Blogging

Dragon Dictate 3 Upgrade

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Since I like writing, but typing at the end of the day after working at a computer all day is not the most fun thing to do I have been using dictation to write. It has been fantastic.

The issue is since I upgraded to mountain lion my dictation software on the Mac has not been working. I’ve actually been using the dictation on my iPhone 4S. I think I’ve written about that before. It’s actually quite good, but nowhere near as good as using the computer. As if to prove a point, the WordPress app on my iPhone 4S just crashed for the second time in a day. I lost about two paragraphs of this post and had to write it over. That sort of thing doesn’t happen on the Mac.

Today, Nuance the makers of Dragon Dictate released an upgrade for Dragon Dictate for the Mac that works with Mountain lion. Because of the limitations of the iPhone dictation I am pleased to be able to upgrade. But I’m not pleased about is the rather expensive price of the $149 to be able to upgrade. I don’t typically buy software is expensive. The only other software that comes anywhere close to this price is Microsoft office. Even that I got a rather steep discount through work the last upgrade. I just hope the price was worth it.

I am downloading it now, and I hope to have it working tonight. I’m wondering if I need to train it again. This software I like the mobile phone versions of the software requires you to train the software by reading. It does not take very long, but it does require some minor concentration to read to a computer. I will give my opinion in a later post.

Hosting Changes

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All my thinking about changing domain names led me to another bigger change. For the past few years I have been using wordpress.com to post my blog. Before that I mainly hosted on TypePad for years. in between I played around with movable type, and WordPress. In 2009 my started using WordPress.com it was free, and they offered services cheaper then TypePad if I wanted any. At the time I wasn’t walking a lot and the easy dollars or so year just for bloging seemed like a lot from TypePad. With my recent revival to writing I was making changes to my site. Unfortunately any real changes that I wanted to make on wordpress.com would require several add-on purchases. At that point I looked at the price of a true hosting provider. I signed up for one, only to cancel the trial account within an hour. I then continue to waffle and signed up for another hosting provider. The second provider bluehost.com hey pretty decent rate for a 2 year package. It was pretty simple to set up all my content on the new provider and add both my new domain name and my old one to point to that site.

For the most of the life of my blog I’ve been on TypePad, but I have over the years used several different hosting providers on and off. In recent years using Google apps and other web services for free or small fees having my own hosted account didn’t seem like it was worth it. By simply decreasing my Google apps for business mail quota I was able to go from the paid plan to the free plan. That cost savings alone offsets the price of the new hosting plan per year, so I figured why not give it a try. I like the additional flexibility I can have with my own website. I am already playing around with media wiki again, and some WordPress plug-ins that I could not get on the hosted account.

Having my own FTP account should also come in handy. I can remember at least two or three instances in the past several months that I’ve needed it, most recently two weeks ago.

Now I just have to see if I continue writing to make these changes worth it. I told MC yesterday I would love to be able to carve out 30 minutes night to just sit and write. I always found that pretty therapeutic to do that. It helped me unwind from the day. I just haven’t done it in years. Of course it’s my luck that I decide to really get into this again right before I have a baby. That means pretty much no free time at all. On the flip side it would be nice to have time to document what the baby does, and other milestones. I think years from now that would be nice to have. I always said I like to write for me.

I will see how it goes over the next few weeks.

Does The Domain Name Really Matter?

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Over the years I have used several email addresses and different domain names for websites. In recent years I have been using the powerz.org domain. It was unique and relatively cool 10 years ago, but as I get older and I’m less concerned about anonymity on the Internet and more about people finding me I question if I should be continue to use it. My thoughts are if I’m going to have customized domain name, I might as well have one that represents me and not some silly reference to a TV show from the 90s. To be fair it’s an obscure reference to The Simpsons, and the Simpsons are still awesome however that still does not take away from the fact that any online presence should represent me.

I’m not sure what made me start thinking about this topic. It might have been because I am planning on buying a domain name for my baby when she is born. Let’s not go into the fact that MC thinks it’s not really necessary. She is right by the way, a baby does not need a domain name. I am getting it so down the road when she is old enough she will have one if she ever wants one. I did the same thing for my oldest niece and she actually is using it for her maill right now. But that’s off-topic.

My domain name usage has progressed from using Scott.ac for email and for a time my blog, to powerz.org. there’ve been other ones I’ve played around with for a short period of time. For example I used powerpedia.net for my blog for a while. I loved the Scott.AC domain, but the international domain name kind of confused people. I still have that one, and don’t plan on ever really giving it up. I just don’t want to use it for day-to-day stuff.

I am probably overthinking it. It’s most likely not that big of a deal to have an online presence with one domain versus another. I guess, well I kind of know I’m a perfectionist about this or stuff so I am compelled to go through the painful process of moving things to a new domain. As I started writing this post last week I was planning on moving everything from powerz.org to scottw.net. After getting opinions from several people (Jay was for the move, MC wasn’t) I decided to move ahead with moving my blog to the new domain. I will over time move my non personal mail to the new domain, but i will keep my personal powerz.org mail address that i have been using for years. MC likes the domain name even though it has no real meaning. It just sounds cool, so for personal use i will keep it. That decision made things pretty easy. If i did move my personal email address, the one used as my main google apps account I would have had a lot of work to migrate google services. Some stuff like Google Play purchases can’t be moved. Other things like google voice is a very painful thing to do.

