Category: Daily Blog

This is my Daily Blog category.

Moon Glow

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

Darrin went out to the car then came in the house and told me to come look at the moon.  I was like yeah yeah yeah I’ve seen it and he said no really, come look, it has a cool glow around it.

I went in the house and got my camera but it didn’t come out too great so I had to do a video in order to take a screenshot to get a good image.  The glow was so huge that my camera couldn’t get the whole thing in the frame so I just got the bottom of it.

I don’t know if this is visible to everyone but it certainly is visible here in Bakersfield right now.

I’m Almost Finished Restoring Posts from Blogger

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

When my blog crashed, I started restoring posts from YouSayToo from that date going back to July 2010 but then decided to go back from the beginning of my blogs time in 2007 which I had to get from my Blogger blog.  For the last couple of weeks I’ve been restoring 2007, 2008 and 2009.  I just finished restoring July 2009 and there are only a couple more months worth from 2009 on Blogger.

I think that when I am finished with all of this I will wipe Blogger clean because there are some posts that I purposely didn’t restore because they were terrible posts.  I’m shocked they got posted at all.  Since I didn’t delete them during the restoration I won’t remember what is what so I’ll just wipe it all.  I can export my blog from over here to there easily but I’ll wait until everything from YouSayToo is restored to do that.

This has been so hard on my wrists from copying and pasting and resting my wrists on the laptop and the hard gel mousepad from the desktop so I decided to start wearing my wrist splints which has helped today.  Unfortunately, I have no splint for my eyeballs which are so blurred from staring into the screen for 8 hours or more per day.

I don’t know how much longer it will take me to finish restoring everything but I’m working as hard as I can since I am one person.  To prevent this from happening again I’ve had my blog email me backups once a week which I will store on my desktop just in case it crashes again because I refuse to go through all of this one more time.

Restoration Is A Lot of Work

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

It has been a couple of weeks since my blogs database went corrupt and I’ve been working every day trying to restore everything that I’ve totally forgotten about everything else around me.  It’s a lot of work but I have other things in my life like books and tv shows and online friends, not to mention house work that has taken a back seat.

Today I decided that after I finish restoring December 2008 that I will read a book.  I read 2 chapters and it was very good to be able to do something else for a change.  I think I said in a previous post how boring the copying and pasting was getting so this was good for my psyche to do something else.

My next side project is to get a new banner.  I’d like to grab a pic of Xanapus from EverQuest and put him by himself in the banner.  What I would really like to do is to draw him to make him look more cartoonish than 3D gameish if you know what I mean.  I can’t draw so let’s hope I can figure out how to do it with Gimp hehe.

I’d also like to change my background, not just for the banner but the site itself.  It’s kind of boring me and since my site is going through some major changes I might as well change it’s look as well.

I’ve been so busy restoring that I haven’t been blogging much so this is sort of an update as to where things stand.  Give me another few weeks, it will all be back to normal and hopefully I can find a way to restore some of those comments too.

Since When Is Protecting Your Kids A Felony?

On By Michel McDonaldIn Amplify, Daily Blog1 Comment

The legal system in this country is so crooked. All this woman wanted to do was send her 2 daughters to a school that is in a safer area and she pays the price by becoming a felon. Since when is protecting your kids a felony? This is just madness. Please read the article and go over to the change.org page and sign the petition. Thanks.

Amplify’d from www.change.org

Gov. John Kasich: Pardon Kelley Williams-Bolar — she shouldn’t go to jail for protecting her kids
Targeting:
The OH State Senate, The OH State House, Rob Nichols (Communications, Gov. Kasich), see more…The OH State Senate, The OH State House, Rob Nichols (Communications, Gov. Kasich), and Gov. John Kasich (OH)
Started by:
C. Lord

“An Ohio mother of two was sentenced to 10 days in jail and placed on three years probation after sending her kids to a school district in which they did not live. Kelley Williams-Bolar was sentenced by Judge Patricia Cosgrove on Tuesday and will begin serving her sentence immediately. The jury deliberated for seven hours and the courtroom was packed as the sentence was handed down. She was convicted on two counts of tampering with court records after registering her two girls as living with Williams Bolar’s father when they actually lived with her. The family lived in the housing projects in Akron, Ohio, and the father’s address was in nearby Copley Township. Additionally, Williams-Bolar’s father, Edward L. Williams, was charged with a fourth-degree felony of grand theft, in which he and his daughter are charged with defrauding the school system for two years of educational services for their girls. The court determined that sending their children to the wrong school was worth $30,500 in tuition. – Dr. Boyce Watkins

As punishment for doing everything in her power to keep her children safe, Ms. Williams-Bolar, a single mother with no previous criminal record, has been made a felon by Ohio judge Patricia Cosgrove. In addition to jail time, a large fine and probation, Ms. Williams-Bolar’s felony conviction has also robbed her of her future.

