I do not have a single thing on my mind for writing, so here I go, roughing it in to the Blog. I'll start with yesterdays activities. It is my weekend with Amber! Scots cousins Lexi, Braydon, and a Baby Lucas, spent the weekend here too. I took them for a walk to the park. I brought two soccer balls. Along came a few of Scot's friends from School (Parents obviously lack self-control with speech).
One of the goals were flipped on its side. Additionally, the field was to big for the younger children. So we played with one goal. Quickly, the girls formed a team against the boys. The girls were fool of energy, "Yay, girls rock," while the boys were very humble, "Okay". I played Goalie (Mistake, my knee is still lacking strength). Now, having one net, I thought the teams would simply blend together and race the ball to the goal (Meaning, I'm in trouble). After all, both teams are trying to go in the same direction. It didn't work that way at all. If the girls had the ball, boys took it away from the goal. When the boys had the ball, the girls tried taking it away from the goal. It was good exercise.
It didn't take long for the girls to loose their encouragement. The boys were slaughtering them on the field. To keep the game going, I intervened by making the oldest girl and oldest boy Captains. I used the traditional Rock-Paper-Scissors to decide who gets first pick and the looser gets first ball. The boy won first pick so Lexi won first ball.
So the pick started, the boy picked the best of the boys. The kid was fast and had amazing control of the ball. Lexi picked Amber. the boy picked the next fastest boy. He was a good player too but he often let the ball lead to far in front of him while traveling. Lexi picked Shauna. That is when I realized, we are forming the same teams again! I didn't say anything, I watched as the boys vs girls team was formed again. In the end, Lexi had chosen her brother, the only boy on the team. He refused to play on the Girls team. Finally, one brave boy stepped forward and said, "I'll play on the girls team and we're going to win". Clearly, if his reservations always remain the same, all the ladies are going to love this boy later in life!
I am thinking about the week ahead. I have court this week, hoping for one more day a week with Amber and to have Child Support reassessed. No more high paying job right now. Going to family court always turns my stomach. Hearing how the others talk, the arguing, and typically the disregard for the Children bothers me. Usually the thought going through my mind is a question, "What am I doing here?". On the other hand, when you can't reach an agreement, what else can be done?
Thursday I find out about the Boilermakers Union. That is the path I am considering to take. Similar income, similar benefits, a lot less hours of work for the income. It has been a longtime since I worked on Industrial Boilers, but I know they are still busy!
I am still considering talking to an infectious disease doctor. Especially after the way my knee feels today. The Orthopedic, after hearing my negative view on surgery, suggested seeing one. He told me, "In the thirty years I have been a doctor, I only seen one other case where lymes disease affected a knee. It has been feeling better but today it is having an effect on walking. I believe it is from playing Goalie yesterday too.
Things have changed a bit online. I just realized this doing some research. I need to revamp the website a little. There is duplicate content from the design. It is off to a good start though. I like the feel so far but I wonder how Google's Farmer Update will effect the types of Websites I generally build. It will still make a good sale, if the traffic is there and it is easy to run. I won't be able to develop a spider that automatically adds content without a human editor. That was great on the now tanked Articleboards.com. The articles need some meat and a human editor to make sure they're not stuffed with keywords to inflate search engines. Quality works.
My new approach is forming. It is going to based on the Wiki concept. There will be a hierarchy in memberships. Writers and members are two for variations, for example. Writers, once they demonstrate they will participate and they write decent content, will be able to simply act as their own editor. When they log-in, they can post content. In addition, they can edit their content. Members can only post comments. Now there is one debate on my mind. Should that much freedom be given to writers? I could have them pending but then there needs to be an editor who has to read all the articles and news submitted. That's a lot of work. Writing this makes me lean a bit to the later of the two. Considering all the reading and verifying makes me lean to the first.
Articleboards was great. I built a spider that took advantage of RSS (Full Posts only). The spider would check, every hour, the RSS feeds added to a backend database. When new content was found, it would check all the articles in the current website. If it didn't already exist, it added the content and made a new page. It seemed perfect but it didn't take long for me to realize, writers do not have loyalty to their rss feeds. At least those that allowed full distribution of their work. For example, someone with an Automotive blog and a feed would sometimes write about problems they had with their computer. Why is this a problem? Their rant about a computer problem would appear on Articleboards Automotive column. It was shocking how often that happened. Reliable sources for content, even with allowing their advertisements to display, do not allow those syndication rights. While it grew to thousands of content pages in a few months, the sources of content caused a big problem.
So, here I am with a new design. Maybe an editor is just something that cannot be overlooked. Someone has to assess the content and the placement besides the writer. I'll debate this a little more. I have the login section ready in the background but I'm still deciding on the authority levels and writers directly adding content. One bad apple could really make things ugly.
More Terrible News about Japan
I heard some sad News about Japan last night. First there was an earthquake, then a killer Tsunami, and now the threat of a Nuclear meltdown. CNN reported, because the Nuclear Power station had no water, they were forced to use salt water, in a desperate attempt to cool the reactor. The salt water caused Hydrogen Gas to build and caused the explosion. Supposedly, it is not similar to Chernobyl, but I wouldn't want to be nearby.
I did some research on Cancer and put something together yesterday! America is leading the world with some Cancer treatments. That might help the economy and save lives!
Clocks an hour ahead. Taking Amber to Church then going to my mothers for dinner!
