It’s been a while since my last post. I wonder who even reads my ramblings here?

The year seems to be going quickly — very busy at work makes time past quickly. April is already here. I’m now driving to work — but that now helps me work longer and harder… get more done too. Instead of getting home earlier, I’m actually working later, for I don’t need to worry about catching the last bus, or about rain if I’m riding my moped. But then, I rarely get to work before 1 pm now.

Now, I’m taking the bus once again, as we had a bit of a snowstorm yesterday… hopefully the last blast of winter. March was abnormally warm and with at least 2 days that had record rain falls. The weekend was like plus 10 degrees C. Now, it’s -3 and icy out. Not too much snow though — 1 to 2 cm. But too icy to drive home last night.

So… what’s new? I discovered this thing called Camfrog — basically chat rooms with music playing… and live videos of people from around the world. Most seem to be in the Philippines. I was a bit surprised at first — attracted by some rooms, with maybe 4-5 girls in the room, and 50+ guys… and the girls show themselves, show their breasts, teasing… and some masturbating, touching themselves. And the guys want them to show more — and the girls smile and laugh and comply. Most of the rooms are not in English though.

Some of the shows by the girls were very good — making me horny a bit and wanting to go home and make love with my wife. But I wonder, why the girls do this? I’m thinking one reason — many want to find husbands. Another… maybe they really enjoy it. I wonder if they’re getting paid? For I’m not paying anything.

Then there’s also to find fame. There was one girl, Miki her name — and she gave the most wonderful shows — live masturbation that she really looked like she enjoyed. I think she’s from Japan. But now I don’t see any more of her shows. I think it helped her become famous, for now she says she’s in the Netherlands — and showing her pictures on magazine covers. I think showing herself like this, masturbating on camera — it helped her road to fame.

But then again, many of the shows are actually recordings — for their too good to be real. I find the ones in the English speaking North American rooms are more like that. If some is very beautiful in those rooms — it’s probably a recording. There are real women in those rooms too, but if the woman are showing their breasts and sweet, soft, wet “pussy”… the woman are usually not that attractive. This is actually a way for people to feel more attractive. I wonder if fat, unattractive women are better lovers, better in bed than the sexy looking girls?

The Philippine rooms though — the “owner” of the room (each room has an owner who moderates the room and make sure the rules are followed) — he will usually ask the girls to show their face (to make sure their over 18) and ask them something to make sure their video feed is live.

At first I didn’t know what to make of Camfrog, for many of the rooms were just playing music — at first I liked some of it… but now find the music quality is pretty bad. At first I liked it, for I finally discovered a way to listen to Asian music — Philippine, Japanese, Thai, Chinese. Even though I don’t understand it, I love Asian music… especially sung by a girl. So, I discovered nice music playing in these Camfrog rooms.

BUT… last week I got some spam email from mp3.com — really I used to love mp3.com until it was destroyed by the music companies. Anyway… it pointed me at “last.fm” — so I checked it out. And I discovered lots of Asian music on last.fm — and much better quality than on Camfrog.

Camfrog, btw, has 2 versions — a completely free version, and a version that you pay one time for — which gives a few more features.

Ok… so this journey of discovery — it went from one spam email talking about Camfrog, to finding nude shows and Asian music on Camfrog, to then finding better Asian music on last.fm — and now I have a new favourite singer that I found on last.fm … BoA — which I think stands for “Best of Asia”… sounds a bit conceded, but it’s a very talented girl. I think she’s from Korea, but very popular in Japan. And now she’s trying to become famous over here, on youtube and the states, with her first English album. She has one song: “Eat you up” that’s very good… and great dancing on the video too.

Also — on Camfrog I found some new Philippine friends. Not in the adult rooms, but just in normal rooms. I don’t know how — I just visited the room and later they found me in the room and sent me instant messages. I think really their looking for husbands, but I make it clear that I’m already married. Still, they want to be friends, and it’s interesting, learning about their lives.

Today is 08/04/09. It is now 2:15 AM
ohh… I wrote this 12 hours ago but just posting it now… a busy day in the office… take care… xoxo Ron

1 month ago he tried to have this meeting, but gave up with phone problems after wasting 30 minutes. A week later he had the meeting again, an one hour meeting — but he felt rushed, for he had to leave exactly after an hour. Today he covered exactly the same info he covered 2 weeks ago — except this time he did it in 40 minutes instead of an hour (skipping some of the material)… He thought it would take him 10 minutes for the review. And now had some time for questions. With better planning… does he realize how much time he wasted by taking twice as much time as necessary!! He’s a great talker though and also has great thoughts.

Oh well… I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to work for these new managers, for they seem to bring a lot of stress with me. After 2 1/2 days filled with too much meetings and talking — it just completely exhausts me and makes it hard for me to accomplish much in the second half of the week.

Ok… rant off… breath…. in…. out… exhale…

Downtown there is a light dusting of snow tonight, but not too much… but Mia said the home is barried under a lot of snow, so I’ll have to shovel it again when I get home. At least tomorrow I have no meetings scheduled, so I can sleep in and get to work whenever.

Ouch… this MacBook of mine… the stupid case cuts into my wrists as I type. It seems stupid that Apple makes so many mistakes in their products yet few people complain. I bought Mac OS X 10 when it first came out and it was garbage — very buggy. Things started to stabilize around 10.2 and get better — but I needed to pay money for it again — they never offer upgrades. I kept 10.2 for a long time, skipping 10.3 — and got 10.4 with my current MacBook.

Then I got the first video ipod they made — it was garbage. The videos often freeze on me. The battery is garbage… if I don’t use it everyday, it just refuses to work anymore until I do a few hard reboots and charge it… And the worse part of it — if you touch the screen, it scratches. Apple is quite bad this way — releasing products long before they’re ready. They look great, but they are not meant to last. I remember — I bought the Newton when it came out… and it was complete garbage too. It relied on hand-writing recognition, but it just didn’t work.

And now this MacBook of mine. The nice white case is getting very dirty — marks on the monitor side of the case… like maybe there’s magnets or something inside… just a terrible design. And the worse part — the screen gets scratched by the keyboard! If I carry the MacBook in my laptop back — and if it’s tightly packed… the keyboard has scratched the screen. Again… just a terrible design.

True… Apple stuff looks great… but it’s overpriced and looks great when new… but after being used, it doesn’t work that well. People seem to love the new iPhone — but I just don’t trust Apple stuff… they’re never as good as they seem.

Oh… and tonight I grabbed a bunch of twitter ids. I got SexualRiver, SensualRiver, and LoveRon — all to go with the new domain names I got. Plus one for my real name too. It’s really amazing how Twitter is taking off, as I often hear about it on the news. So, I want to make sure I get the names to go with my sites.

And I’m making some progress with SensualRiver.com (or SexualRiver.com — what do you prefer?). I installed another Wordpress database for it… actually quite easy using Godaddy. So I can have a separate theme for it. That’s one reason I almost missed my subway train — as I was discovering a lot of Adult wordpress themes out there. So, I’m thinking it will come together very nicely.

That was a big problem with my MiaRon.com site — it was just too hard to update. I was manually editing the html — and it just became too time consuming and error prone to add more videos and pages.

Now that I’ve discovered Wordpress, it should all get much better… wish me luck…

Ohh… but I’m finding that my nuderiver.com site is getting too slow now… I need to figure out why.

Good night and sweet dreams… time for bed now…

Love and kisses,
your Ron

But then I think I figured it out — the Grammy awards!

For the Grammy’s had a very pregnant and talented MIA singing in a rap song. And, it just so happens, my wife’s name on my porn site is Mia too, and I have some of her pregnant photos up (nudes). So, I think people searching for a pregnant Mia stumbled across my site.

At first, I started to panic and thought about taking the site down. The site has many names… easiest is: MiaRon.com … combining her name Mia with mine, Ron.

So… I almost took the site down, for I worry, if it gets too popular, someone who knows us might find us. But then, I worked long and hard and figured out how to block the site from people with Canadian Internet addresses — for we live in Canada. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s good enough. And it adds the safety factor that we need… and this will also help me to get Mia’s permission to put more videos up.

Mia, by the way, isn’t my wife’s real name, but it’s a name I choose… for, of course, for a porn type site, I don’t want to use her real name. My real name is Ron though.

Our porn site — it was something I created a long time ago… I think about 3 years ago, back in 2006. It was before I started my blog and before I discovered Wordpress. The idea behind it was mostly something to help spice up our sex lives. I told Mia it was to help us get some extra income — but the money never really came. And I never really did it for money.

One idea — a fantasy I have… is to share my wife — like to try “swinging”. Mia isn’t open yet to the idea — but maybe someday, after the children have grown up. Mia can’t really disassociate love and sex though. I’m not sure if I can either.

But we can both watch porn movies to help get us in the mood for love making — so, I think that’s not very different from having sex in a room with other people also having sex.

People have fetishes — and I suppose mine is to be watched when making love… and to be able to other people’s juices flowing by watching us. I think it stems from my childhood — never feeling myself attractive, always being picked last for sports. Even at work too — even though I survived many layoffs, I have been the last to get a promotion.

In person, face to face, I have never really been pursued by a girl/woman. On the internet though, with my writing, I was able to win a couple hearts and my current wife.

So… all this has lead me to creating my porn site — feeling a sense of excitement that right now, somewhere in the world, someone might be watching my videos and having an orgasm as they watch me and Mia’s orgasms. That is exciting, safe, and beautiful — orgasms helping to create more beautiful orgasms.

My second “fetish” is that I find myself attracted most to Asian girls — something about them that I’ve always found so beautiful. Like a shyness, sweetness, tenderness, closeness with nature and the past… just so very beautiful. Maybe it’s not what they really are though — but more a fantasy and illusion, but that’s ok. And this too stems from my past — seeing myself as shy, an outsider. I always feel like I’m in my own world, different from those around me.

I wonder… when I was in China, I felt completely free and open as I walked the streets and took photos of people. I took lots of photos — 5000 photos over 3 weeks… half family related though and half of strangers. I was watching this street photography lesson on youtube — about how to just move about in busy New York and take photos of people and things happening without people noticing.

And yet, in Toronto, I would be too self-conscious and unconfident to do it. I’ll try it this year though. And I think it will be ok — once I get over the initial fear. It’s about being confident and not act like I’m doing anything wrong. Of course, especially if there is anything sexual or if children are involved, people might get upset and defensive. I need to make a profession website to showcase my photos — and the get some business cards made. So then, if anyone stops on the street, I can give them my card and they can visit the site to see the photos.

In China, I would take photos of mothers and of children, and then show them the photo on the camera — and they we’re all so happy and excited to see the photos. I loved that. It also helped to have my 5 year old daughter with me — for then I wasn’t just a single strange man. And she helps relax me and give my life purpose.

Being a father is a very important part of who I am.

So, I’m many things. A father. A husband. A software developer. A nudist. A porn star/director wannabe. A future possible swinger. I love nature. And I try to minimize stress.

Now with the jump in visitors to my home-made porn site, I want to devote more time to it — get new content up… and it needs a redesign to make it easier to add content. I want to make it into a blog type format. Do you find my blog too slow to access though?

But, I’ve never really liked the name MiaRon.com — for people don’t really know what it means… I tried other names too, like LovelyPenis.com (I sort of like that one :-), MyAsianLover.com, MyNaturalPorn.com, NaturalHomemadePorn.com … but these names never really seemed true to what I want the site to be about.

I want the site to be about more than just home-made porn. I want it to be about love. I want it to show a more tender type of sex… making love between lovers. I never liked the coarseness of calling it “fucking”… for that’s not true to my character.

It’s not about mainstream, cold porn. I want it to be about making love. MakingLove.com was already taken though. And I want it to be about the beauty of having sex — the beauty of giving and receiving a beautiful orgasm.

I looked up “Making Love” and found it is synonymous with “Sexual Love”. I then looked up “Sexual” and came across “Sensual”.

And I like the definition of “Sensual”: “Of, relating to, or providing gratification of the physical and especially the sexual appetites. Suggesting sexuality. Giving of pleasure to the body and senses rather than the mind. Having a strong liking for physical, especially sexual pleasures. Of the body and senses rather than the mind or soul.”

And this seems very applicable for what I want the site to be about. I want NudeRiver.com to be more about my thoughts, my mind. And I want my porn site to be about sharing orgasms… sharing physical and sexual pleasures… and to help people satisfy their sexual appetites.

I love the “River” theme of my site too… for River is a metaphor for our lives. I truly believe life is like a River. NudeRiver is about me being completely open and honest and sharing my life with you.

So… I bought a new domain name on the weekend… actually 3. I bought SensualRiver.com, SexualRiver.com, and Love-Ron.com. SexualRiver.com was just because it’s more explicit and easier to remember than SensualRiver.com… they will both point to the same site. Love-Ron.com is a future possible name — something more personal, like letters from me to you… And love is something I truly believe we should share.

Take care now… hope you like my new site names… and over the coming days I’ll create the new site.

Love always…

Yesterday was a holiday — Family Day… I think it’s only the second Family Day we’ve had in Canada… a nice little perk given by the government, and in February when many people are feeling down. Last year though, my company gave us Family Day off, but then took away one of the Easter weekend days. But, checking the company holiday schedule, somehow, it looks like this year we get both.

The economy though is falling apart. Last month my company laid off 10% of it’s people — 750 people. That’s small in comparison to the job losses in the news everyday. Right now I worry about GM, as they announced last night the plan to layoff another 20,000 workers in the USA — about 50,000 worldwide. It is scary, as things get worse and more and more people are losing jobs each day.

And I worry about myself, as my debt load is too high. I’m thinking I’ll be ok, if I can survive the next 2 months. But I don’t know what I’ll do if I ever lose my job. I’ve had the same job now for almost 20 years!! Finally I got a company parking spot last fall. In all my life, I’ve never experienced anything like what’s going on now. Worse case, I lose my job and lose my house, and all my saving vanish.

I’m hoping and praying that smart people will figure out how to get out of this economic mess we find ourselves in now.

Losing my job though — though sad and scary… I will also treat it as an opportunity to do something new. It would give me a chance to focus more on my website and photography endeavours. I will treat losing my job as a positive. It is sad though, when giving 20 years of your life to a company, they can just toss you aside.

I like being a software developer, for I create something. I would hate being a salesman, for they don’t create anything… they just move from one sale to the next… always striving for money.

Oh… but I didn’t think about the Mac… for I’ll have to do something completely different if they want this to work on a Mac as well.

I have a lot of new things to write about too. My 100 year old Aunt finally moved into a nursing home 1 week ago. I spent most of the long weekend moving some of her things. We have to have everything moved out of her apartment by the end of March. And I worry a bit — for the big furniture… a sofa and bedroom set… are still left to move.

Last week, my home-made porn site was getting much more visits than normal… hits jumped from about 100/day to over 3000 hits last Monday…

I’ll continue this train of thought in my next post…

First off, I figured out how to include files on my page. I’m still not sure why it didn’t work when I tried including the file directly — using a php include thing. But then I discovered an include-it plugin. So… I installed it and it worked like a charm.

It allows me to create a news and link page where I concentrate on the format. And then I just include files for the content. I see myself updating this content numerous times each day, so I want something easier than always editing the page.

So, my workflow now is, Google Alerts come in to my email. I filter through the email — and the ones which I decide are good enough … I add them to some text files I created… creating a text link that makes some sense for the content.

I then created a windows ftp macro which copies the files from my computer to my website… All very nice. And it allows me to use my editor of choice: emacs.

I created a half dozen or so buckets to organize the alerts find… things like Nude Photography, Erotic Stories, Nude News, Being Nude, Nude Modelling.

Then I visited statcounter.com — for I use them and love them for tracking my site MyAsianLover.com … I tried paying once, but now just use the free service… it’s good enough. And I discovered they have a wordpress plugin now. So, I downloaded and installed it on my nuderiver.com site.

LOVE IT!!… for I now finally have stats running on my site. It might be discouraging if I find I’m not getting any visitors. But hopefully, as I work on the site, I will see the visitor count increase… and this will in turn encourage me to update the site.

In this void, where I create something, write something, but get so little feedback on it — it’s hard to know if anyone out there is even looking at my creations. With stats, knowing there is are real people out there reading this — that will help motivate me to continue.

At the very least though, all these entries will help people know me and know this time of my life. Who knows what the future holds. Maybe I will die in 6 months or 6 years or 60 years… I don’t know. Whatever my future holds, however short or long, I will share it, here and with you.

Sometimes I worry that my entries may repeat the same thoughts. But actually, that’s ok and I shouldn’t worry about it. For, as the number of blog entries I have grows and grows, I don’t really expect anyone to read it all.

I want you to be able to join me, find my blog at any time, pick it up and read it — and it shouldn’t matter that I already wrote 100 entries or whatever. I want you to be able to join me here at any time, and for however long our roads intertwine and we walk our separate paths — yet similar paths that have met.

Now… the next thing I want to do with my site is to make wordpress multi-site. I’m not sure if I should use one database or two. I’m thinking one — don’t see the need for two databases. I want to move MyAsianLover.com — my homemade porn side — to wordpress.

At the same time, I want to password protect it. I will still share my sex videos free of charge — and want to put more content up too… I haven’t touched the site for like 2 years now. But I want to password protect it just so people I know don’t find it by accident. My wife is ok, sort of, with putting the videos up — but… she’s definitely not ok if our family or anyone we know will find it. Ok… tomorrow’s job.

I wonder… how to password protect a wordpress blog? I just want to require that people register and I will manually approve them. Everyone will be approved, completely free — except… if I somehow know them. Of course, someone I know might pretend to be someone else. I might end up just banning anyone from Canada?… might be safest.

Maybe… if I want to password protect the site… maybe that’s reason for having a new database for it? I want to keep the users separated…. maybe the 2nd database is the safer way to try first?

Take care my friend… stay safe… with hugs and kisses and…
Love Always….

Oh well… time to listen to my book on The Tao and calm down… another bus should be here in 4 minutes…

However, after a couple days, the results I was getting was getting polluted by too much noise. First off and worse, some of the alerts that came in were actually pointers to virus like websites — a site where, once you clicked on the link to visit the site, it tried to install something on your computer. For that reason alone, I cannot use this automated approach to update my site.

The alerts I choose were: “Toronto nude modeling”, “Toronto nude”, “Nude Photography”, “Nudist”, and “Naturist”.

Oops… almost forgot my timestamp…

So, my second attempt was to pipe it to an email account instead of RSS. I’m still not sure how to get email to update my site, but I thought maybe the spam filter would catch these. Nope… I set up a gmail email account just for the purpose of receiving the alerts. And it didn’t remove any of these spam type messages.

I’m thinking now that, unless I can find a smarter more reliable way to get alerts, I need to use a manual approach. That is, what I’m using now is google alerts but manually filtering the results and manually adding the information to my Nude News page I created. Last night I was updating the page manually — but that seems too tedious. I’ll change it to creating a file on my site and including the file on the page. Not sure though how to include a file on a page in Wordpress.

The other thing too is that besides the virus type sites, some alerts are sending me links that seem to have nothing to do with the alert I set up.

Plus, I don’t really like RSS in that it’s relying on an external source for the information when building the page. Information that was interesting last week on the page might all of sudden disappear and I wouldn’t be able to find it again.

Any ideas on how to make this better?

I think I need to stick with this manual approach. But I will still use Google alerts for finding the news and sites to include. And it will help me become an expert in these topics. Hopefully my site will grow and become a resource people go to for information. And people are free to send me something to include in email too… or via a comment on the page. I manually review all the comments — just to make sure spam garbage doesn’t find it’s way in.

I have a lot to learn. I wonder how google alerts even works?