“‘Because of the felony conviction, you will not be allowed to get your teaching degree under Ohio law as it stands today. The court’s taking into consideration that is also a punishment that you will have to serve.” – Judge Patricia Cosgrove

Although Ms. Williams-Bolar had nearly completed her education to become a teacher, under Ohio law felons are not permitted to teach. She has been robbed of the opportunity to elevate her life and the lives of her family through her own hard work. She has essentially handed a life sentence for attempting to protect her children.  In a time of overwhelming economic disadvantage for so many US citizens, are loving single mothers like Williams-Bolar truly the enemy our court system should be making examples of in this way?

Ms. Williams-Bolar’s attorneys are currently preparing for an appeal. Please sign this petition to let Gov. Kasich know that you do not feel that Kelley Williams-Bolar’s punishment appropriately fits her crime, and that you both support and demand a full pardon.

Read more at www.change.org
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/ansvq

Bored with Copying Posts

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

I’ve been copying my old posts back over here from YouSayToo for almost a week now and at first I felt under a lot of pressure to get it all copied and was hoping it would go really fast but now I’m just so bored with it that I don’t care how long it will take. I mean on one hand it’s all old information, who cares anymore? But on the other hand, I can see people are still looking for certain posts about certain old news stories like the girl with the stars on her face and the Elvira posts.

I have over 200 posts copied and even though I want all 1700+ of my posts back here, I don’t really care anymore. I’m sure it will all build up again eventually, it’s just the principle, you know? I want them all back but at the same time… it’s soooo boring. You have no idea lol.

I woke up early yesterday so I could get as many done as I could and I got 30 done then X-Play came on and then Attack of the Show and next thing you knew I had stopped working and paying attention to my blog and focused on that. I needed that break.

I’ve been meditating every day after lunch before going back to work and that seems to help calm my mind down but it doesn’t get rid of the boredom lol.

I don’t mean to complain, I’m just venting. If I was that bored with it I would stop dead in my tracks but I really want to keep going and get everything back here where it belongs.

I found out that my xanapus.wordpress.com blog has blog posts too but all the images are gone. Well that’s probably because I deleted them from my directory here because I’m having to upload them all over again so I might as well save space. So when I’m finished with this blog then I’ll have to export the file and import it over there so everything matches up again.

Well, I just finished copying 10 posts, I guess I should do 10 more before lunch then hopefully get another 10 or 20 before Attack of the Show comes on. Maybe I should turn some music on and that will take some of the boredom away.  Probably not but you never know.

Bummed But Hopeful

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

I’m a little bummed out right now. My KewlRank number keeps going down more and more every day since I lost my database. I don’t mean to sound like a bummer talking about this and I’m sure rank doesn’t mean a lot to most people but it means something to me.

That is a bummer lol.

But since I’ve been copying my old posts back over, it looks to me like that little line is coming back up. So even though I dropped like a brick, I see it coming back up little by little. It took a long time to get over 5000 and seeing that number drop bums me out but on the other hand look how fast it’s rising again. I’m sure before you know it I will have 1200 posts back on my site (despite my 1700 that I had before) and my number will be over 5000 again and I will be as happy as can be again.

I know that I have a few regular visitors and I love them for it but that’s not really where my traffic is from, it’s the Google visitors that really make my numbers go up and as long as my old links start disappearing from the search engines and be replaced with new links then I know I will be ok again. I will bounce back.

I got 27 posts copied over today and I’m up to 167 posts from 1700+.  Even though it’s not going very fast, it’s the only pace I can take since I’m only one person. I had hoped that I could do a couple hundred per day but that’s just too many considering I have to edit them all over again and add tags and give them all categories. It’s a lot of work. More than most people would probably want to do and I’m sure if that happened to someone else they would’ve thrown in the towel by now. See how dedicated I am?

Tomorrow is yet another day and I will work hard to get hopefully 30 more posts copied. Who knows, I might work overtime and get 40.

My Blog Progress

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

Things aren’t going as fast as I had hoped they would. My projection last night and this morning was that I would get at least 200 posts copied from YouSayToo but that just wasn’t the case.

Last night, in just maybe 4 hours, I had copied 18 posts so that is where I got my estimation. I figured it would be so much easier today and I would have gotten way more than last night. I have only gotten 27 copied over.

The thing is, it’s so boring lol. I mean, I have the YouSayToo website loaded in a tab and my blog in a tab so it’s not difficult switching tabs to copy from one site then paste to the other. It’s all the editing I have to do and adding tags and putting each post in a category and this and that and the other. Plus there are images that I have to use that I have to upload all over again because even though the images are all in my blog uploads folders, they don’t show up because it’s a new database. I could go on and on but no matter how long it takes I will keep at it until it is all done.

The problem is, people are still coming to my blog from the search engines with old posts that no longer exist. How do I tell the search engines that my old links don’t work anymore? I can’t. So all I can do is hope that people do a search for themselves on my blog to see if they can find what they are looking for and go from there.

My toolbar has a notification explaining what happened so if they see it great, if they don’t then there is nothing else I can do. Tomorrow is another day so we will see how many I can copy then. I already have all of January 2011 and December 2010 copied so maybe I can do 1 month per day. Yeah, that will make it easier. Let’s hope November 2010 was uneventful in the blogging department :p lol.

