Lee.org

You might not even notice a difference but I changed how I share my feed with Twitter and Facebook. I used to use Twitterfeed.com. It’s a fine service that reads my RSS feed every couple hours. Now I’m using the Publicize feature of WordPress Jetpack. Let’s hope it looks good and works well.

I don’t like it when content disappears. I go to lengths to make sure my files are backed up. I love that Lee.org leaves a permanent (-ish) trail of my doings. The notion of archiving videos have been problematic because it is just so easy to point to Youtube or Vimeo and forget about it. And video files are big. But storage is cheap, and when times change and those links eventually go dead, there’s often nothing to do but wonder.

I am now making a special effort to archive videos shown on the site. I was able to download about 100 of the 150 or so videos pointed to on my site. The others are lost, some forever. As I began the archiving task, I thought, “Phht, I’m 50 for 50. Why am I doing all this work?” Then as I got to the older archives, I started not finding videos. And when I say ‘older’, I mean just 2 years old. What do you think the hit rate is going to be in 5 years or 10 years?

A good Youtube Video Downloader was much harder to find than I expected. My final choice: 10youtube.com. All the rest looked very suspicious, like they were going to put malware on my computer.

A good way to embed video on WordPress was much harder to find than I expected. I finally found VideoJS – HTML5 Video Player for WordPress. It is easy to use and open-source from videojs.com.

You and I can now look forward to seeing more content on Lee.org and less of this:

Michael has been working on a flaming sword. He’s really got the thing dialed in very nicely! Custom welding, some custom machined parts, a novel filling mechanism, a safe pressure vessel, butane powered. Win all around!

Today is a good day. I am cooking bacon. That is all.

I met a guy named John who has plenty of education but from a school that wasn’t accredited. Now he’s trying to get into a master’s program like I am. So he figured out how to test out of almost all of a college degree!

This is useful if you need to pick up some classes that you already know, or if you are a super genius and can study for college at home, or need just the right summer class to round out your prerequisite classes. I am in the last camp.

Here are some links that point to some great Credit by Exam resources. John used these programs to great effect. I haven’t used them yet but certainly might this summer.

great link for college degree planning       Degree Forum is the site for those people utilizing credit by exam and applying those credits to degrees

Excelsior College in Albany     The largest of the schools accepting up to 120 credits.for their degree programs

Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey  TESC also takes 120 credits toward their Bachelor’s degrees

http://www.bain4weeks.com/     The first website dedicated to Credit by Examiniation

http://www.free-clep-prep.com  An excellent resource for free   CLEP DSST ECE prep materials

Ugh. My computer has been getting slower and slower over the past few weeks. I think I figured out why. I am told by the CrystalDiskInfo program that the hard drive has a lot of uncorrectable sectors. She is dying.

I ordered a new laptop last week, it’ll be here in a week. So I decided to not write anything important to my desktop computer, wait for the laptop and make it my primary computer. I’m a bit freaked out at this. Change can be hard. Hell, I still have a land line phone.

Last week my beloved AG Neovo monitor died. I’ve had it for about 10 years. I had it repaired for $150 a couple years ago but it would be silly to spend another $150 on fixing an old 19″ monitor when I can buy a new on for about the same price.  Now this week my desktop computer is dying. It’s I don’t like it one bit.

I considered doing the following: get a small (128GB) SSD drive, a large (1TB) physical drive, reinstall XP, go from there. But why do it, really? I’m not a computer professional any more. My phone almost is as powerful as my desktop computer. I tell ya why I’d do it. Because I’m comfortable with it. It works. But the times, they change.

The dream of flight often brings tears to my eyes. Case in point:

local version:

I had been using Verdana (with a fallback to Arial and Sans-Serif) on the blog, now I’m using Open Sans (fallback to Sans-Serif) from Google Webfonts. What do you think?

Last week I tried using Vollkorn from Google Webfonts. But it was too curvy and loopy. My eyes tired quickly winding my way across the screen. I think Open Sans is the slider hamburger of fonts, it just slides right down your… umm eyes. eiw. Ok, bad analogy. ;-)