I know my reading on The Tao teaches to not make plans, for without plans you cannot fail. I want to summarize all these Tao teachings on another page or blog entry. And I want another page also to talk about going bra-less — I was inspired and promised this to my friend Kat.

Things to do:

• Make a page with wonderful quotes from The Tao
• Make a page about the benefits of going bra-less
• Organize my photos… I want to build an automated script to rename and move them.
• Redo my home porn site: MyAsianLover.com

It seems to be snowing every Wednesday now. It feels so long since I last wrote to you. I set up a way to insert the date and time in my post last time… let me see…

I like the snow. It’s nice to get forced exercise like this by shovelling it. The only thing is that it takes about an hour, so I’m an hour later than usual for work. It’s ok for today, but tomorrow I can’t afford to be late.

Tomorrow is shaping up to be a terrible day — for I have meetings scheduled from 10 am. till 3 pm, with only a half hour break. 5 hours straight of meetings… it’s going to be exhausting. And stressful too, for it’s all about putting together a contract for this years work with GM. If GM says no, I could end up being out of a job.

Let’s talk about something else. I’m still buying things, all for the purpose of my photography hobby/ambitions/business. After thinking about it for a month, reading reviews, both good and bad, and comparing it with other programs, I decided to buy Portrait Professional. And I love what it can do. It’s a bit limited, in that it only works with faces and both eyes must be showing — no good for profile photos. But, in just a couple minutes, it allows me to do things I would never be able to do.

The best thing I like is how it improves the skin — removing blemishes. In a way, like digital makeup, smoothing the skin… and making people just look better, like a model. It can also reshape the face, slimming it. And I love that feature too. But need to be careful with it. I find, if I use the face slimming on my wife, it just made her look strange… but, on photos of strangers I shot in China, it makes an ordinary looking person on the street look like a model… really making them look more beautiful.

It can also very easily, with one button click, change the colour of the eyes — which is pretty cool too. It has many more features too, like teeth whitening, making lips redder, and brushes to manually touch up features.

One thing I’m not sure if it can do but would love is whether it can add that highlight in the eye that photographers love — the highlight reflection of the light that helps give life to the eye.

Some people may think it’s cheating, retouching photos like this. But, professional photographers do it. And people want to look their best. It’s also about, for me, just making beautiful images. And images that are like art. And the people are still the same people. Once I get my photos organized, and edit a few, I’ll put them on my flickr page for you to see.

I, like most people, hate mail rebates.

I need a release from all this stress. I feel I’m not very good in my social interactions. I bought the domain: “shy.me” last year — haven’t done anything with it. But it is a lot of who I am.

But I also take pride in the work I do — no matter what it is. I take a job, focus on it, and give 200% — making sure it gets done on time. Even when surprises come up, I try my best to resolve them. And, even though sometimes I feel like ignoring problems — I take pride when I don’t and meet them head on. I feel a bit disappointed in my coworkers though when I don’t see the same effort from them. But, at the same time, I’m amazed at how brilliant my coworkers are too.

Listening to second part of “Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life” now. Really I love this book I bought from Audible.com. Listening to it, a peace comes over me. With the economy so bad now, more and more people losing jobs everyday — many of my coworkers and friends out of a job now… it’s a very stressful time. We need, I need, this feeling of peace.

At first I listened to In Bed with Susie Bright — but… I don’t know… I just find listening to her not relaxing at all.

I want to share a feeling of peace, seeing the world through tender, peaceful eyes. Maybe that would be a good domain name: “PeacefulNudes.com”?… but no… I won’t get any more domain names. I still like: “n-nudes.com” — the last one I got. And I will resurrect my original domain: AngelEyes.com … sometime.

But… NudeRiver.com… I like it too. This will continue to be my primary domain now. I have the other one: MyAsianLover.com — I like that one too… for sharing my intimate love life with you.

Anyway… time to get off the train now… TTFN…

I can’t say too much here… suffice it to say, I know too much.

Tonight I rediscovered my digital magazines with Zinio.com. I subscribed to a digital version of Playboy 2 years ago and the subscription finished. So I renewed it. But then I looked at what else was out there and subscribed to 3 other magazines — 2 on photography and one on business.

I was just reading one of the photography ones and find it’s worth it — lots of info there and it will undoubtedly help me create better photos. It was the most expensive though, at $22 for a year, 12 issues.

The other 2 — a business one for just $8 for a year… hopefully it can help me get my finances in order. And the other is another photography one.. $9 for a year… a lot more ads though.

And then browsing… I found they also carry Penthouse. So… curious, I also subscribed to Penthouse Letters for $20 for 12 issues. I’m thinking it might provide some inspiration for one goal I’ve had for a while — to write erotic stories.

Anyway… almost home… as soon as I get home I need to just quickly go to bed. And then set my alarm for 8 am again. I’ll be happy when this week is over!! A very stress-filled week, but I think I rose to the challenge.

And I’m continuing listening to this audible book inspired by The Tao — very peaceful and just what I need now. I feel it’s helping my confidence…

Hugs and kisses and with love always…

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130281944460

So, 2 days ago I placed my bid.  It’s not cheap and at a fair price — actually a bit more expensive than some others on ebay, but I like the microphone it has.  Plus, I just feel this seller is easier to trust than some others.

Sadly though, someone else is bidding on it!  I increased my bid by $10, but I’m still losing it.  It’s now to the point where it’s just gotten too expensive — so I decided to let it go.  It’s at $425 USD now

After my last post mentioned that my investigation of all this HD camcorder stuff — miniDV versus card versus hard drive… miniDV seemed the best.  But then, I found another camera for sale — the Sony HDR-CX7 … newer and I can get it cheaper than the ebay auction.  It actually uses a memory stick card and the AVCHD format.

I know I mentioned that this AVCHD format is hard to edit — both my versions of iMovie and Windows Movie Maker don’t support it.   But then I discovered that buying software that supports it is actually pretty cheap.  I can buy Corel VideoStudio Pro X2 now on sale for just $59.99.

Once I discovered that — then I can see the advantages of going with a card and the AVCHD format.  The one thing I’ve always disliked with tape is it’s hard to find a particular clip.  I might have 30-50 clips on an one hour miniDV tape.  But it’s a pain to find any of them.  I think I need to copy the entire tape to the computer to be able to work with the clips and edit it.

While, with the AVCHD and a memory card, I should be able to easily work with any individual clip.  Also, being more heavily compressed, it might not be up to the quality of miniDV, but it should be pretty close.  I read the low light ability of the camera not be as good as the HC5, but in any case, it will be much better than my 10 year old TRV-900.

I’m surprised the TRV-900 is still selling for almost $1000 on Ebay — like who would buy it when there are HD cameras out now?  True, the TRV-900 was a great camera and has served me well over the past 10 years.  I’ve shot many hours of tape with it — except, my tape collection is completely disorganized and I never edited it… so I would shot video but then never look at again… trouble of working with tape.

Ok… wish me luck.  As long as it doesn’t snow, tomorrow I’ll go and buy the CX7… really looking forward to getting the new camera and recording many precious memories of moments that can never be repeated.

And this is all part of the Tao teachings… or fate.  Like, I studied everything and decided on the Sony HDR-HC5 camera on the weekend.  But then, on Monday, someone at my work mentioned tomorrow, Thursday, being “Canada’s National Buy Something Used Day”.  And they had pointers to a few websites where used things can be found.  I went to one of them and searched for Sony HDR cameras… and found the CX7.  It looked like a great camera.  But, I had already entered my bid on the HC5.  Plus I was concerned with the AVCHD format.  But then, last night, I was installing some software on my computer at home, and I installed Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 — I bought it last year.  After installing it, it told me about a special offer on the VideoStudio Pro X2 software… and that lead me to think that perhaps an AVCHD camera is perhaps good afterall.

Luckily, someone else came forward and bid on the HC5, so I’m now free to get the CX7… it’s fate or the Tao all coming into play and things working out in the end.  The thing is to have an open mind and don’t be too stubborn.  My wife always says I’m the most stubborn :-).

We are on a river… flowing… and we just have to keep our eyes open… don’t plan or try too hard to get somewhere, but let the river take us to wherever it may… and don’t fight the current, but smile and enjoy the journey we’re on.

Take care my friend, with hugs and kisses and love always…

For… it’s misleading… sometimes it takes me a couple days to post the entry…

Maybe I’ll just start my post with the current date and time?…

How’s this format?

I like it… and it also gives me a way to separate these long entries and maybe make things easier to read.
Nice… Too bad I just discovered all this now. Oh well.

This is going to be a long trip home… the subway is moving very slowly, some technical problem… hopefully I don’t miss my last bus.

Today wasn’t a very good day — just feeling I had no sense of time… time just went by too quickly. I need a good night’s sleep. Maybe I have a touch of the flu that my family has? Or maybe just too much stress recently and need more sleep.

Man… this subway feels like it’s going to get stuck here… very jerky. Ok, we’re finally at Greenwood station now. The announcement, though impossible to really hear well, said something with Chester to Greenwood… ok… finally we’re moving now!

Today I just felt hard to get much done. I did make good progress on these estimates I think. And I installed Windows Server 2003 and got Sharepoint up and running. But I never resolved getting Windows update to work completely — and the last couple updates just always give an error. And the install CD had a few error messages too — something about missing files.

Tomorrow I just need to get one more task analysed/estimated… and then get on getting some questions answered. And also I have 3 or 4 bugs that require some attention this week. All in all, just too busy. I wanted to get home earlier tonight, for my wife is sick — but I don’t know what happened with the time.

I also explored blogging from inside emacs — a cool lisp plugin called weblogger — but it gets the time stamps wrong. It isn’t taking into consideration that my blog is GMT-5 — so, every time it fetches and saves the entry, it shifts the time by 5 hours. I’m thinking maybe I can fix it up… if I do, I’ll post the fixed versions here.

Ouch… what happened… I thought I assigned F1 to insert my date, but now it’s undoing all my typing!!

Maybe F1 is set to undo by default? Ok… then I’ll set my date macro to use apple-F1 — how to type that little apple clover symbol?

Ouch… bbedit doesn’t remember the key assignments when I restart it!… there must be a way…

In any case… I just missed the 1:50 am Kennedy bus, but there is still one more, at 2:10 am… the last bus tonight. When the subway train is delayed though, they should have the busses wait.

Really I love this workflow I created. MarsEdit + BBedit, to create my Wordpress blog posts wherever I happen to be… offline… and allowing me to post them when I get back online. Very nice. BBedit is a very nice editor — not cheap though. I just happen to have it because I bought it a long long time ago, 10 years?… and just upgrade it every couple years… the upgrade cost is reasonable.

I remember though, about 10 years ago, I needed to buy it twice. Back then they didn’t have download versions and I needed to get a CD shipped to me. I shipped it to my home… and it went missing. I think it came by FedEx, I missed the delivery… and then I signed the card they left, so they could leave it on their next visit. The package then just disappeared.

Someone must have stole it. But it was only a software program that I think most people would have no use for it — not even knowing what it was. Since then, I now always ship packages to my work office.

Oh… btw… I placed the bid on the HD camcorder I want today… a Sony HDR HC5… I’ll know in 2 days if I win it!! I hope so :-). It will be one of my biggest purchases from ebay — but the seller is very good with answering my questions. And I’m getting it cheaper than the half price demo sale at theSource.ca here. Plus I’m getting an external mic too.

I studied the various cameras and this looks like the best one. It’s discontinued now though. The new model, HC9, would cost me at least twice as much. I can afford around $500 for a camera, but not $1000!

It’s tape based, which looks like the best choice. I was tempted to get a card based camera, using AVCHD, or a hard drive based (also AVCHD or mpeg2(ts))… but… so many things are wrong with them. I want to be able to edit my movies. The tape based ones — they store in a format called HDV… and it’s widely accepted by practically every program I want to use … like either iMovie or Windows Movie Maker…

I have a 2 year old MacBook and Vista Home Premium. My version of iMovieHD is 6.0, and that doesn’t support AVCHD. And Windows Movie Maker also doesn’t support it. Searching, I found a program that can convert from AVCHD to a format iMovie or Movie Maker can use… but it takes 12 times as long as the movie to decompress it… plus takes 5-10 times the space. That means, a one hour AVCHD movie will take me 12 hours to decompress, and the 8 GB size will grow to 40-80 GB in size!!… ridiculous, if that’s true.

There are JVC hard drive based HD camcorders though — recording in mpeg2(ts)… but, reading reviews — the video quality is no where near as good as Sony or Canon cameras… and there are lots of problems working with the files.

So… that leaves us with tape based, miniDV, HDV camcorders. And they actually sound so much superior. A one hour tape takes just 1 hour to transfer to the computer (and not 12 hours). And it takes just about 11 GB of space. And it’s supported by both iMovie and Movie Maker. And the tape serves as a nice backup of the original (true, it might deteriorate over time). Plus the battery strangely seems to last longer than the equivalent Sony AVCHD cameras.

And while the HC5 is missing some features that the newer HC9 has — like the photo quality is less and less manual controls and no external mic port… it has better low light ability… being that it uses less pixels.

So… I’m happy with my choice and with finding the HC5. And happy I can get it for around $500. Can hardly wait for it to arrive. And I also want to try out the 0 lux infra-red night-shot ability… I’ve been wanting to try that out for years.

I would love to try making some home made porn — like I managed to convince my wife years ago for… but, I don’t think she’ll agree any more…

Mostly though, I want to take some beautiful videos of my family, and my lovely baby learning to walk now. Really she’s growing so fast. She just started trying to walk when she turned 1 year old, and now she can hold onto a chair or table and get up herself. She can’t yet walk without holding something though… but soon.

Really so amazing….

Take care now and stay safe…. with hugs and kisses and love always… time for bed now…

But I was distracted by material things — wasting most of the weekend because of wanting something. It all started on Friday night as I saw a Sony camcorder on sale for half price… a demo… HD. Back in December, there was only one thing I wanted that I didn’t get — and that was an HD camcorder. Now that I have HD (high definition) TVs, and see how much better the picture is with a high-def. picture — I want to upgrade my video camera to HD as well.

I have a good Sony video camera — about 10 years old… one of the best cameras they sold back then. But, I want to upgrade it to HD.

I discussed it with my wife, and, with the economy the way it is, at first she was against it… eventually I got her to say ok. But, she wanted me to get a machine that uses a card or hard-drive instead of tape.

So, I spent hours this weekend, going in circles, reading about various technologies and cameras. Eventually, I ended up going in a circle and back to the camera on sale. I found that mini-dv tape is still the best. The hard-drive ones or cards — they still seem to have compression and editing support issues with the files. Plus, I still have a lot of mini-dv tapes to use.

The main problem with tape is just the time it takes to get it from the camera to the computer — linear and in real-time… as opposed to the idea of just copying a digital file across… which cards/hard drives would allow. But, I want quality and a camera that will last me the next 10 years. For quality, tape still seems the best.

So, I went in a circle, examined different cameras and technologies, and decided on, for the price, the best choice is the camera I started with, the one on sale — the Sony HDR HC5. And then, last night, I placed the order for it.

But… seconds after placing the order, I checked my email and found a reply from someone selling the same camera on ebay. On ebay, I figure I can save between $150 and $200 — depending on whether I need to pay taxes. A bit worried though — for the ebay ones has no warranty… so, worry if it works properly. But I think it should be ok.

I spent so much time and energy over the weekend on this — knowing I want an HD type camcorder, and then finally deciding on which one to buy.

But… back to my listening about the Tao — it tries to teach to free yourself from wanting. Yet, why do I want this camcorder? Mostly, it will allow me to do things that I cannot do now. My precious children are growing quickly and I want to record these memories before the moment passes. I could use the camcorder I already have — but… I want a higher quality picture.

Do I really need it? No.

More important is having time to spend with family and not worry recording it.

Most important is health… my wife and daughter have both come down with the flu. I seem to still be ok myself — and my baby too. Everyone needs more sleep. The flu doesn’t seem too serious… I think the flu shots we all got helps. Mostly people feel tired and some diarrhea.

I’m still taking the bus/subway, as my car door locks are frozen. But I find -20C not too bad… I actually like it… the crispness and clean feel to the air. Wind is worse, and it’s not too windy.

Still listening to this book about the Tao. At first it sounds crazy to people. I try to explain it to my wife. She’s Chinese and studied this book when in school, but she didn’t like it… like poetry that’s hard to understand. I thought she would be interested more in it, for it’s 2500 year old Chinese culture and historic writings.

But she doesn’t believe in it’s teachings and fights all the time. I wish she could help and make our home a more peaceful place. It’s just ridiculous, how she wastes so much time in fighting — fighting with me and with our children. Like she’s fighting with our daughter Angelina, because Angelina wants to look at herself in a mirror and play putting on jewellery… while my wife wants Angelina to do her homework. Like… why fight? And let Angelina make her own choice to do her homework. Angelina is 5 years old now and old enough to make her choices… and to know the consequences for her choices.

Actually, I would like to teach Angelina more about the choices she makes and that her choices and actions have consequences.

I was trying to teach my wife the benefit of the Tao teaching of living without plans, without goals. At first, it seems crazy — like how can you get anything done? Another teaching is to live without wanting. My wife’s comment was then do you just sit all day and do nothing? But the Tao is not teaching that. You still do things, but just do what your nature, what your heart and soul tells you to do.

…

The day following layoffs, another day where the message is change… I actually feel quite good. I no longer worry about who I am or showing who I am.

I feel a sense of wellness… a sense of contentment, happiness, peace. Really I love the feeling that listening to this book gives me. I wonder if it could help my mom deal with her anxiety?

I feel like a huge sense of stress has been taken off me. Not just about this book, but that’s a big part of it. Seeing my new boss also helped. Having a sense of purpose at work also helps. Feeling I have work to do, know what work I need to do, and not being overwhelmed with it also helps. And the layoffs done with and I’m still here — I can relax too a bit, for I know I’m safe — at least for a few months longer. I truly believe in the company I’m working for and believe it will come out of this economic downturn eventually.

I feel a sense of confidence and maturity in my work now — a feeling of finally emerging from my shell. Yes, 2009 will be a good year — I feel sure of it.

Back to the Tao and living without plans, without goals — for then you cannot fail. That sounds crazy and a hard thing to change. Today, I went through my tasks and tried to decide which to do. One task looked scary and I didn’t really want to go through it. But I went through it, in an orderly way, and it wasn’t too hard after-all. And it was much better to do it now, early, and not later. It wasn’t about planning or a goal — but just following my nature and doing what I was supposed to do. And I just put the other tasks on my list out of my mind and forgot about them.

At the beginning of the holidays, and actually at the beginning of many weekends too, I made a list of everything I wanted to accomplish. The holidays came and went and I never really got a single item accomplished — or maybe 1, partially 2, on a list of many things. The same thing happens on weekends too. Making a plan was my downfall. And then, when I thought about the many things on the list, I didn’t know which to do first.

And I felt a sense of failure — as the days ticked away and I didn’t accomplish what I hoped to. If only I listened to this book back in December. And because I shared my plan with my wife, she also made me feel a sense of failure as she reminded me of the things I didn’t do.

So, I will change and stop planning and just do… no rushing… no sense of failure… just to be spontaneous and do what I want at the time… to listen to my nature, to my soul…

And, like the Tao says, by doing nothing, I can do everything.

Sound crazy right… but the key is, with less stress, with no sense of failure, and without planning, I don’t get overwelmned by having too much to do… and I will just listen to my soul and do what it tells me to do. That way, I can and will accomplish what is truly important… and little by little, I know I’ll accomplish much more than before.

Take care and with love and tenderness and peace, stay safe my love, my friend….

On another very cold day, I find listening to this book relaxing. I have a meeting in 30 minutes, at 10 am, and I’m afraid I’ll be late for it. But I have no control over it. I will probably be late, but hopefully only 10 minutes or so.

