Blog

Where Have I Been?

Wow! I didn’t realize it’s been three years since I had written a blog. I guess trying to continue previous “series” such as “Adventures in Home Ownership” would be pointless this far removed, but frankly that is probably, largely a causal factor in my lengthy absence from WordPress.

So, let’s see. What’s transpired from January 2016 until now? I’ve defiantly had further adventures in home ownership including breaking a toilet tank, having to have the cable company rewire the house due to signal loss, ladybug infestations, an abundance of birds and squirrels making our back deck home due to putting out feeders and having to chase away the neighbor’s cats because of it. I’ve lost a job due to corporate downsizing and been unemployed for four months before finding a new one just before the severance pay ran out. I joined and left a D&D group, then started my own using an online application called Roll20. I’ve started working nights. I started painting miniatures again for the first time in several years as well as started making table top scenery to use with them. I’ve made new friends and probably even lost some. I even became an uncle for the second time.

Some of the above will likely end up becoming blog topics since I’d very much like to start writing again. As for the name of the blog, I think I’ll keep it as is. I really don’t see spinning off a “v3”. Hell, I never even finished linking all the v1 titles in the V1 Archive list so I’m not about to have to do that with v2 as well. 😛

Until then, Happy 2019!

~JC

Looking Ahead To 2016

I’ve never been one to make New Year’s Resolutions, and I’m certainly not about to start now. Last year, I wrote about certain goals such as quitting smoking (which I’ve accomplished) and losing weight (which I’m still working on). I bought a house in 2015, so there’s lots to do with upkeep and projects I’d like to undertake to make improvements. My career is bit weird right now – on the one hand I was just given another promotion and moved from being hourly to salaried with a raise coming sometime within the next month or so, but on the other hand the product I support is being discontinued which could mean either having to start looking or could be an opportunity to train in something different soon.

I can’t say what 2016 will hold, but if it is even half as successful as 2015 was, it’ll be a good year.

~ JC

First Blog of 2015

I’ve obviously been pretty lackadaisical with blogging over the last several weeks. My last update was from November 16, 2014, titled WoW: Warlords of Draenor – First Impressions. I good bit of why I haven’t been blogging is due to playing the game on Sunday mornings instead of writing, to be perfectly honest. The other issue with not updating the blog as often is that the ideas I have for what I want to write about lately either fall into categories that I’d rather do a bit more research on before just throwing a blog together for the sake of it being Sunday and my normal blogging day or that I normally try to avoid, namely the topics of religion or politics, because all either one of those does is start arguments and flame wars.

Anyway, it is a new year, and while I’ve never been one to put stock in making New Year’s Resolutions, I do hope to accomplish some things in 2015, one of which, of course, is to blog more often. Topics may or may not include (in no particular order), vaping, gaming, religious/political commentary, book reviews, movie reviews, restaurant reviews, house hunting, or whatever the hell else strikes my fancy. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even get back to that short story/novella I started 10+ years ago and post it on here.

For now, I’m happy to report that 2014 was pretty good for me. Here’s to 2015, may it be a great year as well.

~ JC

Time to Make a Pressing Change To The Blog

For the last several years, I’ve written a blog just for fun; said blog, which I entitled Carlisle’s Chaotic Commentary, was hosted by Blogger (owned by Google). Over the last few months, I’ve become increasingly displeased with Blogger’s Dashboard. It hangs, freezes and also has gotten to the point where I have to manually edit the HTML code to get the page to display correctly. This became increasingly irritating for me since I switch between using my laptop and my Surface 2 tablet and trying to edit code on the tablet’s smaller screen (and without a mouse) can be a pain in the ass.

Also, since I’m now a subscriber to Microsoft’s Office 365, I wanted to find something that worked well with Word 2013’s built in Share feature specifically the “Post to blog” option. My attempts at doing this with Blogger proved to be less than exciting.

So, this past Friday, since I had the day off from work and had the spare time, I decided to register for a free Word Press account. I spent a couple of hours posting test blogs both manually and using the Post to blog feature in Word and I’m pretty happy with the results. Going forward, I’ll be blogging using Word and posting to Word Press instead of Blogger.

Granted, Blogger is 100% free, while certain features in Word Press only work if you subscribe to a paid account¹, but even so, Word Press (so far) has been more user friendly than Blogger has been lately.

For that matter, I’m also planning on researching the possibility of migrating data from Google to Microsoft Live. It’s odd to think it, but lately I’ve gotten to where I’d rather trust and use Microsoft’s cloud features than Google’s; perhaps it’s because I own both a laptop and a tablet running Windows 8.1. *wink*

If you are reading this on the Blogger site, thanks, but this will be the last post on http://jecarlisle.blogspot.com. If you’re reading this on the new Word Press version (https://jecarlisle13.wordpress.com), thanks for stopping by and I’ll work on getting more stuff posted here soon.