!