But the other big news today — LAYOFFS!! I just read the press release and the email from our CEO this morning before leaving home. I felt something was coming… for 3 all-hand meetings were put on my calendar… 2 for today and one for tomorrow morning. That’s why this meeting is even more important. 10%, or 750 people, will be losing their jobs. Most of the people will be notified today!

So… I think I’ll be ok… but… I’ll soon see.. if I still have a job. But I worry about my friends and who will be affected. Who will be the 10% that will soon be gone? I’m thinking all groups will be affected… all a bit scary.

Ok… I won’t write any more and just relax and listen now…

…. ok… 9 minutes to go now and on the last connection… the 504 streetcar. Luckily, it was waiting for me. I worried that the tracks could have been frozen. I will still likely be late for the meeting, but perhaps just 5 minutes late.

Back to this book about the Tao. It’s talking about something now that is the hardest thing for me to change… to be spontaneous and live without planning. I actually hate surprises and am very not spontaneous. And I’m always making plans, to do lists — and I pride myself when I make a plan and can carry it out to success. My marriage is such a plan.

But true, without that plan, I would still be married now — just to someone else. And I would be happy too. And I would have caused less pain. For, in just “going with the flow”, I was in a relationship and my girlfriend had moved in with me. But, somehow, someone else ended up in my lap — by fate, by chance. But she was in China and it was hard for her and me to be together… it took a lot of effort and planning to get together and to where we are now. And now we have 2 wonderful children — again, with planning.

“Going with the flow”… I would not have worked so hard to chance my path and change my girlfriend to the one who would now be my wife. The other girl’s name was Yinqing…

Ok… 1 minute over now and almost there… time to rush to my meeting now…

“Live as water lives, since you are water…. Say a prayer of gratitude for this always flowing, live sustaining suspense”.

Listening to the Audible book “Change your thoughts, Change your life” by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer. It started a bit slow and I was almost ready to just put it down… but then, once it actually started in the content, it’s actually quite good.

It talks about “The Tao”… spelling?… a book around 2500 years old, and actually quite good. And I never knew it, but I already believed much of what he says in this book. It’s about how to live life… and a way to be happy. Allow instead of fighting our natural course.

I need to do more of that. Too much, I struggle, fighting, working hard — but still don’t make much progress.

“Do your work and step back. Practise humility. Enough is Enough. To keep on filling is not as good as stopping. Seek the pleasure in what you’re doing. When the work is done, it’s done.” Don’t think more will be better.

“Retire when the eating is done, this is the way of heaven”.

Hard to concentrate on my writing when hearing this book…

“View others as an extension of yourself… Letting go of ego dominated thoughts, to practise the oneness with others… We are the world” Step back and be an observer of the world, and be detached from the things we process.

Jesus followers asked: “When will the Kingdom come”
Jesus answered: “It will not come from looking outward… rather the Kingdom is spread about on the earth and men do not see it”…. from Thomas… I’ll need to check it out.

But then why do Jehovah witnesses come by and talk about God’s kingdom coming, Jesus returning… or do they? Yes… I’m sure they talk about eternal life, if you only believe in Jesus. They spread the message of how terrible the world is — the signs of the end of the time.

We are a part of and already living in the kingdom of God. We just cannot see it. God’s Kingdom that we are praying for is already here and all around us — we just need to open our eyes and our hearts and see it.

My wife often complains about life, the struggle — and sometimes hopes to die, for in death the struggle and pain ends.

Ok… the next lesson in the book… Don’t give importance to the approval of others. Don’t let someone else’s opinion change us and what we do. Be guided by our true nature, our inner self, independent mind versus a dependent mind seeking the approval of others. Live in harmony with your own unique nature, your true self.

“I am a guardian of the world and fit to be a teacher of the world.”

What is my own nature if remove all the external influences?

Next lesson… unseen, untouched, unheard are one. No beginning, no end, without form…

…. on my way home now… still listening to this book. Really it’s very peaceful and true. Don’t fight life, don’t pursue too hard your dreams… just let things come.

It’s about a oneness between the body and soul. Just relax, let peace come — and be at harmony with the nature of things.

In these times of economic worries — it’s scary. I too get caught up sometimes in worldly affairs…

Ok… how to use these lessons in my life to make things better?

I do worry about money though — for it always slips through my hands and is hard to keep. I owe too much money. Scary, for outside my mortgage, my debt load is around $30,000 now!! The interest rate is low though and I can still pay it. I have enough stock investments still to pay it off — but is now a good time to sell?

Last week I already made the decision to sell to pay off some of this debt — but each day since, stocks have fallen and I don’t want to sell when things are going down.

Back to my book… ahh… feeling relaxed again. I won’t worry too much about money and just continue and let my natural being be who I am. And I will not let others influence me — for that is also the teachings. And it makes perfect sense. I cannot be happy if I spend energy trying to please others. I am who I am — and what I do should reflect who I am.

I found a translation of the Tao and the history of it on a pretty good website. I’ll continue to study the Tao and learn more about its teachings.

And then these websites I’ve been trying to build for like a decade… they will just flow from me. It’s scary when I see how many site names I’ve wasted money purchasing. Just last week I bought 2 new names… naturenudes.net and naturenudes.ca — is it? I even forget now… Good names? I don’t know.

My heart is still more with the name AngelEyes.com and AngelEyes.ca — but there is too much history behind those names… where my parents, ex-wife, and brother knows about them. That makes it hard for me to use them for showing my true self.

I still love my name NudeRiver.com — I’ve been using it for a while, and I like it. It took many false starts and attempts to find it though.

I worry about my Mom! She had bleeding behind the pupil of her right eye last Tuesday and is now blind in that eye! I hope and pray that her sight comes back. She’s about 76 years old and her health just gets worse with each year. 2009 is getting off to a pretty bad start. I think, even though 2008 was the worse year financially ever — health wise, my family did ok.

I talked with my Dad last night and my Mom went to the hospital — just before 7 pm. Her blood pressure was too high (180), and she wasn’t feeling very well. I’ll phone my dad this morning and see how she’s doing. I am a bit worried. My dad is getting up there in age too — 80 years old now.

There will be much sadness in the years ahead — as I know, as we get older, eventually we all die. I have 2 aunts, ages 100 and 101 as well.

So, I’m off to a very early morning start today — just 9:23 am now… A 10:00 meeting to meet my new boss — he just started last week. I haven’t seen him yet, as he’s based in the Detroit area, while my office is in Toronto….

Anyway… a nice ride in… time to get off the train…

Wow… that was nice… just got off the train, took the escalator up, walked, and the streetcar was right there — just coming in. It was the same when I took the subway train — with the doors almost closing on me. I love days like this, when my connections just work. It’s 9:31 am now — I should be able to make it to my 10:00 am. meeting on time.

I just wish my MacBook could play my itunes music when the top was closed — through the bluetooth connection. But sadly, as soon as I close it, everything turns off. I used to love this part of my MacBook — just close it, it turns itself off. Later, just open it up, and everything comes back to life. Much better and more reliable than a Windows laptop I tried before.

But… if only my MacBook could stay alive when it’s closed — then it would be a very nice iPod type device! Of course though, it might overheat… but, there must be a way. I think I remember if you have a mouse and external monitor connected to it, then it will wake up when closed. But, there must be an easier way.

This 504 streetcar is starting to get a bit crowded now… hard to get enough room to type here…

It’s looking like I might take the bus for the rest of the week, as winter is taking hold of us here. There is a light snow now, and it’s going to snow all day. And then snow for practically the rest of the week.

The other problem with my MacBook is the size of the hard drive. Like, it’s only 80 GB in size. For the cost of the machine, it’s ridiculously too small. Like, for less than $100 now I can get a 250 GB external 2.5″ drive. True, my MacBook is over 2 years old… I’m not sure, but I think that’s right.

Oh… and almost at work now… have to get ready to get off soon…

I love this bluetooth headphones I just got yesterday from Dell. It took a dozen or so tries to get the pairing working — but, magically, it finally took. One thing nice, it powers itself off when the music stops… or sort of a low power mode I think.

Ok… time to get off now…

It’s now 7:09 pm… a busy day at work, but nice… Actually nice to get here early for a change. And a day of meetings, meeting my new boss. And continuing work on a new project, learning new things.

Also, a bit of a relief, as I phoned my parents and surprised that my mom was home. She came home last night from the hospital. They did a few tests, but didn’t really find anything.

Now, time for dinner, finish up some work, and then to go home at a more ‘normal’ hour… Tomorrow afternoon is another long meeting session.

….
Now… on my way home way. A bit later than I would have liked… 11:11 pm now. I feel a bit guilty for I promised my 5 year old daughter to be home before 11. Oh well. I just feel hard to leave work — wanting to learn new things.

Just before leaving, I downloaded some new Audible content. I actually forgot about my Audible account for the past year… but feel nice to find it again.

It’s like… a feeling of coming home. I found 2008 a bit of a mess — just too many things. 2009 I feel a year of coming home. I met my new manager today. I feel ok, happy with my job — feeling a sense of purpose.

I like coming back to my old ways… using Audible again… using my MacBook… writing my blog. And wanting to get back to my photography. And I want to learn how to make my photos look better. I was reading a bit about HDR images tonight — and it sounds like a great idea… basically taking multiple exposures and combining them.

And… I was getting ready to buy this cool program I found a few weeks ago called Portrait Professional. But now I’m hesitating, after reading some negative comments about it… and people saying another program called Portraiture is better.

But then… sadly… I discovered that the price of Portraiture just went up 10 days ago!! I just missed out. I sent email to the company tonight and just hope they can give me the earlier price. Either way though, it’s still pretty expensive.

And… I discovered a solution to my problem of my MacBook always sleeping when I close the case. There’s a free program called InsomniaX that does just what I need — keeping the Mac awake when the case is closed. I worry a bit that it might cook my MacBook though.

But…. so very nice now. With my bluetooth headphones connected wirelessly to my MacBook, I can close my Mac, put it in my briefcase, get off the train, waiting for the bus… and still can listen to whatever is playing on my Mac. I can change the volume, but that’s all. It would be ideal if I could pause and rewind and fast forward… but, I’ll be happy with what I have.

Ok… almost time to get off again. It’s been a looooong day. And a long year too.

Finding our way home…. take care and stay safe…

Had two weeks off, which was nice, but still too short — as the holidays is a busy time. And, even though I tried to control myself, I spent too much again — with the great boxing week deals. Bought a new computer just to be a media server for the LCD TV I got last month.

Ok… I’ve been looking forward to 2009, for it’s hard to imagine it being any worse than 2008. Yet, I read some news headlines tonight basically saying things will continue to get worse before they get better… all too scary.

2009 will be a year to catch up and do all the things I wanted to do in 2008 but just didn’t have the time or energy to do.

Ok… here’s my 2009 list:

• Number one: Exercise and lose weight. One of my accomplishments over the holidays was setting up my exercise room. I feel happy with it now, yet I still haven’t started exercising yet.
• I want to organize some videos to watch when exercising — I’ll use my Mac as the video server… likely using iTunes. I struggled over the holidays with getting a Media Center system set up.
• Organize my photos.
• Redesign my website(s).
• Learn more about photography. Become a better photographer. Set up my photo studio (again). And just create beautiful images to be proud of.

Phew… 2:30pm now on Wednesday, January 7 and I’m just now on my way to work!! I was on a phone conference (work) for 1 1/2 hours this morning. All in all, it went pretty well. I took a lot of notes, but now can’t find where I put them. Oh well… they have to be somewhere… either in my briefcase or on my desk at home.

Ahhh… and I love that I found these old headphones I bought a couple years ago… an expensive pair of in the ear headphones by Shure. I found them when cleaning things up over the holidays… and it’s been at least a year since I last used them. They’re great a blocking out the noise — so I can listen to my Mac and it blocks out most of the train noise. With my other headphones, I have to turn the volume up much higher and I still can’t hear my Mac very well. This should be much better for my hearing.

And it’s nice… where I can just block out the entire world, headphones on, a tv show I recorded last night playing, and type away here — forgetting completely and blocking out the people around me. Just have to make sure I don’t miss my subway stop. Sometimes I’m too conscious of the people around me. And I just hope no one minds me taking up two seats — one for my coat and bags and one for me and my MacBook. I really hate taking the subway when it’s crowded and people are jammed in tight — could never do that everyday.

And wow… I was shovelling the heavy wet snow for 2 hours this morning. So, had my conference meeting from 10 am till 11:15 am. And then shovelled the snow for 2 hours… till 1:30 pm. Then I took a shower, had a quick lunch, and left home a little past 2 pm.

• Organize my house — I can never find things and my basement is a complete disaster
• Organize and redesign my blog and write more often.
• Organize my photos — I have like over 30,000 digital photos, scattered about in different places.
• Get better organized so I can take more and better photos. Need to get my studio set up in the basement again.
• And exercise!!! And lose weight.

Really I love this blog workflow I created last winter — using Marsedit and BBedit. I just need to learn and figure out a workflow to make making the blog entries more interesting by adding photos.

2008 was a pretty terrible year — full of just too much stress. Hoping that 2009 turns out better. 2007, by comparison, was pretty good. In 2007 I joined the nudist park, bought the trailer there, and we had our wonderful baby Jennifer. In 2008, I had an operation (for my bum), lost lots of money in the stock market, spent lots of money renovating our house (new roof, replaced windows, door, new sliding door), and spent more money going on the trip to China… and the economy has completely fallen off a cliff.

Ok… here’s something I’ve been working on this week. A month or so ago I got this Linksys 2100 Media Center Extender (MCE) box. It’s something I’ve been wanting to get for a long time — wanting to keep all my media on my PC and access it from anywhere in the home. While, it’s been a struggle getting it up and running… with getting Vista up, getting a network running, and I still can’t get a very good connection… at least according to the MCE.

First, once I finally got the connection working, the 2100 able to see and connect to my PC, I thought I was done. BUT… I had ripped DVD’s to the .vob format — for it doesn’t lose any quality. I learned that vob’s cannot be streamed on MCE. They can play fine on the computer, but it’s a limitation of the Microsoft MCE streaming. A hack/solution I found, rename the .vob to .mpg — and I found a utility to make this easier. Worked, and I could play the files now — no menus though. BUT… my connection is too slow and the files are too large… they maybe play for a few seconds and then drop out… no good. I’m using powerline ethernet and a wired connection (10/100) to my router. At first I tried wireless-g, but that was slower. Oh, but I was never successful in getting wireless-g working on my Vista machine — no drivers for cards.

Ok… so I discovered that I need to encode my files to make them smaller. I never liked Apple TV for it required this step, but now I’m starting to understand why it’s needed. The trouble is, what to encode things as? Reading up and trying different formats, I decided that mkv is the best. And h.264. For audio, I went for “audiocopy” (AAC I think it is)… a bit larger, but I think good audio is important.

A few of my requirements:

• Good quality video
• Can view videos on both my MacBook, Windows, and MCE
• Supports subtitles

Ok… so, finally a solution, or so I thought. I found a good player (VLC) that can play mkv on both Windows and the Mac. BUT, my mkv files cannot play on my 2100 box!! I struggled with this for a bit, but I think it’s a limitation of the box. It does support the h.264 codec though.

So, back to the drawing board. With mkv out of consideration — oh, and I liked most that the mkv format supports having subtitles embedded inside the file… that leaves me two choices… AVI or MP4. Last night I tried both of them… and it’s close, but my encoder seems to support AVI better. PLUS, I’m having trouble with VLC playing the mp4 with subtitles.

So, it looks like AVI is my final choice!! I still haven’t figured out how to get subtitles to appear using my 2100… but I get them when playing on the computer using VLC (or Windows Media Player). I’ll likely switch back to mkv if Linksys updates the firmware to support it on the 2100. Only problem with the AVI… it takes about 5 seconds for the 2100 to start playing the video… but at least it seems to play.

Only thing left to check is if the AVI can play on my Mac using VLC — I think it should… but you never know in this world.

Ok… so finally decided… AVI, h.264 it is!!!  See a great comparison of all the formats at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_container_formats

Anyways… the first big winter storm of the season is here right now… windy, snowy, and cold. But the trip taking the TTC isn’t too bad. Just waiting about 20 minutes, freezing myself, for the bus was the worse part — and trying to walk to the bus stop. The rest of the trip — subway train and streetcar, pretty nice actually, not needing to wait too long… and not crowded at all. Going to work at almost 2:30pm now makes a difference though.

The trip is a bit slow though… the streetcar still just slowly chugging along. Almost there, but taking at least twice as long as normal. Really people should not be out driving on a day like today.

But I feel in a good mood… it is actually nice, seeing the snow… beautiful and helping the senses come alive.

Take care now and stay safe my friend…

So, it’s a beautiful fall afternoon now. I have my 2 new beautiful doors and I love my GPS. It’s pretty cool, walking with the GPS and seeing how fast I’m walking and how far I’ve walked. And outside near my home, the reception is great and I can pick up like 10 or so satellites and get the distance location to within 5m. Downtown it’s a bit worse, with all the tall buildings interfering. I wonder how well it will do when hiking in a forest? I imagine it will have the same problem of trees blocking it — but I’ll give it a try sometime.

At the very least though, I can see myself using the GPS to store waypoints that I can retrieve later to tag my blog and photos with. I still need to come up with a good workflow.

One more thing I bought last week and it’s arriving today — my camera sensor cleaner. I bought the arctic butterfly made my Visible Dust. It seems highly recommended, from what I could find on the web. Hopefully it does a good job and I can overcome my dust sensor problem and fear. Reading about the dust sensor problem years ago, I always worried about changing my camera lens and did it very seldom. But now I won’t need to worry about that anymore. I’ll have the knowledge to be able to identify and fix the problem.

Do you ever try and just pretend a problem doesn’t exist in the hope it goes away by itself? I know I do. And sometimes it works and the problem just fixes itself. But, more often than not, the problem grows and grows and just gets worse. A few times, it might not be fixed, but doesn’t get any worse either…

Ok… last stop… time to get off the train now…

… nice… my streetcar is right here waiting for me. Too bad they can’t make GPS and satellite technology that can penetrate metal and buildings. I guess it’s the same problem with why satellite TV dishes need to be outside and have a clear line of site to the satellite.

Ahhh, passing by the DVP now… the trees in the distance look so beautiful. Fall really is a beautiful time of the year.

Technology helps us in so many ways. Like, I don’t need to know how to spell very well and the computer can tell me my mistakes… and fix them too. Really computers are amazing — and we’ve come such a long way in my lifetime. If I only knew, I could have become rich. But that’s ok… for the most part, I’ve enjoyed the ride.

The key though is to know what lies ahead. That’s important too from the standpoint of performing well in my job. But, the thing is, it’s hard to know. In big companies, like General Motors, hundreds of thousands of jobs and lives depend on people who make decisions to have a good ability to have a vision of the future.

I just saw two crazy people on the bus. A woman got on with a cat in a box, and the cat was meowing a bit. A crazy man started to mimic the cat and make meowing sounds too. The woman and cat just got off now, and as soon as she got off, she gave the man “the finger”… like why bother getting upset over nothing like this? In all my life, I don’t think I’ve ever given anyone “the finger”. I also try to never swear.

Anyway… at work now and a busy day ahead… to try and concentrate the best I can on work, given I’m still coughing with this cold of mine…

Take care and hope you enjoy sharing my journey with me each day…

First off, when I arrived at work, my GPS arrived in the mail.

Secondly, checking my email, I discovered that I finally am being offered a parking spot — after working here for 19 years, finally my name got to the top of the parking spot list and someone who had a spot left. Spots are allocated based on seniority. And I’m number 8 right now for people in the Toronto office in terms of how long people have been here. Who would’ve thought? This shy, timid guy who joined the company 19 years ago, and he’s still here now, after most everyone from that time has left… most though, not by choice, through the layoffs that have occurred over the years.