In another post I will talk about the efforts from this weekend to migrate my blog to the new domain and a new hosting provider.

Back to Blogging

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I’m back to blogging full swing this week. A lot of what I have posted for May June and July have been things I’ve just written and never got around to posting, or things I had rough notes about and just never really elaborated on them. Not fully sure what got me to start posting again, but what’s made it really easy has been the ability to dictate what I want to say to my phone. Currently I’m running Mac OS X Mountain lion. Unfortunately it is not currently compatible with Dragon dictate that I have. After a long day working and writing on the computer typing a blog post sometimes is physically uncomfortable. So before I stopped blogging I was using dictation on my Mac. I was getting mixed results from it, but I was using it. With me being unable to use the dictation software on the computer I gave talking into my phone a try. I’m pleasantly surprised by the positive results. I first tried my android tablet because it has off-line dictation, but honestly the keyboard editing on android has not been very fun to deal with. So now I’m using my iPhone 4S and the WordPress app to edit after I dictate has been pretty simple.

7 Years

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In some ways it is very hard to believe that I have been blogging for 7 years, but my first post ever was March 23, 2003. So much has changed in my life since then. So much has changed period. I don't post as often as I would like but here I am 7 years later still writing.

Here is to another 7 years!

Rain Day

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I had another horrible night of sleep last night. I am not so sure if this sleep CD (well MP3’s of a CD) that I just bought is working. Not the best $9.95 I have spent. I am going through a bought of restless sleeping. Every few months I get this, I just want it to be over.

Today was at least a work from home day. That meant I could sleep an extra hour before having to get ready for work. I was glad to be home today since the weather was horrible. I had a packed day from 10AM onwards. I didn’t finish up my last email until about 7PM.

I didn’t do much afterwork. Since it was nasty I stayed in. Ordered food in, and caught up on some personal emails and TV. Why is it that I live and die in email for work but can be horrible in contacting my friends via email!

Not much else to report, but as I was catching up on my posts this past week I told myself to take a few minutes each night and try to post something. As much as I dont miss my hour long commute from Bayside, I do miss the 20-30 minutes each direction on the railroad I could get writing in. Of course I will take my 15 minute commute over an hour any day.

Ying and Yang, WordPress and Typepad

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I have been using WordPress since January and overall generally happy. Initially the ability to customize any aspect of the software was a hindrance since it required time to tinker to get things right. Then over time I got my WordPress site to be in some ways better than my Typepad one. The effort involved wasn’t trivial, but I enjoyed the tinkering. Once the site was right it has become an annoyance to deal with plugin updates, WordPress updates, etc. I know my Typepad subscription is up near the end of the year so I wanted to keep using WordPress to see if I would be comfortable enough to delete my Typepad account when the time came. I mean I hadn’t updated Typepad since January.

A few other annual subscriptions are up around now so I got thinking about what my plans are for everything. I was set to ditch Typepad all together since it would save some cash, but decided to check out their changes while looking at my current WordPress setup. My conclusion was mixed. I think overall I like both systems. They each have their advantages. The deciding factor was for some reason the performance on my hosting site I use was apparently really slow recently. Significantly so that I noticed it affecting page load times. That little thing made me realize why it is worth it to pay for an application suck as Typepad. I don’t host it, i dont’ fix it, I just use it. I like tinkering with the look and feel, but don’t want to deal with performance and stability and updates, etc. In the end I will stick with Typepad. I have used it for almost 5 years now. It just works.

That being said I spent the better part of this afternoon porting posts since January from WordPress back to Typepad. The migration process works, but is not as clean as I would have liked. Tags in WordPress show up as Categories in Typepad. That required some work. Then severing my domain hosting accounts hooks into my Powerz.org domain took some work since they controlled the DNS. After a DNS server migration my mail and blog are now safely working again. Now I have to wait for Google to rebuild my site index. Their goes my page rank’s but it isn’t the first time I have done that. Now lets see if I don’t want to change my mind again in 6 months. The reality is both systems are good, but I am happy where I am, and don’t want to mess with easy upkeep.

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Venting Over

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My last post was a big rant, but I think I articulated my frustration so maybe it isn’t technically a rant? Still really ticked off. I have a bunch of other posts I am working on that I just haven’t updated in July. I just felt compelled to update that last one after I read about it today. Hopefully more updates (and backdating some older posts I started writting two weeks ago) in the next few days.

More Blog Tweaking

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After a really bad night sleep I decided to lounge around on the computer this afternoon. I ended up looking through he WordPress Plugin directory and found a bunch of new plugins for my site. I found some cool analytics plugins. I also added some nifty plugins that does some magic and suggests related posts like the one someone is reading. I find it interesting to tweak the site to see what else I can do with it. Totally useless time spent but fun!

At night I ended up going to see The Hangover with Danny. The movie was very funny! We grabbed dinner afterward, but I refrained from drinking. I was happy to get home at a reasonable hour.

Web Updates

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I upgraded this site to WordPress 2.8 today. Thankfully the update was fully automated. I know I am technical but something like this blog I like to just work. Not a fan of tinkering with it. I also realized that my URL is not indexed with Google. I figured out the problem and fixed it. I am finally becoming more comfortable with using WordPress after almost 6 months. I am slowly deactivating my Typepad sites. Not 100% sure I am going to get rid of them completely but for now I am focusing on my WordPress setup that you happen to be reading now.