Frank Caico's Blog

This is my first post from my brand new iPhone!

Yay!

So I've been doing Physical Therapy for the tear in my right arm's biceps tendon and the tendonitis I got in my left arm (probably as a result of above said tear). They seem to be getting better, but its only been a week so I'm trying to be conservatively optimistic.

The end of the year is coming up pretty fast. I can't beleive its almost 2007! Time just seems to be accelerating. Hopefully this affect applies to winter too and not just the good times/weather.

Angela and I went to Art and Jess' games night this last weekend. I had a real good time - it was nice to just not worry about anything for a few hours. It gets harder and harder for me to just relax and not think of any and every thing that is going or could go wrong. I now understand why it always looked like the weight of the world was on my Dad's shoulders. I assume this would only be worse with an entire family depending on me.

 

Current CD:
Current DVD:
Current Book(s):
Currently Wishing for:

As part of my new commitment to keep my blog reasonably well updated (and for keeping up on all ya' all's blogs), I've found some really nifty blogging and commenting tools.

CoComment is a tool for keeping up with all those comments you've made on everyone else's blogs (well not *everyone's*, just those people whos blogs support CoComment. Incidentally, Mine does). Here's the basic LD from the CoComment web site:

There isn't even any software to install or website to register for! Give it a whirl!

I've also been playing with a few free off-line blogging tools. I've tried w.bloggar - which works very well if you know how to configure it for your blog and you don't mind crafting your html a bit to make it look "just so". It is a tad primitive, however and hasn't had an update for a while.

Zoundry lets you craft your blog entries and also allows you to create links to products which you might be blogging about. If people click through and purchase any of those products you actually get a kick back (which you can use to pay for part of your hosting - yeah right). This one has some potential....

Microsoft has a slick tool called "Windows Live Writer". Its completely WYSIWYG (just checkout this screenshot and tell me its not;)

it supports most blog protocols and has some cool features. I really like this one as it was almost like typing directly on my blog page and having it stick. However, its a tiny bit buggy so I'm not yet sure if this one is going to become my main blogging tool. I really hope Microsoft continues to develope this one, because its by far the coolest of the free products I've tried...

Yes, I know I've been gone a long time.  I am really pissed at my hosting company right now - they keep changing their server configuration and it keeps breaking my blog. 

Anyhow, I've had them move me to a different server, so hopefully there won't be any more significant problems.

In other news, I think I'm going to change the format of this blog over a bit.  I've been essentially using it as a photoblog anyhow, I think I want to make the pictures a little larger and appear better - rather than always being so small.   Hopefully that will work out.

I doubt anyone is reading this anymore, but if you are - thanks.

Frank

Due to problems with my web hosting service, my blog has been down for a few days.

Its back up now though. Did you notice it was missing? I'm guessing not.

Just read this article on the "Peak Oil" Theory. If you haven't heard of it, you might want to start with this article. Its quite frightening, and its something you should at least be familiar with.

Other than Alex, I didn't realize that anyone had actually really found my blog yet.  Its still in the early stages so I hadn't yet really started advertising its presence.  

Anyhow it started out on the free hosting site aspfreeserver.com.   Even though I have a custom domain name, when you reach that site, that custom name is subverted and you see the actual local domain name(bigfrank.aspfreeserver.com).  Well, I've since moved the site to a different free server (courtesy of CrystalTech).  This probably won't be permanent either, but that shouldn't matter because you should always be able to find my blog by going to http://www.frankcaico.net/Blog. 

So Please, if you are linking to my blog and you are using the aspfreeserver address, either for direct-blog-viewing or for RSS aggregation, please change your links so that people will continue to receive my incredibly drole and interesting commentary. 

Thank you muchly!

Why you get BlogMaps courtesy of FeedMap of course!

Peppers

So I got flickr set up such that I can blog photos (and accompanying text such as this) directly from flickr. They even let you fully customize the HTML/CSS that gets generated. Neat stuff! Good thing too, because thanks to the guillotine bug in IE, I couldnt get the entries to look right until I put the img block into a small table (which is just to sort of simulate float:left for the img).

I can't figure out whats wrong with this page.  If I look at it in IE and move the mouse around and hover over some of the links on the page, occasionally my Blog items will vanish.  If I mouse over them (or refresh the page) sometimes they return, but its quite annoying.Firefox doesn't suffer from this problem, I wonder if my CSS is slightly off and causes problems in IE, or if this is a strange IE bug.

Anyone?

Edit: Well, I found out what the strange problem was.  Apparrently I was caught by the infamous IE/Win Guillotine Bug. This nasty bug was causing div's that were 'float'ed to be clipped off the page entirely. Anyhow I worked around that problem for the moment so the page should look better now.

Okay, so this is my first attempt at theming dasBlog.  It wasn't easy either -- and I still have many kinks to work out.

I am also currently using w.Bloggar to upload blog items remotely in a nice little windows app.  It still seems to have some issues, but in general it does the job.

Now I just need to figure out the best solution for display photos on a custom page on this site.  If I had my druthers, I'd just post links into flickr and host the photos there (disk space is a premium here at frankcaico.com).  Anyone have any ideas?