Thirdly, I’m still battling this cold of mine.

So, why am I taking the bus this week? Well.. today was because it snowed in the morning, and it’s below freezing now — and I’m scared to ride my moped in potentially icy conditions. But tomorrow and Friday — it’s because I cancelled my moped insurance today. And I cancelled the insurance because it just so happens that today is the renewal date of my policy, and I now have a parking spot — but the spot isn’t mine until Monday.

So, to save a few $$, I cancelled my policy today — so I can get a full refund. I pay $359 for the year.

Ok… back to number 1 reason for being a bit exhausted now — struggling to learn my new Garmin GPS. It has this map feature. But it isn’t loaded with street-maps of my city — Toronto. So, foolishly, I searched the web and found some free Canada maps… and I loaded them onto my Garmin Vista. BUT, when trying to use the more detailed map, the Garmin just slows completely down… and becomes a struggle to do anything with. So, the map feature isn’t very useful for navigating a city.

But, also, a bit disappointing — the GPS needs a line of site to the sky. It doesn’t work at all on my streetcar. So, I couldn’t map the route I’m taking now… oh well…. almost at my last stop now… I’ll see if I can get a reading when waiting for the bus…

Ok… made it home. I’ll see if I can post links somehow to my GPS co-ordinates of my route. The GPS was able to get a signal on the bus — pointing it through a window. And it gets a beautiful signal as I’m walking — telling me the speed I walk — a little over 5 km/h… and accurate to less than 5m when I’m walking.

It takes a little getting used to, but I think I’m going to love my GPS. A couple things that concern me — the battery life is less than 12 hours… and it only has 500 waypoints … and tracking only allows for 3000 points. Time will tell if this is enough. It has 24 MB of storage for downloaded maps — but it seems like a waste, for I don’t want to spend money on maps, plus they slow the GPS down too much…

Time for bed now… night night my love…

And today they’re finishing up work with our doors. We’re getting a new front door — looks so beautiful now. And replacing a window in our bedroom with a sliding door to the backyard — not an easy job, as they needed to cut through a double-brick wall. But they did a great job of it. And all the bricks, except for maybe one, were cut so smoothly. The house definitely looks and feels so very much better now.

I’m surprised, after a whole year, I still remember how to do my blogging workflow I developed last winter… using my MacBook, MarsEdit and BBEdit. Writing my blog while taking the subway is really a great way to spend the time. It’s too time-consuming to try to design my site, or edit/organize my photos on the train — but writing is a very natural and easy thing to do here.

Let’s see… over the past year, what did I do? For the house, back in February we finished replacing our windows. We got a new metal roof in the summer. And now, complete almost the last of our projects with the new front door and the sliding door. Next year will be the last project — to build a deck. I want to try building it myself — but Crystal, my wife, doesn’t trust me… she wants to hire someone.

I think my top choice is a cedar deck — but I worry about the cost. We don’t need a very big deck and not a complicated design… just maybe 20×10 feet, rectangular…

I wonder, how to write my blog entries? I like the style of a diary, where I just say everything that’s on my mind at this moment.

Over the past year I learned a lot too. I made new friends on twitter and plurk. Really I love plurk — an amazing fun and interactive web interface. It takes a while to figure out what it really is. Twitter I think started this micro-blogging thing.

Oops… my stop is next… need to get ready to get off now…

Ok… on the 504 streetcar now… the last leg of my journey to work. I like commutes like this, where I didn’t have to wait too long for the bus, subway train, and streetcar.

Ahhh, I’m also excited for my GPS should arrive today!! I think it will be cool if I can somehow hook GPS driven maps to my blog — so you can see where I am and when I am at the various places on my journey each day.

And that’s a big part of what NudeRiver is about — sharing the journey of life with each other. Plurk and Twitter do a great job of that too. Life is a journey, a road. And it’s not important where we go, but the road we take to get there is so very important.

I wonder if I will always have something interesting to say. When I read other blogs, some parts are a bit boring — when talking about things. But, when they talk about something from the heart, that’s when it really gets interesting. People are sometimes a bit … the most personal stuff they make private… and I can understand why. But that is also the most heart-felt entries.

Myself too, when writing — if I’m writing an informative blog entry, I feel it’s just … boring… boring to write and it must be boring to read too.

PLEASE TELL ME… if my blog entries ever are boring.

With people I follow on plurk or twitter, I feel like I know them from what they say. Yet, I don’t know if they feel the same. They have dozens and some hundreds of followers. So, sometimes I feel a bit shy to talk like I would talk to a good, close friend.

Age can also be a barrier. I hope people don’t think I’m some dirty old man. For, I’m 46 years old and many of the people I follow on plurk are young girls… by young, I mean many around 18-26. But, I don’t think of age… I follow people because something about them I find attractive and interesting. People talking more from the heart, more about love, maybe more unsure of their lives and full of life and promise… maybe a bit scared too.

Myself, I always try to keep the child inside me alive — to try to see the world through the innocent eyes of a child.

xoxo Love Ron

Let me first just talk about twitter — I LOVE IT!  It helped bring my blog back to life and I’ve met a couple wonderful people.

Here’s how I came to twitter.  I was just browsing youtube and found a new video by a girl called iJustine… a funny, sexy, beautiful, smart girl.

From iJustine on youtube, she mentioned a twitter page at: http://www.twitter.com/ijustine

I wasn’t sure what to make of it, so I created an account for myself: http://www.twitter.com/NudeRiver

I’m a bit shy, so I didn’t do much with it — being quiet.  Twitter, by the way, is a way to broadcast messages to people, maximum of 140 characters… so, a way to let friends know easily what you’re up to.  Myself, I find it’s a great way to meet new, interesting people, to learn new things, and to “network”.  I’ve learned so much this past week.  Sometimes I’m a bit shy — but, it’s best to just talk and say anything.  And most people are so nice.  Much much much better than the spam filled yahoo chat rooms.

Somehow, I don’t know how, but a photography in Hawaii found me and started following me: http://twitter.com/jasontagphoto

I didn’t really know what to make of this idea of “following” — for I don’t want to appear like a stalker or anything.  But I just looked for who Jason is following, and found a few interesting people to follow as well.  And from there it just snowballs, and the network slowly grows.  I now have 62 people I’m following, and 15 are also following me.

And there’s various clients to post messages from.  My favourite right now is one called Spaz.  You can send a text message from your phone too — but I hate trying to type on my little phone… plus that costs me.

And then, this past week, I saw one person I was following, AshleySteel, post about something called HugNation — that was on Tuesday afternoon.  So, curious, I checked it out.  And it was actually a great webcam show — very good video quality.  I’m still a bit shy, didn’t say much — but I highly recommend it.  I left smiling.  I then looked up more info about Ashley.  I discovered that HugNation is actually run by her boyfriend.  And I found some of her youtube videos.

Here’s my favourite:

Really, Ashley is an amazing girl.  Beautiful and sexy and smart.

Anyway, somehow from me finding Ashley, Kat found me.  And she found my blog and commented on it.  She helped me fix it so people can now add comments.  And she emailed me about her own experiences with wearing, or not wearing a bra.  Out of all my blog articles, that is the only one that has sparked any interest — I need to bring that topic out and focus on it more.  That is, it’s healthier to not wear a bra.

Let me just end this post by saying that somehow people started changing their profile pics to Manga versions today — using http://www.faceyourmanga.com/

Really I love the Manga versions.  And people actually do pretty good jobs of making a manga version that looks like themselves… or how they see themselves or want to see themselves.

Here are 3 versions I made of myself:

Here are some other very cute Manga versions of my new friends:
Ashley

Kat

I discovered twitter a couple weeks ago — really quite addicting and amazing and just love it.  It’s a great way to meet new people, network, and to just not feel so alone as I pursue my dreams — to be a writer and photographer.  I highly recommend joining and then you can follow me as I build my blog — and together be a part of this journey…  It’s not important where we go, but what matters is the journey, the road, the river that takes us there.

I found this one new friend on twitter with an interesting site: phonesexlife.com Check it out.  She’s running a contest that I entered.  If I win, it will help more people discover my blog here.

Here’s the link to her contest: http://phonesexlife.com/entrecard-contest/

Please go there and vote for my entry.

The contest is to describe the ultimate sexual experience.  Here’s my attempt.  Let me know if it makes you hot…

We then get in the car and drive to see a waterfall.  On getting there, we walk hand in hand, as if we’ve been a couple for many years — yet, so much in love and desire of each other.

We get to the waterfall, a pool below the falls — and start to kiss more… take off each others clothes now, completely nude, and get into the water — you look so beautiful in the water nude, the water falling on you.

I have my camera with me, a digital SLR, and start taking photos of you — you are my beautiful model… and the pictures are amazing.

I put the camera down, nude as you are, and go over to you, start to kiss you again… kiss you beautiful lips, your neck, your nipples… and drinking the water on your glistening skin.

We move over to the side of the pool and find a beach, soft sand, and you lie down in it.  And now I kiss you, eat you, lick your warm… your so wet down there, and I lick your clit, hear your moans…

And as your coming, you pull me up, wanting my so very hard penis inside you — and I enter you… and move on you… your hands on my bum, pulling me deep inside you.  And you continue your long beautiful orgasm — and you’re so loud, moans and screams of pleasure, not caring who might hear… forgetting the entire world, it’s only you and me…  And as I feel your orgasm, so beautiful and long, finally my warm sperm comes inside you… and your face is so beautiful…

And we just hold each other, not wanting to leave…

Throughout all this, we didn’t realize someone was watching us — another sexy woman at the side of the falls, and she had picked up my camera and was taking photos of us… So, we had many beautiful photos to forever remember our first time making love.

I wonder if I could handle my boss’s job? But it sounds like they already have a couple candidates in mind. Really I think I could do a stellar job of it all… and, in the past, I handled the responsibilities of my manager when he wasn’t around.

Usually Monday’s I feel terrible. But today I feel not too badly — actually quite good and full of energy. Maybe it’s just a relief from all the stress of the past week. Also a sense of new freedom and new responsibilities. Really I love getting more responsibilities at work. Perhaps I could apply for the job of my boss — but I hate the feeling of rejection that will most likely come.

My ex-wife wants me to do something for her — but really I just never have the time. The only day this week that I might have the time to do it is Wednesday or Thursday. She wants me to get a document notarized.

Taking the subway once again actually doesn’t feel too bad. It’s a little bit longer, but not bad — at about an hour to get home. And it gives me some time to do some reading and collect my thoughts in my journal. I missed not writing my journal the past week. Still, I know, there’s no reason I can’t write my journal when I’m at home — while watching tv or something. But I would much rather enjoy my children when at home.

And tomorrow I have my doctor followup meeting… to discuss whether or not to attempt surgery for my anal fistula problem. I did a colonoscopy a month ago… taking 3 days off work for it (plus an xray that was also done). Really I don’t want to have the surgery — feeling my problem isn’t that bad… bleeds every now and then, maybe once a week, but nothing that bothers me much….

First off, I started riding my moped again last week — after a long winter. It took me a couple of hours of trying to finally get it started again. But finally it sputtered to life. I like riding my moped. Though I miss the relaxing subway ride where I can collect my thoughts and write to you in my journal.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone is even reading my journal. But then, the other day, someone added me as a contact off of my flickr page — and they wrote to me about my sagging breasts entry. For medical reasons, she stopped wearing a bra when 18 years old, found it uncomfortable to wear again — so, she’s been bra-less for many years now. And she does find her breasts in much better shape because of it. I’ll put a link to her flickr page here, if I can.

There are many things I will talk about here. Just general things about life. Like that it’s better not to wear a bra — much healthier for the breasts. At first it seems counter-intuitive. For a bra was designed to help support the breast. And people talk about gravity pulling the breasts down. But then, the human body is wonderfully built — designed to be nude. It makes sense that breasts are like muscles — and muscles need to be used, or else they will get flabby and loose. So the best thing for breasts is to let them be loose, flop around, to make them exercise and get tighter as a result.

Other big news… my baby is now 5 months old. And she’s changing a lot now. Now she’s trying to talk — having much to say sometimes. And she’s very alert, looking around. And she’s moving. She can roll over half way, onto her side. She hasn’t rolled all the way over onto her stomach yet though. If left alone on the floor, she will move about now, sliding on her back, turning 90 degrees from the position we put her in. And she’s starting to show an interest in her toys — grasping them. It’s so very cute — really making me get one more.

Mia loves our baby so much and is a great mom — breast-feeding seems so easy and natural for her. She suggested once that she might give in and have another baby later. However, she hates the pregnancy feeling, very hard on her. So, when I mention it later, she goes back to saying no more babies. Also, compared to minding our 4 year old, the baby is just so much easier.

I missed not writing in my journal.

The other very big news last week — my boss quit!! He just upped and gave 2 weeks notice and left. Friday was his last day. Somehow he just decided he wanted to go to business school. Still, he has to find a school. So, I met his boss, my new boss now, for the first time last week. He seems nice enough. I just find it very hard to remember and feel confident in how to pronounce his name. It’s “Doron”. If you know how to pronounce it properly, please let me know.

A replacement has to be found now. I agree with Doron — the way my boss left was very unprofessional. At the very least, he should have stayed on and helped in the transition process and helped in finding a replacement. Other people at my work, when they leave — and one did leave a couple years ago to go back to school… they give several months notice. But, this just goes to show the way my boss is… a bit unprofessional and disorganized. I wish I knew what was really going through my boss’s mind. I just hope some of my harsh words over the years didn’t hurt him — for I did have a few rants about his poor management skills in the annual employee surveys… but, as far as I knew, it was anonymous.

I could always apply for the job myself. But I just got myself a promotion and don’t want the stress that comes with being a manager. I like to get my hands dirty inside the code — spending hours deep inside the code. I don’t want to spend days inside of meetings. And I don’t want to always watch the clock. And I don’t want to travel. And I don’t want the stress of dealing with difficult customers.

There are a few of my coworkers who would be perfect for the job, I think.

So, that was my very stressful week… my boss gone now and I met my new boss.

I missed out on 2 social events yesterday and today. Today was a ko-kart offsite meeting — a team building exercise. It was a 4+ hour drive away and in another country and my wife didn’t want me to go — especially with our baby and daughter to look after. So, I decided not to go. And yesterday was a team release party… I also didn’t go. Everyone else on the team from work went, except for me. But I just didn’t feel comfortable going. It would have been a 30 minute bus ride and I would need to pay myself — they didn’t have a budget for the party this time. Plus, I always feel socially awkward at these events.

Really I’m perfectly happy not partaking in any social activities — is that wrong? Does it affect my work performance? I don’t think so. But it does affect how people see me. And it has prevented me from getting a promotion for most of the past 10 years. I’ve had the same job for 18 years now — only receiving a single promotion, about 14 years ago. Finally though, I’m receiving a promotion this month!! I’m not sure what triggered it — for I did bring it to my boss’s attention a month ago.

But, by missing these social events yesterday and today, the good part is that it got me thinking. And yesterday I discovered that I have a mental illness, “Social Phobia” or “Social Anxiety”. I’m not as extreme as others though. And for me it’s normal, for it’s the way I’ve been all my life.

I love this Social Anxiety support/friendship site I found today. Everyone is so nice on it. No feelings of rejection. No harsh words. No judgements. Just nice people, sharing their feelings and experiences.

So, I feel a lot of good has come out of missing these social activities — for it got me thinking about my problem. I hope I can continue to learn and grow and conquer my fears.

I think many things will help. Joining the nudist park will help. And trying to start my photography business will help too. And reading and writing and making new friends on the Social Anxiety friendship site will help too. Maybe I should seek out and find a psychologist too? For I can’t do this alone. And writing my online journal will help too.

I don’t like to apply labels though. Like I don’t like someone to say I’m a nudist. Or I don’t want to say I have “SA”. I like being nude. And I have some social limitations that I need to work to overcome. And I have a trailer in a nudist resort. But I am much more. I want to be a photographer too. Sometimes I like watching porn too. And I like have sex. I’m also a father and love my children very much. I’m also a husband and love my wife.

He was pushing me to go to a social event this evening — my team having a release party to celebrate our latest software release. It’s a tradition. But, as it’s quite far for me, and they have no budget for it this year — pay your own, I decided not to go. My boss was trying to push me to go.

Really I feel uncomfortable at events like this. I’m the type of person, shy, and will just stand in a corner, feeling uncomfortable… and hard to get into a conversation. One on one, I’m ok… but not so much when it’s more than one other person.

I did some google searches, and discovered that really I have a mental illness “Social Phobia”. I don’t think I have that extreme a case and I can still function, still have a job, wife, children. I explained my symptoms in an email to my boss and was surprised — he phoned me back within minutes and was very understanding. And he suggested some treatment I could get.

I was a bit surprised that he didn’t suspect anything wrong with me. I guess I conceal my social awkwardness well.

I’ll list some of my symptoms here:

• I cannot pee standing up at a urinal — unless the bathroom is completely empty… for I just can’t relax.
• I feel uncomfortable writing if someone else might be watching.
• In a large group of people, like at a party, I just feel like claustrophobic and need to get out or stay close to an exit.
• I avoid giving any presentations — not giving a single presentation in my 18 years here.
• I feel uncomfortable when alone in a restaurant… even when I’m with my wife and she just went to the washroom for a few minutes.
• At work I always eat at my desk, for I don’t feel comfortable eating in the kitchen with others.
• I also feel uncomfortable walking into the kitchen when it’s full of people — just scared people will make fun of me. After all, when I was a child, I was bullied and made fun of.
• I avoid team sports. I hate the feeling of rejection and remember, back in school, I was always the guy picked last when they picked teams.
• I’m very shy.
• I avoid taking leadership training courses because talking in front of a group might be involved. Really I’m scared I’ll make a fool of myself.
• It’s hard for me to make phone calls.
• If I do need to talk in a group, or make a phone call, I like to rehearse and make notes first.
• If I visit a chat-room, I like to watch but I don’t feel comfortable to to say anything.
• When driving, I like to stay far away from the other cars.
• I find myself wanting to stay close to an exit.
• My heart races just at the thought of a social situation.
• I avoid parties.
• Difficulty talking with strangers.

My boss complements me, saying I’m brilliant. Yet, things like that only makes my social phobia worse — making me more scared to speak up, knowing that is a reputation I can’t always live up to. Many times after all, I think of saying something, and then think it was better that I didn’t say it — for it wasn’t a very brilliant thing to say. Other times, I think of saying something, analyse it, contemplate saying it, and then it’s too late the conversation has moved on to something else.

Really I’m scared of falling, of making a fool of myself, of people laughing at me. In the past, people have made fun of me, and I just smile and blush — maybe, in a way, like it.

And yet, I seem full of contradictions, as here I am putting my diary online and explicit revealing photos as well.

As well, I’m a nudist. I guess that’s the paradox and why I’m not a simple man. I can reveal myself completely to strangers and be nude. And I feel comfortable that way — when they’re nude too though, in the nudist resort. If they have clothes on, then I start to feel shy and uncomfortable. But when nude, I can be myself… for I feel completely accepted for who I am. Not perfect, over-weight, small to average sized penis — but accepted for who I am.

The same here. Maybe it’s because I don’t know if anyone is even reading this. At least there are no comments yet. But here, I can be completely open and honest too — and reveal myself completely. If people start judging me and being mean, then maybe that will change. But I’ve had very positive experiences where it’s come to writing — people complement me on my writing… my boss too. And my writing has gotten me both my wives and every girlfriend I’ve ever had. If I had to rely on my social face to face skills, I would be a 45 year old virgin who’s never even kissed a girl or who’s never had a date.

