Scott and I headed up to San Francisco today to catch the Ghiradelli Square Chocolate Festival. We had a great time, and tasted a lot of yummy chocolate goodies.
We also got to make the acquaintance of a very friendly bird (a Cockatoo, I think) who was visiting the festival with her keeper. She stepped right onto Scott’s good arm and allowed herself to be petted and photographed:
Last night’s colorful, hazy sunset:
And a cat on my desk chair:
There will be no more encores for stellar tenor Luciano Pavarotti.
I had the pleasure of hearing Pavarotti live once, years ago, in New York. The world will not soon see his like again.
UPDATE: Yahoo has a nice aggregation of news reports, obituary notices, etc.
Scott, after all this time, has got himself a blog.
After looking at MovableType and getting a little frustrated by the setup process, he decided to use WordPress instead. So now we’ve got a Battle of the Blog Platforms in our own home! 🙂
I’m waiting for the first bug-fix patch before I go to MT 4.0 though.
There’s an old truism that if you get good customer service, you tell two people, but if you have a bad experience, you’ll tell 10. So here’s my small attempt to balance the scales:
Hotwire, you guys rock. Not only do you help me book good, inexpensive rental cars, but when I needed to cancel our vacation last week, your Customer Service staff told me exactly what I needed to do to request a refund, and then they processed the refund quickly. And this despite Hotwire’s very firmly stated ‘no refund’ policies. (No, I did not purchase trip insurance.)
Things have been stressful enough around here; you helped lessen my stress. I’m deeply grateful, and you can bet I’ll be using Hotwire again in the future.
Four years ago today, Fiat Lux came online.
I’ve averaged a post every 1.21 days since then. Not bad, for a solo effort (plus one guess post from Scott).
I’ve had days where fewer than a dozen people came to my site, and a few days where more than 6,000 people stopped by.
I’ve had days where I couldn’t wait to get something up onto the blog, and days where I’ve though about shutting it down entirely.
I’ve learned a lot about the mechanics of web marketing — SEO, how to build traffic, how to get links — that I use in my professional work.
I like to think that the discipline of writing this blog has made me a better writer (although this post is probably not one of me better efforts in that regard). At the very least, I’m more aware of my weaknesses as a writer now, and hopefully I do a better job of working through them.
Lately, though, it feels like most of what I want to write about is me, me, me. And this blog is at it’s best when it’s not all about me. Not sure how to resolve that contradiction right now; perhaps I need a few more days away from the blog to get my groove back.
I closed my first post like this:
What next? Who knows. But I think that I’d like to blog the journey.
And now, 4 years later, I still do. So let’s see what happens.