Fixing My Blog

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

Yesterday when I got on the computer I discovered that my database had issues and I went half of the day without any blog posts but my blog was still functional, sort of. I called my web host and they fixed the database but could only give me their backup from before December 23rd. I thought, ok that’s fine. I’ll only have a month of posts to restore, no big deal.

Unfortunately it wasn’t that easy because as I was restoring the 2nd post everything went wrong. The backup that they installed was still corrupt and everything disappeared. Not just the posts but my entire blog became useless. I couldn’t do anything at all.

Today I got back on the phone with them and thought it was all fixed when I hung up but it was far from fixed. I didn’t call them back but instead I re-opened my support ticket and sent them an email telling them it’s still not working. I got tired of waiting so I just decided that they weren’t going to be able to help me so I’ll just start over.

I created a new database and started from scratch. I got most of my ad’s back up so I get paid for them and while I was at it I figured, while I’m starting over I might as well change the permalinks. It’s the way the website address (URL) looks. Instead of being xanapus.com/blog/?p=(numbers) it’s going to have the date and the name of the post in the url. That makes it easier so if I have that issue again with my database then I can easily add the posts without having to contact the companies I do posts for with a new url because they will automatically be the same as before.

The downside is that I had over 1700 posts. I had more than twice that amount of comments and they are all gone now. The only way I can get any comments back is if new people comment. I was fortunate to have 616 of my blog posts copied over to YouSayToo and I had about 609 posts over on Blogger so all I have to do is copy and paste those posts.

The good thing about being able to copy my posts back manually is that I can edit which ones I copy over. Like all those Roku posts, I can finally just delete all the useless posts and make 1 new post review of the product.

The bad thing is that my arms and wrists aren’t going to be too happy with me. I’m already in pain in my left arm and both my hands from the carpel tunnel syndrome. This is going to take a lot of time to do but I will get as many posts back up as I possibly can.

I have spent the last 4 years making this blog what it was, I am not about to throw in the towel just because my database is corrupt and I wasn’t smart enough to do backups. Although, I will be doing monthly backups from now on lol.

My widget bar on the right doesn’t have everything in the same order as it was and I’m probably missing a few things but those are things that I thought might have been there.  I’ve also changed the paragraph style so they are fully aligned like a newspaper or book.  I think it makes it easier to read.  That has always bothered me but 1700+ posts made it difficult to want to change every post.  Now I can since I have to manually add them.

Well, tomorrow is another day and hopefully I can get as many posts added as I can before my arms fall off.  I copied 18 posts tonight but that was in a very short amount of time.  Tomorrow I will have the whole day to get as many copied before I get too tired to go on.

So until tomorrow…

New Xanapus` Lair

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

I have some good news and I have some bad news.  The bad news is that my database was too corrupt for me to fix so I have to start all over from scratch.  The good news is that I was smart enough to back up my blog over on Blogger last year but that doesn’t give me over a years worth of blog posts back.  However, I did also send my blog posts over to YouSayToo as well which means I will have those missing posts.  Thankfully.

So I will be able to manually copy and paste my entire blog but it will take time.  I’m not sure if I will copy every single post back but I will try my best.  I have to copy all of my paid blog posts before I will copy my regular posts just so I can get credit for those that I wrote all month-long.

Wish me luck lol.

Why I Stopped Writing My Book

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

I stopped writing my book for several reasons and here they are.

I started writing and I think I got 3 chapters written and edited and typed storylines for 3 or 4 other chapters then I quit. I stopped writing because I had to start working on finishing the Christmas stockings but I didn’t work on those all day long, only a few hours so really that is no excuse for why I stopped.

One other reason I stopped writing my book is because I started hearing these horror stories of other people’s childhoods (that’s what my book is based on) and I started thinking that my childhood was mild compared to these people. So I started to think that people may read my book and think that I had it good. Even though I had a rough childhood, other people had worse than I did so my story pales in comparison and it just made me feel really tiny in the scheme of things.

I saw the movie “Riding In Cars With Boys” with Drew Barrymore and she wrote a book about her life and she had to have her ex-husband sign a paper so she could publish the book. Well, there is no way I’m gonna get any of the people I am writing about to sign their name on a piece of paper agreeing to let me publish them because I say some horrible things about almost every family member who did something rotten to me. I just know that they would ask me what I wrote before signing and I know they would never give me permission when they hear what I wrote. Plus I don’t speak to my stepdad or sister anymore and I know those greedy bastards would do what Drews ex-husbands wife would do, they would make me give them money first.

So before I continue writing I’m thinking of changing it from an autobiography to fiction and just change a few things. Obviously I’m gonna have to change names, that way I won’t get sued and I’m probably going to have to change the way things happened so it doesn’t seem too familiar to people.

I am not a writer and I only have 5 years experience as a reader (of fiction) to sit down and start writing a book so that’s why I stopped. I think that I need to keep reading other books to give me more of an understanding about how books work before I start writing again. And who knows, maybe I might take an online course in writing to help.

We will see how it goes. I’m not giving up on it, just putting it on the back burner for now.