But, my writing won the heart of my first wife, and the heart of the girl who ended up destroying my marriage, and the heart of 3 girls in between… and the heart of Mia, my wonderful wife.

I also think, when nude or when writing my diary here, I don’t care if people see me as a bumbling idiot sometimes. But, at work I have more of a reputation to uphold. Reputation and respect is very important to maintain at work. And, having the same job now for 18 years, I feel I’m very well respected at work. And I feel I can make the software sing and dance and analyse and figure out practically any problem I’m faced with.

I’m very confident when sitting in front of a computer and working away on a problem. Sometimes it takes me much longer than other people. And sometimes hard for me to put out all the social distractions and focus at the task at hand.

But back to my social phobia problem. Sometimes I just think it’s who I am, and I’m happy and proud of who I am. But then, it is the root cause of many of my difficulties. Like, sometimes I find it hard to focus on a task because I’m worried or thinking about what my boss might be thinking — or worried about some social interaction that happened. I worry and think too much.

I love those times when I can just forget about everything else and focus on the task at hand — and those are the times when I can accomplish things I truly am proud of.

For true close friends, people I can call up on the phone — I can’t think of a single person. I have my wife and my parents, and that’s all. My mom has always said I should get some friends. I have very low self-esteem when it comes to social interaction — and that actually makes me feel a bit like crying.

Writing serves as my release. Verbally, I can’t express myself very well. I want to appear strong, in control, and not weak. I don’t want people to see me cry. Yet, I feel like crying now. There’s a fear too in seeing a psychologist too, for I have difficulty talking with strangers.

How I miss the high I got back in university when making new friends. But they were never close friends. And I would confuse friendship with romantic love. And I remember I would go days without speaking to anyone… or especially to anyone of the opposite sex.

All my life, I’ve felt isolated and alone. I tell myself it’s ok, that’s just the way I am. And I feel happy with who I am. Is it bad to be anti-social? Is it bad to avoid social situations? I think I’m not alone, in that many people out there feel like I do in certain situations. Like the fear of giving a presentation.

I remember back in 1989 I had a paper accepted for the Siggraph conference — the number one conference in the world for computer graphics. I feel quite proud to have a paper there — for it’s really a huge accomplishment. It was the accumulation of 2 years work. I forget what the % of papers they accept, but it’s quite small, and most papers are rejected. But there was no way I could present the paper — in the huge auditorium, in front of thousands of people. So, my supervisor presented the paper. He also co-authored it. I think my fear mostly was the questions at the end. I knew I wouldn’t be able to answer background questions on the paper — like if someone asked how my work is related to another researchers.

I’m not able to talk BS to get myself out of a situation… and, if I’m not 100% sure about something, I admit that I don’t know. At times this is frustrating for people talking to me — for I tend to say “I don’t know” too much.

Is social phobia a problem? Some animals aren’t social after all. At times I would love to be isolated and completely alone. Yet, a few days of that, and I’ll go crazy.

Still, I’m able to function normally. I go shopping. I commute on the bus to work. I’ve held the same job for 18 years. Oh, and that Siggraph paper I had — I think that was instrumental in getting my job.

Yet, I have no one I can really call a good and close friend. There’s Sandra, but I don’t even have her phone number. Really, I have a lot of difficulty making phone calls. And I have trouble asserting myself.

I talked about this problem I have with my wife last night and she sees some of my social problems showing sometimes. Like, if I want to see something, I’m often just move my eyes and not my neck. And she says that makes me look like a bad person, like I’m hiding something. Like, especially if the police are beside me, I will get very nervous and scared to look at them — just look at them through the corner of my eye. I’m scared of social situations and of someone confronting me.

Writing my daily journal here, and my photography serve as my outlets.

I should make an effort of fixing my social awkwardness, for it does stop me from enjoying life to the fullest. Like, I can’t run my photography business if I’m scared to phone up and talk with strangers. And I may end up looking like a dirty old man, like a pervert, which is the furthest thing from the truth.

I should read up and learn more about CBT — cognitive behaviour therapy. Wish me luck.

And I would love to form a group with similar people out there…

Maybe I can find some nice friends out there, people with similar social phobia or anxiety… Really I would love to grow as a person, overcome my fears, and have some friends to share all this with…

It does mean I can’t do editing while commuting. I think that’s still ok. And I’ll need to keep my external drive with me… I want to have 2 copies of all my photos anyways… so I should keep two mirror copies. That way, I can keep one drive at work, if I want to do editing here, and one drive at home. I will need to be extra careful not to lose my photos — hence the need for 2 drives at all times.

One thing that works beautifully though — my photos are on a Windows NTFS formatted drive. The MacBook can read the drive, but it cannot write to it. And Aperture has no trouble using it as the master folder location — import from it and keep the photos there. This helps assure me that Aperture will never touch my originals. Very nice…

It does mean I’ll need to set up two drives and keep them in sync somehow — if I want to sometimes edit the photos at work and sometimes at home. But forcing me to do that will be a good thing, for I want at least 2 redundant copies of all my photos.

But, while on some days the commute goes so smoothly, today is a bit rough. I needed to wait 15 minutes for the bus — and then, of course, 2 buses come right after each other. And then, once at the train station, an old man with a suitcase blocks the escalator, so I have to wait again — and just miss the subway train, and have to wait another 12 minutes for the next one. People should learn the rule, stand right, walk left, when riding the escalators.

Anyway… finally, on my way now… still another 30 minutes by the time I get to work. If I was on my moped, I would already be at work now… assuming it doesn’t have any problems.

I still don’t know if anyone is bothering reading my diary entries here. Today I need to put up some stats, so I can tell. And I need to get some photos up too.

All in all, I love my online journal/diary writing now — one reason I like to take the TTC… for it gives me time to relax and write my thoughts. And everyday there are new things to write about. If anyone is reading this, best is to type a search string at the top to find entries concerning anything. Like just type Mia Nude, and you’ll find all entries that have those 2 words. I thought about using tags, but I don’t think their that useful — for then it’s up to me to manually add the tags for each entry. Best is to have search — but I would love to have some suggested search strings as well… just to help in the navigation.

I am trying to separate things into categories too — but almost everything is falling into the “life” category now. For I’m talking less about technology, now that I really love the workflow I’ve created. Again, I’m using a MacBook, BBedit as my editor, and MarsEdit to manage the posts, and wordpress for the site. And everything is working very nicely together.

The next pieces to add to the puzzle is stats — I love the site statscounter.com for this… and photos… I’ll initially use my Flickr accounts and Aperture. Later I’ll need to move to Gallery and host the photos myself — for photos more of a commercial nature, or when advertising other adult sites.

I forget if I mentioned this last week or not. But last week I typed in a google search for “sagging breasts” — for really I wonder about Mia’s breasts. As women get older and after child birth, do breasts always sag? And what can be done to help? So, I was surprised to learn that bra’s actually do not help and make the problem worse. And it makes sense. The breast is full of muscles and bra’s stop the muscles from doing what they like to do — making them lazy, and hence sag more. So, the best thing women can do is to not wear bra’s. Interesting… So, if you’re a woman reading this, try not wearing a bra and see if you notice any differences in your breasts — see if they become perkier, and let me know what you find out. Even when exercising, it’s best to not wear a bra and let your breasts bounce around — giving them a good exercise too. Muscles need to be used, after-all. Of course, because of years of neglect, your breasts might get painful without a bra — and, just like with any exercise, it needs to be taken gradually and easier at first.

Mia though feels she needs to wear a bra because she’s breast-feeding… her milk will leak out. So, she wears a bra with a removable padded insert to soak up any milk that leaks out. Really breast-feeding is a wonderful thing, and I feel Mia does a wonderful job of it.

Ok… next task… to learn about Aperture and posting more photos. I got more photos into Aperture last night — the shots I took 2 weekends ago of my 4 year old daughter. She loves being a model and having her photo taken — very different from my 13 year old son, who doesn’t like his photo taken. He’s a lot like me, for when I was that age, I resisted having my photo taken too. I regret it now though, and I’m sure he will too, for Mia (and me too) would love to see more photos of how I looked when I was a child.

Digital cameras have really changed things… ok… let me dive into Aperture and Flickr now and see if I can find some good photos. Remember though, I’m still learning and these were my first attempts in my new basement studio.

Plus I was distracted on the weekend with the basement flood.

Last summer I rode my bike to work sometimes — but I just don’t have the energy to do that anymore. I’m thinking I’ll just continue taking the TTC — or maybe ride my moped. The moped is actually cheaper, given that I’m already paying for it’s insurance anyway. The moped last summer was just costing me about $1 in gas each day. Gas prices are a bit higher now though — maybe 30% higher. But I like the relaxing attitude of the TTC, and being able to write on my way.

I just hope my moped still runs… after the long winter. I also like that moped allows me to do some errands and shopping on the way… saving me time. True, it does pollute the air a little bit. But the amount is much smaller than a car.

So, I guess it’s ok I didn’t buy the bike, for I don’t see myself riding much this year. I’m thinking better and safer would be to ride my moped — and with the time I save each day, exercise at home instead. Also, riding a bike is very hard when the weather is wet or windy.

The TTC isn’t too bad either, but it doesn’t save me any time — so I’m left with no time to exercise. I do need to manage my time better.

So… I didn’t accomplish any of my goals for the weekend. What we’re they again?

I wrote: “I want to continue to organize the basement, take more photos, organize my photos, start using Aperture, get more photos up on Flickr, and visit my parents, and maybe start exercising.”

Out of all that, the only thing I did was visit my parents. My basement is a mess once again — because of the sewer backup problem I had. And I didn’t find any time to organize my photos or take more photos. Oh well. I have a nice 4 day weekend coming up now, so let me see if I can accomplish my goals this weekend.

Mia though wants to go somewhere, do something, when I have the time off… maybe go to the zoo one day. The weather should be beautiful. But I want to use the time to catch up with life. Plus I need to spend some time on my taxes. It’s that terrible tax time once again. I always hate doing taxes. And always think I’ll file early — but then always being late.

As I do consider myself to be self-employed, I have a June 15′th deadline. Except my business idea is dying. I was thinking of making home-made porn. But my heart really was never in it. And now, as I watch more porn, really I don’t think I want to be doing this.

I want to switch the focus of my home business and be a photographer. I took a course last year. Not just taking photos of sex and porn — for the internet seems to be getting flooded with that type of photos. I want to create photos to be proud of.

Photos not about sex, but to show love and love making. And photos to show the beauty around us and inside us. Photos to show the beauty of the nude and natural human body. Photos to show tenderness. Photos to show the innocence of youth.

I want to create high quality beautiful images.

This year, if feels like I’m starting over, renewing my passion for creating something beautiful — after being distracted by money and porn.

I would still love to take photos of bums, and penises and vaginas and breasts… but to show them as beautiful and interesting…

I guess I need to learn and follow my heart. And if I’m trying to do something that my heart just isn’t in, then I won’t succeed. That is why my dream of being a porn video producer has failed. But it’s ok — to learn and fail. I still have many hours shot of home-made porn — and maybe someday I’ll edit it and get it up. But right now, that’s not important.

What I want now is to master the art of taking beautiful photos…. to learn how to master using lights… both studio conditions, as well as natural settings. By putting my heart into this project, I feel I’ll succeed now.

So, my new plan — I’ll forget about the porn business for now, and instead I need to:

• Organize my photos.
• Get up to speed using Aperture.
• Put my best photos up on Flickr.
• Get my photography website up and running… at RonPhotography.com
• Build a portfolio.
• Initially, get more practice and photos by TFCD — actually TFDVD… that is, I’ll take the photos for free, and provide a DVD of all the photos I shoot, trading my time, a photo DVD, for the model’s time and a signed model release.
• And get business cards made.
• Eventually, have a real legitimate photography business!!

I really believe this year I can make this dream a reality. Wish me luck. And let me know if you want to be my model…

Finally I checked the city’s website and found the phone number. I was surprised they have a 24/7 number to call. So I phoned them up at 2:30 a.m. Sunday morning. The man was nice and said to phone back in the morning, unless I want him to wake up the guy to come over at 4 a.m.

I phoned back 10:30 a.m. Sunday morning and they sent someone to my house to fix the problem. He arrived about 2 hours later, around 12:30 a.m. Right away he looked at the sewer vent pipe in front of my house and knew there was a problem with the sewer line. For the first thing to try, he got a long plunger out of his truck, plunged the vent pipe — and miracle of miracle, the blockage cleared and the water started flowing again!! I struggled with the problem all Saturday, and within a couple minutes minutes he fixed it.

BUT… now I still worry if the problem will return.

First let me say that I went to Home Depot on Saturday afternoon to see what I could buy — now that I knew the problem was with the drain and not water leaking into the foundation from the very wet winter we’ve had. The man in Home Depot was very helpful. And I bought some chemicals and a long 50′ long, 1/2″ thick “snake”/auger. It was just $25 and strangely actually was cheaper than renting it for a day.

So, Saturday night I used the snake, putting it down the vent pipe, and it went in pretty easily. But then, just near the end, almost 50′ in, close to the road, it started to have problem going any further. So I figured that is where the blockage was. I then went inside for dinner, and thought about using the snake from inside the house — but couldn’t figure out how to get the snake into the drain. The floor drain is under a finished floor, so impossible to get at. I just wanted to be sure that the problem was outside.

But another clue — I measured the height of the water level in the vent pipe, and it was almost exactly where my basement floor is…. another clue and too big coincidence for the problem to be a blockage in the sewer line.

So, after the city worker used the plunger, the problem cleared up. But now I still worry that the cause of the problem is still there. For almost exactly where my snake indicated a problem with the line, today I noticed a small indentation/hole in the grass. It’s not much… just a couple of inches down. But it worries me. What I initially thought, and now still think seeing the hole, is that the sewer pipe is cracked or broken. And I think it’s just on the border of the city property and mine, so hopefully it’s a city problem to fix.

In any case, I’ll keep an eye on the problem. I’ll check the sewer line every day to make sure the water is still flowing. And I’ll keep an eye on the sink hole that might be developing in my front lawn — to see if that hole gets any deeper.

It’s really quite amazing, how a city is constructed — with a maze of sewer pipes deep underground. And somehow graded and developed so that the water all flows downhill to the sewage treatment plant.

Last weekend was a good one, for I just blocked everything else out and stayed in my basement all Sunday afternoon, organizing and cleaning it up — getting my studio ready. I need to do more of that this weekend. It got a bit messed up again with this wet weather and needing to move things away from the part that’s getting flooded. Mia says things are getting better.

I need to try to stay motivated and make plans and accomplish things. Like, either this weekend or next, I want to install a new toilet in the basement. Next weekend will be nice, for it’s another 4 day weekend. This week was only 2 days, but I just feel too tired today. I need to learn, to go to work, focus, work my 8-10 hours, and then go home… and try not to get distracted.

I did accomplish a lot today, by cleaning up 5 bugs. It’s not the most exciting work, which is why I get distracted easily.

Like I got distracted in the world of Flickr. I have 2 pro accounts now — a nice benefit of my Rogers yahoo account. Rogers is my internet provider at home. I pay them enough — about $180/month… for internet, cable, lots of channels, and 2 cell phones. I think Rogers allows me to set up 8 yahoo profiles, so that means I could have 8 Flickr pro accounts!

I’m just discovering the world of Flickr and getting lost in it. There are many sides to it. On the one hand is people posting nude photos of themselves and their wife, friends, family, etc.. Most just nudes and I haven’t found anything that pornographic yet. As Flickr is nice to allow it, there seems to be quite a following. And photos and nude and art — they all go together. Yahoo seems nice that way, for they seem more friendly to the adult community than some other companies. Yahoo’s customer service is a complete joke though — for it’s non-existent. The times I’ve tried asking a question, I just get a response where either the person answering the question is a complete idiot for they clearly didn’t read or understand my question, or it’s just some type of automated form response.

But I’m starting to love Flickr. I still need to learn how to use it, and need to get more photos up. I also want to advertise my photography services — just so I can learn how to take better photos. Originally I won’t charge anything… as Flickr also doesn’t allow commercial use. Yet, people do link from Flickr to a Redbutton page to sell their photos. All a bit confusing — what is commercial use? I just discovered this Redbutton site by looking at someone’s photos on Flickr — pretty cool way to make a little bit of money. I think I’ll use it too.

Ok… plan for the weekend. My son is coming tomorrow. And luckily my ex-wife will be driving on Sunday as well to pick him up. I really don’t want to take any long drives this weekend. For one thing, gas is too expensive. Secondly, we all need to do our part to drive less to help the planet. Thirdly, the weather is looking a bit nasty — maybe even see snow again on Sunday… and very windy. My car doesn’t perform very well on windy days — sometimes feeling like the wind is going to rip the top completely off, or push the car off the road.

I want to continue to organize the basement, take more photos, organize my photos, start using Aperture, get more photos up on Flickr, and visit my parents, and maybe start exercising.

I’m still not sure what to do about my 2 Flickr accounts I created. One is linked to my account RonPhotography@rogers.com and the other linked to NudeRiver@rogers.com. I feel a bit nervous mixing my children photos with the NudeRiver account, for I have some nude photos there. So, I’m thinking of putting them on the RonPhotography account. I’m not sure…

The weather has just been so nasty this winter. Much more snow than normal. Close to a record, but not quite. I think we probably did come in second or third, for the most snow on record for Toronto. And now it’s just going to pore down rain today and all weekend. I haven’t checked my roof yet — I just hope it’s holding up and not leaking. Later this month or early next, I’ll need to go and check on my trailer too.

One could say this weather is just normal. But I think the weather we’re experiencing the past few years and now is due to global warming. Scary… the world is changing right before our eyes. And we see it by the weather.

Today Mia is manning the pumps at home — actually it’s a wet vacuum, used to wash carpets. And we have a dehumidifier going. I think we’ll be ok. Just need time for things to dry off. I just hope we don’t get mould or any long-term damages. And hope the roof holds up too.

It’s a scary thing — water… we need it, yet too much or too little and we’re in trouble. Just like the sunlight and heat. We need it nice warm in the middle — say between 0 C and 30 C is best. Scary, for someday if the temperature hits 50C, we’ll be cooking and many people will die.

Sometimes I wonder if global warming will affect me that much. Like I don’t live near an ocean, so the rising sea level won’t hurt me. But then I don’t realize that our world is in a state of equilibrium. It’s a balance and a state and world we’ve adapted for over thousands of years. And it’s changing. We just don’t know what the world will change into. And we don’t know whether or not we’ll have a place in the new world.

Very scary. Yet we still drive our cars too much. Why can’t people realize that we need to change? Or if we don’t, the world, our world may be destroyed. Actually, the world won’t be destroyed, but we won’t be able to live here anymore.

Maybe we’ll be ok. People would say, why change what we’re doing when it will cost us money, and the world will be ok anyway. People have been predicting the end of the world for a long time after-all.

I don’t know. But I’m shocked to here that Ontario is still using coal to create electricity — ridiculous!! Just shut the bloody thing down. If we don’t have enough electricity, either people will need to conserve, or we’ll have blackouts. People are just so short sited.

And people… stop driving!! I only drive once a week now, just a few blocks around my house to do grocery shopping and visit my parents. And I take the TTC to work and proud of it. Soon I might start up my moped again, but it uses very little gas — getting like 50 mpg.

True though, someday if I’m lucky enough to get a parking spot at work, I would drive everyday too. And in the summer, I will drive from time to time to my trailer… maybe even commute from the trailer to work (about 50 km), so that my wife and children can enjoy their summer there.

And on weekends there’s driving to see my son. It’s important for my family to see him more. And my ex-wife will always make me feel guilty if I don’t. But that trip costs at least $10 in gas, and 10 litres of fuel. With gas now $1.14/l and going up everyday, that trip is getting more and more expensive. Plus it also puts a drain on the environment. Really I don’t know what to do…

Much to talk about. My boss was encouraging me to go on a business trip next week — 10 hours of driving, for a 4 hour meeting/social activity. A part of me would love to go. Plus I would love to take photos of migrating birds along the way — as with a slight detour I could visit Long Point Provincial Park and Point Pelee. But I can’t really afford to miss anymore time at work. Plus I don’t like the stress of a business trip. Plus Mia doesn’t want me to go — not wanting to be alone for one or two nights. Plus I need to hand over my birth certificate to start my passport application. So, it’s looking like I won’t go now.

Monday was a hard day, for I couldn’t eat anything all day. Not till Tuesday afternoon, when I had my colonoscopy done. It won’t be till late this month when I find out my results. And then yesterday I went to the hospital for some xrays, but they couldn’t do them. It’s all for this anal fistula problem I have. But the fistula was closed, so they couldn’t do the xrays. The xrays involve putting a small tube inside the fistula — with the hope of finding where it goes inside my body.

So, I’ll find out more later this month. All these tests put quite a strain on the body. I wonder how old people can put up with it.

Oh, and Mia’s eyes problem. She’ll be ok. She saw a optometrist on Monday and told her she just has what is called “dry eyes”. I came to the same conclusion myself on the weekend from searching on the internet and from her symptoms. I bought one medicine for it on Saturday, but it didn’t help at all. The doctor gave her another one that solves her problem. Most likely her hormones are a mess since the baby was born. Mia is not easy having babies. But she does a great job breast feeding.

….
Ok… on my way home now. Today was a good day. No sign of my manager. No new problems to solve. A nice quiet day.

I went to the passport office in the afternoon and it was very quick. I had to wait perhaps 5-10 minutes in the first line, and they checked to make sure I have everything ready. And then, because I filled out all the paperwork online, my number was called immediately — not even given me a chance to sit down first. So, all is good and all this hard work of applying for a passport should finally pay off. The passports should arrive in about a month… plenty of time for our trip to China in the fall.

And I finally finished off a project I’ve been working on for the past month. Somehow, with the 3 extra days off, I can somehow see things more clearly and it all makes sense. Really I needed the time off.

A week from now will be nice again, as next week is a short 3 day work week, and then a nice 4 day weekend. Really I love these long weekends — spreading vacation around, instead of taking a lot of vacation in one shot. I have too much vacation saved up — about 38 days saved right now. After the fall, after my China trip, that vacation total will be down to just about 20 days — maybe less, depending on how much I take over the summer. Really I got myself burned out the past 6 months — just too much work and responsibilities.

Something else I like about my weekend. Finally I got my basement studio up and running. I did some shopping and visited my parents on Saturday — plus got the tax software I need. I need to visit my parents again this Saturday to give my Dad some bus tickets. Later this month he’ll need to take the bus/subway downtown for jury duty. He’s like going to be 80 years old in a couple months and now needs to get downtown by like 8:30 a.m. each morning. At the very least they should offer potential jurors free parking or money to at least pay for transportation — but nope, nada. Pretty ridiculous… and treating old people like that. Oh well.

With my shopping done, I stayed home on Sunday and just felt motivated to clean up my basement. It wasn’t as hard as I thought. And somehow things just came together. I had a great idea for how to hang a background sheet from the ceiling. In my cleaning I came across some huge hooks. And they were the perfect size to hang my background rod on. And then I found some clamps I bought — and clamped a sheet to the rod. Very nice and professional looking.

So, I’m learning how to set up my studio in a small space. Without much floor space, not enough for a lot of stands, I can hang things from the ceiling.

And then I experimented a bit and finally started shooting again. From the reflectors I bought a couple months ago from craigslist, I used just a couple things — a light stand and the reflector holder. I then used an old photoflex reflector I bought more than 10 years ago, and just positioned it off to one side, to help fill in the shadows.

I then tried using different lights. My model was my rather impatient 4 year old daughter. First I tried using all the lights I have — two bare strobes, a softbox flash as the main light, the Nikon flash pointed at the ceiling to trigger things, plus the photoflex gold reflector to fill in the shadow side. But the lights were just too strong and over-powered the photos. So I removed the strobes, and wasn’t sure if I should just use the softbox or softbox plus Nikon flash.

So, I removed …

Ouch… just got home to a flooded basement…

Ok… try to change, and keep the schedule for the weekend too. In bed by midnight, starting tomorrow. And up whenever I feel I get enough sleep.

And I have a lot I want to do over the next 5 days I have off. Well… the last 2 of those days will be mostly wasted with these medical tests. I’m a bit nervous about doing this surgery later this year. It should be fine though. Just a small problem I have with my bum.

At the very least, I need to exercise and do my photography … and get more photos up on Flickr. I wonder how to mix different types of photos? I’ll put up photos from all aspects of my life. Some will be rated X, some maybe XXX, and some of my children, some nature… just family life in general. I suppose, if someone doesn’t want to see the nude photos, they just have to set the appropriate filter.

I only want to choose the best photos to put up — the ones I’m most proud of. Ok… that’s my plan for tomorrow… exercise and organize my photos… and try to shoot more photos too. And I’ll learn more about Aperture, and get the photos up onto Flickr.

Oh oh… subway has a problem now… it’s going to be a very late start to work.

Mia has gone a while since last complaining about my schedule — for the last month has been very bad again, getting home like 2:00 a.m., but she’s tried to be understanding. But last night she complained again. The thing is, it only makes things worse. We have so little time together — we should spend it being happy together and not complaining. Last night I didn’t get to sleep till past 4:00 a.m.!! And then up again by 10:00 a.m. I feel not too bad.

Ok, this weekend I’ll make the change. I’ll force myself to go to bed earlier, and get up the same time everyday, regardless of whether or not it’s the weekend. And then I’ll be able to get much more done on weekends and time won’t be so short.

Today I’ll try to just concentrate on work and get the project I’m working on finished. My boss is on vacation today, so that should help… less distractions I hope.

Oh, and 2 days ago the latest issue of my FCN membership magazine arrived. I really look forward to it’s arrival. Check out the FCN website at fcn.ca. FCN is the Federation of Canadian Naturists. Really I love being a naturist/nudist. And I think my website I’ll build later: 2bnude.com, will have a great future. It’s a wonderful name, I think, to help promote the idea of naturism and nudism. For nudists to stand together and not be embarrassed. Even myself, I’m scared to have anything on my desk at work that suggests, or to tell my coworkers that I am a nudist.

I guess really I’ve been a nudist all my life — but more so since I left home. When on my own at university, I discovered how wonderful sleeping nude is. I think much more comfortable and healthier than always wearing clothes. Really being nude is very healthy. Our bodies shouldn’t always have clothes, for air is good for our skin.

I think it was 11 years ago that I visited my first nudist camp — The Grand Barn, south of Ottawa. Back then there didn’t seem to be much choice. I drove far with my family, camped in the park, and went to Ottawa for my first photo shoot with a model. Really she was a lovely girl, Nissa Marin (I’m not sure about the last name spelling). And we just walked in downtown Ottawa and I took photos. I took some lovely photos of her with her boyfriend too. I’ll see if I can find and create a flickr album of them.

Back then was before the days of digital cameras. I bought a Nikon F90X and some lights and backgrounds. I was starting my interest in nudism. I had moved to a farm and loved being nude outside — it’s a beautiful feeling, gardening in the nude. Wanting that feeling again, but not being able to afford a farm, plus the commute to work is just too hard — that’s why I bought the trailer in the nudist resort last year. Paid a bit much, $10,000 for the trailer + over $2000 in park fees each year. I think I’ll love it there.

But also, now that I replaced the windows in my home, I love it there too. I can be nude inside my home. Maybe sometimes people might be able to see me nude from outside the window — but I don’t care. I’m not nude to exhibit myself. I should be free to be nude inside my own home.

Ah, how nice if I could be nude more — have a job that allowed me to work nude. One reason I like to be nude is just to be comfortable. I think it’s healthier too. I am overweight and sweat a lot — which is why I don’t like clothes. But I know I need to exercise and get myself back into shape.

I think I’m a very typical Canadian nudist — for it seems most of the people don’t have very tone bodies… most seem to be bit overweight. But it’s ok. It’s a nice feeling, to be accepted and not judged, even if one’s body is far from perfect.

Still, I will get myself into shape. Ok, starting this weekend I’ll exercise. And then get my bike and moped ready.

Ah, 1997 and starting my photography dreams. I think it all started when I attended a nude photography workshop offered by The Learning Annex. It was actually cancelled a couple of times — and then finally was offered. I’ll see if I can put the photos from that workshop on Flickr too. That workshop was with an even older camera — an old Practica camera that my dad gave me when I was a child. It was completely manual, with a built-in meter and split screen focusing. They said to just shoot black & white, but I shot one roll of colour too. Ah, the old days of film. And cameras that lasted a lifetime, and the photo quality only depended on the skill of the photographer.

Times have changed. I need to go through and select a lot of my old photos, put them into Aperture and onto Flickr, and then decide if any of them were any good or not. I know Mia might not be too happy with putting the photos as public on Flickr, for she worries a lot. Worries about who knows where the photos will end up.

But myself, I’m more trusting. I want to learn and don’t want to feel restricted in any way. And by putting my photos out there for the largest possible audience, I can get comments and learn and take better and better photos. It isn’t rocket science, after-all.

So.. the weekend once again is here. And I can never finish my work. Once again it’s like 1:30 a.m. and I’m totally exhausted. I’m working on a big project, much to learn and think about. I like learning. Just it takes a lot of effort. I’m thinking, with a bit of luck, maybe I can finish the job over the weekend.

I worry a bit. I’m going in for some medical tests on Tuesday and Wednesday — nothing too serious, I hope… a colonoscopy on Tuesday and some x-rays on Wednesday. So, as I can’t eat anything on Monday, I’m staying home for 3 days next week. Which means next week is a lost cause.

At least I’ll have some time off now to pursue my hobbies. My 3 goals for this year that I mentioned, kick start my website, learn photography, and exercise. I think I’m off to a great start.

A few distractions I’ll have this weekend though. One is that I need to take my car in to get it’s emission tested. Really it’s just like another tax. My car license expires on my birthday (coming up in May), and because my car is old (a 1995 Suzuki Sidekick), every 2 years I need to do the emission test. My car always passes with flying colours. It’s a good car. I bought it used in 1999 for a little over $9000. Starting to get a bit of rust though.

That was one thing a bit strange… in the nudist resort, 2 other people have the same car as I have. Strange that Sidekick’s are so popular with middle aged nudist men.

Back to medical chat… I worry a bit about Mia, for her eyes are getting bad… swollen. I think it’s just allergies. But she worries it’s something far more serious — thinking she’ll need surgery. She does need to see a doctor to check.

To help separate my blog site from my real life — for I will have a lot of very personal thoughts here, as well as revealing photos, and don’t want people who know me to find me here. Sad that those that know us best will also judge us and try to control us. I know many of the things I’ve done would disappoint my parents. But like I’m 45 years old — yet I’m still treated like a child.

And luckily I got the names I wanted. Somehow I was too late to get nuderiver@gmail.com — but it doesn’t matter.

I created a new profile linked to my rogers/yahoo account: nuderiver@rogers.com, plus the yahoo profile “nuderiver”.

I also got the id: nuderiver on flickr — pretty cool, for now I can get the most natural photo site at: flickr.com/photos/nuderiver/

Plus Rogers gives me a a flickr pro account for free! Unlimited space and no ads!
I really love flickr for it:

• It offers a way for people to find my photos.
• Great for having people find my website too.
• Plus I’m mentioning that I’m looking for people to shoot. Trade DVD of all the photos shot for their time. Contact me if you’re in the Toronto area.
• I’m a bit concerned about the no commercial use aspect of it. I am not making any money — at least not yet… so it should be ok. Later, if I want to have a portfolio and make money doing photography, I will have to switch to Gallery and host the images myself.
• I love too that they allow mature/adult content.
• And I love that I discovered that people are offering their photos free to use on websites and to create derived works. Really I hate all this copyright worries. I was thinking of making money selling stock photos though. But then, I like more the idea of just giving it away — making the world a better place and desire more fame than money. I’ll help support this by making sure every photo on my site is free and clear — either shot by me, or by someone who allows that use.
• I found a few plugins for integrating Flickr with Wordpress.
• And I found a plugin for Aperture to Flickr too.
• I need to check if there is anything to export Flickr to Gallery though, just in case I want to switch over later.

The only thing that worries me is the part about no commercial use on flickr. I worry that at any time they might just delete all my photos, and all my hard work would be lost. I should figure out how to have redundancy in Aperture — like create the albums and comments all inside of Aperture. And then just download the photos, tags, and everything across. I need to check if that works — whether or not all the tag info goes across. And I don’t know if Aperture allows creation of comments?

I feel I’m well on my way this year. When the year started, I made the goal that I wanted to finally get my website up and running. And I’m happy for I’ve found a way to do it — finally!! After 10 years since my site angeleyes.com and then my divorce… and then 2 years since trying to get it up with miaron.com … but it never got anywhere, for it was too much of a porn aspect.

But now, a year after buying the domain nuderiver.com, I’m finally making some progress. Slow, I know. Also, taking the subway definitely helps a lot, for it gives me time to write.

It’s been a long journey and tried many things — like I thought about Joomla, and Drupal, and Dreamweaver, and RapidWeaver, and iWeb, and blogspot, and … And finally something pretty good here with Wordpress + BBedit + MacBook + MarsEdit + Flickr… LOVE IT!

Now I need to get my photos organized and up inside of Aperture and then up on Flickr. I won’t worry about copyright or people sharing the photos… I just want people to see my work and comment and to learn and grow and take more and more beautiful photos… CGI too…

ahhh… I feel too excited with all this… for it’s been a long journey and much struggle, learning on my own, to get where I am. I still have my other site to work on later: 2bnude.com … Plus I struggled, buying at least another 10 domain names over the past couple of years.

But the brands I like the most right now are NudeRiver.com, 2bNude.com, and also my old faithful AngelEyes.com. But I can’t really do anything much with Angeleyes.com anymore, for my parents and ex-wife know about it. My parents worry too much, plus try to instil their ancient narrow-minded values. So, for now, this is our little secret.

Ahhh… a happy feeling… feeling well on my way to… to do my writing, create my journal, create a website of my life, and to be a photographer.

I had 3 goals at the start of 2008:

• Get my website up and running.
• Get more serious about my photography.
• Exercise and lose some weight.

Oh well… 2 out of 3 ain’t bad. And my website is coming along very nicely, considering I had nothing just 3 months ago…. it feels longer… I’m not sure exactly when I started. I still have a long way to go with my photography… still needing to build my studio. But now I just want to shoot and learn and not worry too much about the studio and lack of space.

Exercise… my next goal to start on…

Oh, I forgot to mention, I also updated my Wordpress site… up to version 2.5 now. And the time-stamp is working very nicely now. And I also updated my theme a bit, to make it more the style I want… and removed the tag cloud, just using categories better, and removed the calendar. All is coming along very nicely..

But Mia is complaining with the hours I’m working… That always seems to be the case, when I’m happy and making progress, then Mia complains and feels sad and alone. It’s a hard balance — to have time for myself, also for work, and also for my family. Time for bed now..

Good night and take care my love… sweet dreams…

I need to organize my life better. And then I’ll be able to get more done.

That’s one reason for writing my journal, for I’m hoping it will help me organize my life. I am making those lists as I go, after-all. Also, I don’t have much confidence in my memory, so I want my journal to be my memory. Really I find the search capability of my Wordpress site quite amazing, and I use it myself.

I’m thinking I’ll remove the tags for now — until I can figure out how to do it better. I want to find or create a design though where the categories are tabs along the top. Or… maybe modifying the tag cloud to be a category cloud instead?

Now, for a new topic… yesterday I was trying to control my home computer from work use LogMeIn. It just couldn’t work. I could connect, but after a couple mouse clicks it would lock up. LogMeIn has a free basic service, which I was using.

So, I was looking for other solutions. RemotePC seems like the best choice. But I haven’t tried it yet. I was almost set up with it last night, but then they wanted a credit card number — even for the free 30 day trial. So, that stopped me. I don’t want to give out my credit card just to try their service.

Another one is GoToMyPc — I haven’t tried installing it yet, but it’s by far the most expensive. At $20/month, for 1 PC, it’s just not worth it. Ideally I would like a service for 2 PC’s, so I could control my work computer from home, and my home computer from work.

Isn’t there also basic approaches like VNC? Or does Microsoft have something built into Windows to do this?

Oh, and BTW, after much complaining about Microsoft Word, I’m finding it’s not too bad now. No more crashes now that I uninstalled all my printers.

Cool.. I just upgraded my Wordpress site to the new 2.5 version. Hopefully my timezone problem can be fixed. Ah, I see that it specifies a UTC timezone. Let me try changing it to my time and see what happens… see if I can have my computer in my local time now.

Yeah!!… it works very nicely now. I can now set my computer back to my local time. And MarsEdit creates posts with the timestamp set to when I started the post. And it stays the proper time when uploading. I’m just not sure now how to get Wordpress to display the timestamp with the posts.

All is good… Also today I set up a new rogers/yahoo account and a new Flickr account. You can find me at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nuderiver/

Cool… love it!!!

…. another day finished and on my way home once again. Time is just too short to do all the things I want to do. I came very close to missing my train today. I started packing around 12:48 a.m. and just quickly grabbed my computer and bag and coat. I went down quickly, but just missed the bus. Luckily I caught the streetcar just as it was pulling up. If I missed it, it would be quite a nerve wrecking struggle — whether I would get to the train station before the last train, which leaves around 1:30 a.m. I haven’t missed it yet.

I finished my work shortly after 10 p.m. And then wanted to have a little bit of time for my hobby pursuits. So, I fired up Maya and Poser and found some old Poser objects I have in my collection of things. And I choose a basic Sydney model — maybe that was my downfall. For I had about 2 hours to play.

First attempt, I created a scene in Poser (Sydney with a nice photo studio backdrop) and brought it into Maya — all was fine. But then I realized that a better workflow is to bring in each piece separately. I was using the default Sydney pose, with her hands out to the sides and I wanted to change it. I’m using a Maya plugin called BodyStudio for bringing the Poser files into Maya. And the only way to change the pose is repose the model in Poser and re-import the file. Which is why I think it’s better to have the Sydney model in a separate file from other elements of the scene.

So, then I worked on making Sydney in different poses, and putting each in a separate file. But then, as I’m doing this at work, I figured it’s better if I put some clothes on her. So, I searched for what clothes came with Poser. I found a nice bra and tried to put it on Sydney.

And that’s when my big problem started. The bra just didn’t fit. Even though the bra was supposed to be for Sydney, and I thought I did everything right — I made it comforming… it still just didn’t quite fit. Parts of Sydney’s breasts would cut away parts of the bra.

So I tried for like 30 minutes to fix the problem. The bra has a fix dial, and I tried dialling it up, and it helped a bit… but still couldn’t cover all the breasts. I never did really fix the problem.

How do people solve this problem in Poser? That is, what to do when the clothes don’t seem to fit the figure properly and parts of the figure poke their way through the clothes?

Maybe I need to learn how to use the Poser cloth room? Or maybe I should use a different model, like Victoria from Daz? Maybe it’s problems like this that created an opening for a company like Daz3D?

Please help…

And are there any online forums to discuss and find help to using the Poser application?

Things I can think of to try:

• Forget about using Sydney and use Daz3D models, like Victoria 4
• Try using the cloth room instead of a clothing prop.
• Bring it into Maya and try to modify the bikini mesh there. I tried everything I could think of to try and fix up the bikini inside of Poser.

And I buckled down and finished writing my report. I like the end result I created.

But man… Microsoft Word 2007 is the biggest pile of crap software I’ve ever used. I spent 90% of my time trying to overcome it, instead of concentrating on the contents of the document. Like it would hang followed by a crash every 5 minutes trying to access a printer, even though I didn’t try to print anything. I eventually un-installed my printers… and then wow… the software actually starts up much faster, within seconds instead of minutes… and the crash problem is solved.

And then if I tried some formatting, or tried to delete a couple words or a few lines, the whole document would sometimes change on me. I ended up saving my work frequently, and restoring from my backup a few times when the document changed. Undo doesn’t undo — but it does something else. I don’t know how people put up with it. Maybe it was just a badly designed template document that my manager gave me? I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine software so bad. I would have been much more productive if I had just used some type of ascii type word-processor, with a mark-up type language for the formatting — like good old troff or ghostscript. Do those things still exist?

In any case, I’m glad I got that document finished. One less thing to worry about. And now I can get back to the other task I haven’t finished yet.

And then I want to design my photo set using our software… needing to decide between Maya or ???. I have quite a collection of 3D software at my disposal. I have Poser, Vue Esprit, Carrara, Bryce, Maya, and AliasStudio…. spending too much on software over the years.

I’m thinking, for high quality and accurate rendering, I trust Maya the most. So, let me try using that. And then I can use the BodyStudio plugin I bought to import the Poser models into Maya.

I like my train ride home. A nice relaxing ride and typing here in my journal helps me unwind.

I still need to figure out Aperture and Gallery and how to get some photos added here.

Take care my love and sweet dreams,

I just hope he realizes how long it will take me. It was due yesterday!! And he just put it in my lap today!! Really he needs to plan things better. He should have given it to me 2 weeks ago. In any case, I’ll try to not get too stressed out about it and finish it to my high standards as quickly as I can.

Tonight I just need to get to bed early and try to start earlier tomorrow on this new large project. But, in any case, I feel good — it’s nice to be needed.

I was a bit worried today though, for my access card stopped working. I’ve had the same job for 18 years, and this is the first time that my access card just stopped. So I couldn’t get to my desk. I was worried it might be a sign — maybe I’m being laid off? That would be crazy, to one week get a promotion, a raise, a bonus, and to be laid off the following week. But, seeing the things I’ve seen, I take nothing for granted. That’s one reason I work as hard as I do.

But I think all is fine… so far. Email has been a bit strange at work too. And last week the wireless network inside the building stopped working. And then the printer on our floor stopped working too. I have a gmail account and forward all the email to my work’s account — and most of it has been bouncing back since Friday. Hopefully my work doesn’t notice some of the email, for some of it is a bit sexual — but it’s no different from spam. Just some mailing lists I subscribed to once.

I’m not superstitious — Mia is though. Just lots of strange things.

Oh, and I wasted too much time over the weekend trying to get a bluetooth adapter working. I borrowed one from my co-worker last week… D-link DBT-120, and it worked beautifully. Just plugged it in and I was able to use both my Mac wireless mouse and keyboard with my PC. Nothing to install — it just worked in a matter of minutes. Given this good experience, I bought the D-link DBT-122 — the newer version of the DBT-120, or so I thought, for they only sell the DBT-122. Well… it was a much more frustrating experience. After many hours, installing, crashing during the install, un-installing, re-installing the drivers, finally I got it working. I don’t know why companies do this. They take something that works so nicely and make it into a pile of frustrating garbage. In any case, I think it’s working now — I hope it stays working.

Only thing a bit disappointing was that I can’t have the same bluetooth device paired with multiple computers. Like, I would love to have the mouse be controlling both my MacBook and my PC at the same time. Or to have a quick and easy way of switching it. Things really work so much nicer on the Mac. But it also tends to quickly grab the bluetooth devices it knows about — even if the screen is closed. So, to have my PC get the bluetooth device, I need to turn bluetooth off on my Mac first.

Really though bluetooth is very nice technology — so nice to be wireless. I’m not sure about the speed though.

Oh, and one thing a bit disappointing with my MacBook — the screen is now scratched. The stupid design of Apple’s… just closing the MacBook, and the screen gets scratched by the keyboard. Just stupid. My MacBook screen now has a line across the middle of the screen. Why can’t Apple, with their many billions of $, make a device that looks as good a year after I buy it as the first day? I’ve only had my MacBook for 1 1/2 years now and the case has lots of scratches, the white is now completely stained black where the magnets are to close the lid, and the screen is scratched.

I also have an iPod video, and it too is very scratched… even though I was always careful and bought a cover for it right away. Just touching it with my fingers would scratch it. Really Apple cares more about making boat loads of money, and is great at marketing, and makes beautiful devices — but they’re terrible at making high quality and durable products. Mac OS X is much better than Windows XP — but they over design it. Like they include an Apache web server — fabulous… but call it that. Don’t hide it under some strange name like web sharing. Apple needs to learn to use standards and call things by their standard name.

Ah, I still need to learn how to use Aperture. And I need to check with them, as I think they overcharged me.

I need to learn how to take better photos. Mia isn’t a very good model in that her eyes are too sensitive to the flash. Angelina is wonderful though, but not very patient and hard to get her to do what I want. I think I’ll go to the library again and find some books on lighting. I read a lot of books on lighting earlier this year, but then I was too busy reading plus with other things (like researching and buying Aperture, buying some reflectors too), I didn’t have time take any photos to practise the techniques.

Finally late Sunday night I just decided to set things up quickly and shoot some photos of Angelina. I’m not really that happy with most of them — need to learn what I did right and wrong. I want to put the photos up here. But, as I don’t know if anyone is even here, I’ll try putting them up on other sites too, such as webshots and flickr, for some review.

And I’ll create a study blog of the lighting I tried using… so hopefully I can learn. Actually, I’m terrible at drawing, so maybe I can use my work’s software and Poser models to try to duplicate the lighting set-up I used. That’s an idea. I could just try to draw it, but I’m not very good at drawing. Plus, by using professional 3D software I can perhaps learn how to change the lighting to get different effects. I’m just thinking… Maya is the software I should be using for this project. Ok… that’s my little pet project.

But I have much to learn. Like,

• What is the difference between having the camera on the shadow side of the face, versus having it on the same side as the reflector?
• How close should the reflector be?
• How to bounce light off the reflector? The flash-head I’m using can’t swivel side to side, so can only point forward or straight up.
• How to work in a very small and tight space and with no budget?
• How to hang a sheet — to quickly turn an ugly wall into a much nicer looking background?

photo credit: Sweet One

I had a nice weekend. A bit of a mess for time though. Saturday did some shopping. But I was surprised to find it almost 8 p.m. when I left the store. Really shopping with my 4 year old is very time-consuming, for she always wants things. And I’m trying to decide what to buy, while she’s always walking off — and then I have to search the store to look for her.

I got home exhausted. Rested for an hour during the earth hour — from 8 - 9 pm. And then started cooking dinner. It was past 11 p.m. by the time I finished cooking. So, somehow a complete mess for time.

It’s hard to say if the earth hour campaign will change anything. I noticed my neighbour had their porch lights off. But then, right at 9 p.m. their lights went back on, plus many lights in their backyard too, and the lights stayed on all night. People just don’t get the message.

Really I think the world is doomed. No matter what we try to do now, it will be too little, too late. The planet is changing and I don’t think we can stop it. The only question is how fast will it change, what the result will be, and whether we can adapt to the change. We know some things. We know the polar ice is melting. The oceans will then rise. The polar bear will likely become extinct — or need to move further south in search of food. But there’s so much what we don’t know. Like what else will happen. What will happen to the ocean currents? What will happen to the weather patterns? And can we stop it?

They are saying we need to cut back on our carbon emissions. But then everyone needs to cut back. And people need to ask questions and change the way they do things. Yes, of course it’s good for us to be more neutral and put less of a strain on the environment. But I don’t hear anyone saying or proving that it will actually make a difference. I think they just don’t know. But it’s not good politics to say we’re doomed and there’s nothing we can do. People want to believe they have some control in their destiny… instead of being powerless.

Maybe there is hope, if everyone in the world makes serious choices. The choices are all pretty simple. Don’t drive unless absolutely necessary. I only drive once a week, to do some grocery shopping. And I plan it to buy enough, so I don’t have to go out again to buy just one or 2 things. I keep quite a stockpile of supplies at home… enough mouthwash, toothpaste, toilet paper, paper towels, for a year. I’m running a bit low on Irish Springs soap and anti-perspirent. I do take long drives in the country for seeing my son though… but only about every second week.

I would love to have a lot of land, to live in the country, or even to be able to visit many provincial parks — to take photos and capture beautiful moments and places in nature… like the bird migration. But, if I think about the planet, I decide not to. You see, I make a choice and a choice for the planet. For, caring about nature, it seems contradictory to travel far to take photos of nature, for I would be helping destroy the very thing I want to preserve.

Yet, I still need to do things. I still use electricity — like typing away on my MacBook for my journal right now.

It’s ridiculous, the waste of our resources I see around me. Like on the subway train, they have all these lights on inside the train. They could turn off every second light, cut the electricity by 50%, and it still would be light enough for people to read and be safe. Or like now, it’s broad daylight, yet the streetcar I’m on now has many lights on inside the car. Sure, they get money, for in front of the lights are billboard style ads.

I think with just a few changes and some smart choices, we could reduce our electricity usage by 10% and our gas usage by even more. And there shouldn’t be any need to now use coal for creating electricity — we should be using solar or wind. So, electricity shouldn’t generate any carbon emissions. Very simple — make some tough choices and just stop doing bad things.

But will it make a difference? And can we ever get the entire world to agree? Probably not, not until it’s too late — hence we’re doomed. It is scary, what the future holds.

I always feel — we can’t control nature. Nature will do what it needs to do. All we can do is to try to walk carefully and lightly on nature.

I wonder… does anyone have any tag making utilities that search through the blog entries and create tags? Really the search box is good enough. I just want to aid the reader a little bit with some suggested terms to search for.

Ahhh… maybe I can write something myself. I’ll make a list of tags. And then make a utility that will search all the pages for the words in the list, and tag the appropriate entries that have the search word.

Adding keywords to photos is different, for that has to be a manual process. But for textual blog entries, it should be easy to automate. Maybe someone has already done it?

So, things to do now with my blog — I still hate to use that term, for it sounds so cold. Things to do with my online journal:

• Add some photos and figure out how to hook up Gallery to Wordpress.
• Don’t waste time manually adding tags. Instead find or create a utility that automatically creates the tags for me, based on a list of tag keywords. The utility would need to lie inside of Wordpress, so it can update the database.
• Edit my existing entries to make them more readable. I love writing, but I don’t read my entries after I post them. For the same reason, I love taking photos, but then I don’t look at the photos much and don’t like editing them.
• From my existing entries, create a list of keywords to make tags from.
• Figure out how to add an RSS feed for my site.
• Add stats to my site, so I can know if anyone is even reading my journal. If you are here reading this, you caught me at a good time, for your seeing the website be developed right in front of your eyes.
• Anything else?

This has been quite a week. All in all, a good week. Coming close to finishing up a very difficult project I started a week ago. Another couple of days should do it. And I finally received my well deserved promotion. Really I love my work.

Over the weekend I want to finally take some photos. And organize my photos. Do the things I mentioned above for my site. Really I need to exercise and get my body into better shape.

And then, next week much to do. I need to visit the passport office and submit my application. My ex-wife wants me to get a document notarized. And I’m a bit nervous about the week after next, for I need to get my medical tests done.

Take care my love, and I’m happy I can share my life with you… I think really my diary will become something special… a record of my life.

My heart still feels like it’s pounding — hard to contain my excitement. But finally, after waiting more than 10 years… finally I received my much deserved promotion!! It’s not all signed in stone yet — but it will be coming. It was very hard work though, but enjoyable work. And I know I put in an outstanding performance this past year. Still, my family sacrificed, with me working 12 hour days for since last August. But really, working 10-12 hour days has been my norm.

I just worry a bit if I showed my excitement and appreciation to my manager. For really I do deeply appreciate the recognition. There’s a bonus involved, and a nice 5% pay increase. But mostly, it’s the promotion to the next grade level up that I’ve wanted for at least the past 5 years. For I’ve been doing the same job now for 18+ years and this is only my second promotion. I have waited so patiently, but I had practically given up hope.

Now that I’m here, and waited so long for this — I just have a bit of a feeling of disbelief and hope to see the final paperwork soon which signs it off.

And I’m hoping that my money worries of the past couple months will finally relax a bit now. Too exiting… feeling a need to celebrate. I am glad that through the many ups and downs, I managed to stick it out. And really I love my job. I just hope nothing goes wrong now. For, as the saying goes, if something can go wrong, it will. And it worries me a bit that my manager is telling me the news before all the paperwork is signed off. For, in these uncertain economic times, one never knows what tomorrow will bring.

Still, I’m ecstatic and just want to jump for joy and scream… Really life seems to be getting better and better with each year. I still have a huge mortgage that I need to start paying off. Yet, I do have some investments in stocks. And I just paid off the loan on my van. But on the other side, I need to set aside $7000 for a trip later this year to China — plus another $2000 for my trailer park fees.

All I can say is phew… Thank You Lord!!

The topic of the day is Nudity — and whether nudity in a non-sexual context is acceptable.

I did something the other day and I’m not sure yet whether it will come back to haunt me. My manager’s boss wants everyone to fill out a questionnaire, and I did mine. The questions were pretty general — favourite things, favourite piece of advice. But the one question that worries me was something like “What is something about yourself that would surprise your coworkers”. And I answered truthfully, something no one at work knows. And that is, that last year I bought a trailer in a naturist/nudist resort. I think most people are accepting of someone being a nudist now — but there are a few, like my parents, that have their preconceived ideas and cannot disassociate nudity from sex.

But nudity and sex are very different things. Yet the government also doesn’t help — by practically making any nude photo of a child illegal now. Yes, they need to protect our children. But they are swinging the pendulum too far to the other side. We have to constantly fight for our freedom.

I’ll post my questionnaire responses here later.

Some photos are clearly sexual — while others depend on the mind of the viewer. But I think with any photo or video — just there are some people are out there who will view a particular nude photo as something sexual or offensive, it doesn’t mean that the photo shouldn’t be taken and shown and isn’t beautiful and a work of art. Of course, some photos/videos/movies, nude or otherwise, are just plain bad. That doesn’t mean they are illegal. Photos or videos taken while doing something illegal — that’s a different story. Like a video showing a real rape. Or showing someone forced to do something they don’t want to do. Or showing abuse. These things should be illegal.

But I shouldn’t be scared to take photos of my daughter jumping and playing and just being a child — they grow up so quickly — whether or not she’s nude. It’s a beautiful precious memory that I simply want to record. In my mind, there are no sexual intentions. I care about my children more than anything. And nothing can make me angry than if anyone ever hurts them.

Yet, I want them to be able to experience the world innocent and free, without fear. And that I think is what the naturist resort offers them. Of course, there might be some bad people there. But I think it’s harder for the bad people to hide when they are nude like everyone else. The naturist resort is like a small town, and everyone talks about everyone, gossips.

What got me thinking about nudity today was the questionnaire I answered. I almost feel like what a homosexual person feels when coming out. But also, there was an article in yesterday’s paper about an actress who had some topless photos taken when she was 17 — and those photos are now coming out. She admits it, bravely, but says it was just her inexperience, thinking this was something that people starting a modelling career did. And thinking the photos were artistic nudes and not provocative or sexual. BTW, not that it’s a name I know, she is Audrina Patridge. And she posted a response in her MySpace blog. Like what, does everyone have a MySpace blog now? Sometimes I feel too old. And she’s a star in the TV show The Hills. I need to catch up with the times and watch it sometime. I catch the odd show from time to time and it looks interesting.

Her blog comments were: “I was naive, overly trusting of people and inexperienced. I thought that to be a model you had to be comfortable in front of the camera. I’m not ashamed of these photos, but I don’t want my young fans to think they have to do what I did. I hope people can learn from my inexperience.”

I would love to see the photos, for maybe they are just artistic nudes. Just because they are nude (or topless) photos doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with them. And, as Audrina said, she’s not ashamed of the photos. People need to stop judging others. Yes, I know she wants to be a role model for young girls. But girls need to make up their own mind about what they want to do. And there is nothing particularly wrong with having nude photos taken.

I only wish I took more when I was younger — for I would love to see how my body changed over the years. I think I only have one nude photo taken when I was young, about 21 years old and so much in love. It’s a Polaroid pic. — taken in like 1983, long before the days of digital cameras… and in the days when one would worry about taking photos like that on film — for who knows who would see them in the lab.

Really digital cameras have changed the world so much. Just 10 years ago I would need to shoot film. And at a cost of about $10/roll of 36 (not including the prints), it was too expensive to shoot that much. I still have a lot of blank rolls of film from back then, before I made the switch to digital.

It’s so different now. Now I can shoot erotic, sexy photos and not worry about someone in the lab seeing them. And I can shoot 1000 photos over a weekend, and the cost is nothing. Plus, I can see my results right away and adjust thing, and experiment.

Really that’s my dream — to become a master photographer. Ok, I keep putting it off, never having the time — this weekend I’ll put other things aside and just do it. This weekend I’ll try and put what I’ve read about to practice. I waste too much time each weekend… just catching up on my TV shows, shopping, cooking and resting.

The other thing I love is nature. I read about things, like an ice shelf off the Antarctic just collapsed today… a big news item tonight…. about the size of Montreal island. It’s floating ice, so it won’t affect the sea level. But it’s a sign of things to come. It seems inevitable, what is happening with the environment. The rest of the Wilkins ice shelf will collapse soon. They say it’s just hanging on by a thread right now. And when it goes, the land-bound ice will start to go, and that will raise the sea level. So, I think without a doubt, the water level will go up a lot over the next hundred years. Or maybe it’s only over the next couple years. Maybe another great flood is coming? I think I’m safe, here in Toronto.

A few days ago I was reading about thousands of swans now in Point Pelee, on their northward migration. Makes me want to go there. I want to see more natural places. See the birds as they make their migration. Point Pelee is about a 4 hour drive away. There’s also Long Point Provincial park — less famous, but a little bit closer. Thinking about all this, one thing I would love is to get a Provincial Park annual pass, and then to drive and visit the parks. Camping is a bit difficult though — for you have to plan it well in advance and book early. Maybe not this year, as I’ll be busy enough.

I forget if it was Point Pelee or Long Point I went to before with my ex-girlfriend. I actually miss her in a way. I drove 3 hours to see her. Then drove another 2 hours to the park — just getting there before it closes and did a quick hike. I wanted to find a motel — not to do anything sexual with her, just to sleep, for that is a lot of driving. And then we could enjoy the next day at the park. But she brushed off the suggestion and I drove her back. And then drove myself home. That’s like 10 hours of driving in a day, just for a date. Our next date we went to another provincial park — and I think at the end of that date we kissed a bit and things started to get a bit hot. I remember my penis swelling up — but she stopped things, so I drove again 3 hours home. I remember my balls really hurting after that — my first experience with what I think they call “blue balls”. Really it’s very painful to get excited sexually and then stop before ejaculating. And I think on our next date, our 4′th date overall, we got a motel room (for she had a room-mate), her first sexual experience in her life. She was really special, and like a 30 something year old virgin. Once we finally started, things moved quickly, and she moved in with me. Maybe it was because of the effort I put it, but, even though it all happened about 8 years ago, I remember it vividly — and one of my most memorable sexual experiences. But we needed to communicate better. Like really, driving 10 hours in a day, just for a date for a couple hours.

Strange how my thought process goes. First I read a news article about the birds arriving on their yearly migration. Makes me remember my yearning for nature. Makes me remember my dream of going to Provincial Parks… but really I need a lot of time off to do it. I also have another dream of canoeing and camping in the interior of Algonquin Provincial Park.

I’ve repeated this dream before, but there’s nothing wrong with that. This dream and yearning is at the essence of who I am. In the past, early in the season, I’ve gone to a Provincial Park, bought the annual pass, and then went back maybe once again.

Eight years ago with Yinqing — I really loved the sweetness in her sometimes, when she was happy. We walked through these beautiful parks hand in hand. And once even made love in the car. It was a young and innocent and sweet love. Somehow, living together, things changed.

But actually, we don’t have to go that far to find nature. This morning, just looking outside my window, I saw 2 beautiful cardinals — a bright red type of bird. I ran to get my camera, but the battery was dead — plus the memory card missing. By the time I got back, the birds were gone. And then I spent 30 minutes searching, just trying to find the battery charger. I searched all the obvious locations, and ended up with absolutely no idea where it might be. Finally I found it. It had fallen behind something, and was at the first and most obvious location.

I do have a dream of clean air and peace and quiet. A dream to be far away from the city, just me, nature, and animals. And, of course, it would be nice if my lovely wife was with me. That is why I bought the trailer in the nudist park. For, the dream of having a farm again seems just too remote and unlikely. And I’m hoping the trailer, being close the city too, can help satisfy my yearning for now. It’s not a very good investment, for, without owning the land, unless the park becomes much more popular, it won’t go up in value. But I’m also limited in how much I can lose. I can’t lose more than the $10,000 I paid, plus $2000 in annual fees. Which is actually pretty good, considering the money I always lost in my past home purchases.

I will try the trailer for a few years. Hopefully, someday, if I manage to save up some money, I can buy one of the all-season trailers there. But the lack of privacy takes some getting used to. People will gossip and worry about each other. But also, there is much I can learn from others. And people there really are very friendly and helpful. I think it should be ok. I just don’t want any fighting or complaining or worrying — and just be happy.

Take care my love…

A week from now there might be a transit strike. Really I think unions is a very bad thing, for with power, they just want more and more. They already have a very good salary and benefits, and they always want more. I just wish it was more in the summer, for then I can find another way to get to work. April 1, it’s hard to say what the weather will be like. I might have to get my bike ready this weekend.

And then there was a story about Katie Holmes and motherhood. Really I admire movie stars in happy relationships. I loved her Dawson’s Creek — always thinking her like a grown-up Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years. And now, just because she married Tom Cruise, she’s become one of the A-list stars that’s often in the news. Isn’t he too old for her? But I shouldn’t be one to talk, as I’m 13 years older than my wife Mia.

Not sure what else to write about right now. On my way home from work once again — on the subway train it’s almost 1 am. And my boss keeps trying to help me, but just ends up distracting me. And the clock is ticking — he’ll need to do my performance review soon. I don’t think it matters too much, as I think the bonus’s and merit raises and anything else have already been decided long ago. The only question is what he will say. I know I did an outstanding job and I’m proud of the year behind me.

It was an interesting and eventful year. Mia and I bought the trailer in the nudist resort. We spent a beautiful summer there and our daughter really improved her swimming. I commuted a few days from the trailer to work, while Mia enjoyed the trailer in the final days of her pregnancy. That was interesting — waking up, leaving my trailer nude and just feeling free, taking a morning shower outside, eating breakfast outside nude too… and then reluctantly getting dressed and driving into the city for work. The drive was a bit stressful sometimes. Mostly I hate driving my little Suzuki Sidekick when it’s too windy — worried the wind will blow the top off, or tip me over. Reminds me… once I drove my Sidekick over the Burlington skyway on my way from Toronto to Niagara Fall — and I’ll never do that again… just too windy. Back to my last summer… And then, trying to not stay at work too late — I drove back to the trailer at night. I’ll love to do that again this summer. Though I will need a new car soon — as my Sidekick is starting to rust under the door panels. Any ideas on how to repair the rust?

I feel I’m just rambling on here today. I love writing my thoughts here in my journal. But need to find the time to edit them later.

And, of course, the biggest event of last year was the birth of my daughter last November!!

But, how to choose my tag words? And does it make sense to have categories and tag clouds working together? I’m a bit confused here. Any advice?

What I would like is to have categories of blog entries. Like this entry, like a few others, is about how to set up my blog. So, the category could be blog or technology or something like that. And then I would have tags within the category, such as WordPress, Tags, or …

The complication is that we must always be in a category. I guess I could have one category which means all categories — which would be the home page.

But then, how to get Wordpress to have tabs at the top of the page for each category? And to have tags within categories?

I want to write about many topics. I could set up different sites and blogs for each topic, but it’s easier just having the single blog and separating things within the blog using categories. The categories should be very general topics. And one diary/journal/blog entry might be in multiple categories too.

Ok… here’s my first stab at categories: Life, Technology, Religion, Memories. Very general topics. I was also thinking of Friends, Family, Love, but I think I’ll keep it simple and just have the above 4 categories. And then I want a very simple blog layout, where the 4 categories are tabs on the top. Wordpress has the concept of pages too. But I’ll leave my site with only posts for now.

I just hope that the design decisions I make now make for a site that’s easy to traverse, easy to find things, and flexible. I will hate to redesign it all later. And I think Wordpress allows for different designs for the different categories.

Ok… all is fine, I hope. And this website will slowly come together. I still need to hook up Gallery to it and load it up with lots of photos.

We enjoyed a couple of movies on the weekend. We saw 2 rat movies “Flushed Away” and “Ratatouille” (very hard to spell). Strange that Pixar and Dreamworks both created Rat movies, just a year apart. I think they did the same thing with Ants a few years back. The Pixar movie (Ratatouille) was definitely much better — amazing graphics and a story that actually touched me. From that aspect, I think it may have been the best computer animation type movie I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if it did very well at the box office though — definitely could have used a better name. “Flushed Away” though was perhaps more entertaining — I loved those singing slugs.

One thing too often forgotten is that computer animation and special effects and a large budget cannot make up for a bad script. The story is what matters most. Ratatouille had both — and deserving of it’s Oscar nominations. I don’t know if it won anything. But also, Oscars matter. For movies I would never have considered watching, if the are nominated for Oscars, especially in the best movie category, then I put them on my list of movies I want to watch.

So, I did spend perhaps too much time over the weekend watching TV. I watched 3 movies and caught up on my shows.

And my son was with me again. He’s 13 now. I feel a bit sad, my feelings hurt, feeling he’s drifted away from me. In a way though, I felt that I lost him many years ago with my divorce — when he was just 4 years old. And it’s a pain I always carry with me. I just feel like I don’t matter to him. I pay my support payments for him. And pay extra for his piano lessons and karate.

Feeling like I lost him all those years ago — that was the primary reason I needed to have children again… for it’s something I needed. I know it’s not a good thing to think though. I love my son with all my heart. Yet, I have so little control over his life and missed too much.

Also, I feel a bit sad for Michael doesn’t really want to talk to me about his life. When I drive him back, he just reads or sleeps. Sometimes I wonder if he gets much out of the visit with me and why I even bother. He’s a teenager now though. But, what makes it more worthwhile for me is the time he gets to spend with his 2 half-sisters. He seems to be taking more of an interest in his new baby sister, and that’s good. Really they need to spend more time with each other.

On my way home now from another busy day at work. Sometimes I feel like my boss just puts too much stress on me — like checking on me every few minutes to see how a new task is going. I wish I could just have him stop bothering me and putting pressure on like this. The task will take me about a week. I know what needs to be done now, so I wish he just stops distracting me and let me get it done. I know he wants to help, but many times his help is just more of a distraction and an hindrance. I achieved all the project demands last year more in-spite of him, instead of because of him. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

He also needs to do our performance reviews this week. My boss is also quite bad with managing time. He knows the reviews need to be done before the end of the month. I mentioned that to him last week and he agreed and said they will be done well before the end. But now there’s under a week left. He’s quickly running out of time. And today he wanted me to choose a couple people to do assessments of my work, but that will take them some time. He’s just so bad at managing time and prioritizing things… or in realizing how long things will take.

I need to not let him get to me and take things a bit easier now. I need to have more energy and time for my wife and family. It’s not fair to them, these long hours I work. And the hours have been very long, mostly 12 hour days, since last August. Ok… let me see if tomorrow I can change and get back to normal hours. And just let the project take as long as it takes.

I worry though that I’m getting old and slow. And younger, newer people can do the job much faster. And true, I have trouble staying focused on the task. Because of age, or just who I am, I feel I need to work harder than most others. I’ve survived my job and countless layoffs over the years because of my hard work attitude. Though, my family has suffered.

Hopefully my family appreciates the sacrifices I make to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table and bills paid. It’s not an easy thing to do, the job I do.

I hate Mondays like this… and you would think, being Easter Monday, it would be a little bit easier and more joyful. I need a more quiet week, to help regain my strength — as a new year begins.

Easter is here. It seems to have come much sooner this year — as I thought it came in April? I bought a ham last weekend and I’m planning on cooking it tomorrow night. I’ve never made a ham before. I just worry if it will be ok, after keeping it in the fridge for a week. I couldn’t find any best before date on the package.

Ouch… I just bit my tongue… at the very back of the mouth… I always chew gum when travelling — chew gum and wear a blue visor type hat. And too sunny for a minute there… couldn’t see anything on the screen… ah, that’s better now. Back inside the subway tunnel. I like the subway ride.

About yesterday, being the only one on the bus, the train car, and the train station — if I was a deeply religious person, maybe it would have meant something. But really it meant nothing — just coincidences. Still, sometimes my soul is trying to tell me something. And sometimes the world seems so very quiet.

I saw an interesting quote in the paper this morning. The actor Will Smith said: “I am a Christian. I am a student of all religions. And I respect all people and all paths.” I really admire Will Smith. He is one of the few really talented and lasting actors — staring in a TV show when he was a child, and now married, with a son, and making great movies. It’s hard to find child actors who are still going strong as adults.

One of my favourite child stars was Danica McKellar and … Savage (I forget his first name already), of The Wonder Years. But as adults now, they just don’t have it anymore. They were great as children and fit their roles very well — but they could never really get outside of that role. Ah, I used to have such a crush on Winnie — the role played by Danica. And just got addicted to watching The Wonder Years for the romance between Kevin and Winnie. It was a bit sad, how it ended. But one of the most memorable series finales ever made. Popular shows like Friends or Mash or Seinfeld — I can’t remember anything about their series finales. But I can remember The Wonder Years so clearly. Seeing Kevin and Winnie, the very strong emotion between them, fighting and then making up and holding each other tight. Not wanting to grow up, scared of what the future holds, but getting strength from their close friendship. It was an amazing and inspiring end.

It’s hard to know what future holds, impossible to predict. We can plan and just try our best. I don’t believe in fighting nature and I think there’s a natural path our life takes. Every now and then we are faced with decisions, and decisions that change the rest of our life forever. For me that included choosing to go to The University of Waterloo. Falling in love with my ex-wife. Falling in love with someone else, destroying my marriage. Marrying my first wife — my first love. Having a son. Falling in love a 3rd and then 4th time. Getting divorced. Falling in love a 5th, then 6th, and finally a 7th time. And choosing to get married again. And having 2 beautiful daughters — 3 children in total. There are many other events, but these are the events that shaped my life the most…. and centred around LOVE.

On my way home from work now… exhausted. Really I need to catch up on some sleep. My manager gave me a new task yesterday, and to me it just seems like a very time-consuming waste of time. I need to talk with him more about it on Monday. It’s the type of task that I just don’t see the immediate benefit. And very time-consuming. And I have many more important things to be working on. He has a problem of not knowing how hard things are, and not properly prioritizing things.

Last year was a good year, mostly because he left me alone and let me get my work done. Oh well… we all have bosses. And next week he needs to do our performance reviews.

Money wise, this was a pretty good week for stocks. A nice short week, because of the Good Friday holiday. Monday was a bad day, Tuesday one of the best days on record, Wednesday bad again, and today good once again. Overall, it was a pretty good week. Hopefully this is a bottom for the stock market and we can have a nice summer rally.

Now… what else to tell you? This weekend I have a few things to do. Some shopping on Saturday, as that’s the only day stores are open. Bake my ham tomorrow (Friday). I still don’t know if I have my son or not. I left a message with my ex tonight, but she never returned my call. Really she’s not very good at communicating. It would be nice to have my son, but either way is fine. Really I just need some time to relax. And much to do.

I need to make a plan for what to do. I recorded some nice movies we can watch. And Mia is waiting to watch the latest episode of Big Love with me. That’s our favourite show right now.

We’ll have sex sometime over the weekend. Now our routine is sex once a week. When we first married, I used to feel upset if we didn’t have sex every second day — for I wasn’t used to so little sex. In my past relationships, they were always pretty satisfying for how often we had sex, with sex either every day or every second day. Something seems wrong with Mia, for she just doesn’t desire sex much. Even before the baby, her sex drive was quite low — just really desiring sex a couple times a month. She wonders if something is wrong with herself. Jennifer is now almost 4 months old, she’s breast-feeding, and Mia has absolutely zero desire for sex. We tried twice, and she said it’s painful when my penis enters her. But she doesn’t even want me to touch her down there. She’s a bit stubborn that way. I wonder what to call her nice warm place down there? Cunt? Pussy? I like pussy, for it doesn’t seem that vulgar, and portrays that nice warm feeling in there.

Plus she doesn’t cut her pubic hair. I never understand that much why many girls like to shave there. Only once I dated a woman who shaved there, and I found it scratched me… I didn’t like it that much. Ah, Debbie was her name. And the only white woman I ever had sex with. Really, she was the best too for sex. She was loud, and I loved it. The most aggressive too — and that was a bit of a turnoff. From my experience, the best lovers are right here. Asians or girls from other countries, they seem to enjoy sex less and are less adventurous. Debbie and I once had sex outside, beside a highway. And she wanted to try anal sex once — my first and only time.

Things that made me not choose her… She was depressed and complained a lot. Complained about not getting enough money from the government. Complained about me working too late. She had severe lower back-pain — I can’t spell what it’s called and was on medication for it. She couldn’t work and was fighting with her insurance company. I admired her for trying to deal with her pain. But, I didn’t like the depression or that she expected free handouts from the government. Also, she smoked — a definite turnoff, for kissing her and she tasted like smoke. Also, she couldn’t have babies — I forget why now, and I definitely wanted more children. And lastly, she was older than me — just a couple of years. Still, there was a very sweet side to her sometimes, and someone special there.

I wonder how she’s doing now. I do wish these ex-girlfriends of mine would keep in touch, and that we could stay friends — but it just doesn’t seem to happen.

There are few questions that sparks as much emotion.

After I left the Doctor’s office on Monday, in the parking lot, a man came up to me and wanted to talk about his religion. I forget the complete name, but the common name is Mormon. At first I didn’t want to start a debate about religion. But he started and then I tried to tell him my beliefs. And I mentioned to him my NudeRiver story — how water is a metaphor for our life.

But just like he is stubborn in his beliefs, so am I. Most people believe in a God, and that God created us. And that God is a supreme being, watching over us. The Mormon tried to convince me, but his arguments were not that persuasive. He tried to use the missing link argument — saying there are monkeys and then there are humans, but there isn’t anything that is half monkey and half human. But just look around us. My wife always says that president George Bush is a monkey — and he looks like a monkey. Even Paul Abdul of American Idol looks a bit like a monkey too… or more correct ape. The Mormon just didn’t get that the evolution step we see is monkey (or ape) –> human. That is the step. And look around us — some people will look more like monkeys than others. Evolution doesn’t have to leave a continuous trail showing the evolution path, does it? Actually though, the Mormon could have made the argument that in fossils we should see that continuous path. I don’t know if we do or not. But he didn’t say in fossils — he said to look around and we can’t see a monkey-man. But that proves nothing. But I would need to think about the fossil argument and see if there is evolutionary proof for how humans came to be.

One thing I never agree with is that God made humans in his image. We are just another animal. We like to think of ourselves as different, as better than animals, and to be close to God. By doing so, we can justify the cruel things we do to animals. But we are an animal. It’s also ok for one animal to eat another. I am not a vegetarian and I love to eat meat everyday.

I do believe in a God, but I believe that a piece of God is inside each of us. That is our soul. And our souls are all connected. That way we can feel when those closest to us need us. And our wife is also our soul-mate. There is definitely a dimension to life outside of the physical world we can see.

And I believe in prayer. We need to pray sometimes. Sometimes we are just scared and need the comfort that prayer gives. Like, if I’m driving in a blizzard and nervous, I will pray. And I believe prayer really helps. It’s ridiculous to pray for things like winning the lottery or winning a football game. For, of course, many people will pray, but only one or one team will win. And God, if there is a God, as more important things to do than control and help who wins a game.

Maybe my beliefs are not that different from the true belief and what other’s believe in. And as it seems being a Christian, believing in Jesus and in God is what almost everyone believes in, I want to believe and to follow the crowd. I don’t want to stand out and to fight with people over this. It’s just not worth it. It’s really ridiculous, the fights caused by religion. And like, it doesn’t make sense, why there are so many religions with all of them having the same basic belief in Jesus and in God. There’s Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, and countless others. I’m not sure about other religions, like Buddhist, Islam, Muslims, Scientology, … There are so many religions, and it’s just plain stupid, all the violence caused in the name of religion.

I believe in God, but not in a supreme being God. My God is like the ocean — a collection of all the water in the world… where water is the souls. And souls are inside every living creature. I believe in evolution. I believe in nature. If you leave nature alone, it can do wondrous things all by itself. Not because of God. But simply because that is what nature does.

It’s hard to say, what came first, God or us. It’s the same as saying what came first, the soul or the physical world? It’s hard to say.

I do feel like I’m in the minority in my beliefs. And that’s well… just scary. It’s like, is something wrong with me because I don’t blindly follow and believe what everyone else seems to believe. Yet, maybe I’m not in the minority. Just the people who believe in Jesus are much more vocal.

I really thought I was a Christian too. Maybe I just wanted to be like everyone else. But it’s good to think about it and talk about it. For by talking, hopefully the truth will be known.

One thing I never get is that people say they pray and that God speaks to them and answers their prayers. Does God really talk to people? I don’t think so. People just feel something and think it’s God guiding them. But it could just as easily be their soul guiding them.

I’ve never really studied the Bible — finding it just too hard to read. Like I remember one chapter just going on and on about names and relatives — extremely boring to read. Does the Bible hold any absolute proof that God exists? Please tell me.

People have studied this question for so long now. It seems strange that there is no absolute proof in the existence of God. What about the soul? Actually I would love to somehow prove that the soul exists and to study it and learn about it. That can’t be that hard, is it? But how to prove something exists when you cannot see it or touch it. It’s doesn’t contain any matter that we can measure.

But it’s inside us. Though hypnosis or meditation I believe people can feel their soul.

That reminds me — I should try Transcendental Meditation again. Many years ago, during my first marriage, we went to a TM session. And it wasn’t cheap. But, being a Christian at the time, it scared me. We were each individually given a mantra to repeat in our heads. We were not told what it meant — just a sound, whispered to each of us individually. I don’t know what my ex-wife’s mantra was.

But we were told not to tell others what the mantra was. Of course, they want more people signing up for the course. Once you know the mantra, you don’t need them. I wonder if there’s any websites talking about TM and the chanting sounds used.

I forget how it goes. But I think my mantra was something like “Shh-ring”. To practise TM, you’re just supposed to sit and quietly repeat that sound inside your head. When I did it, I had a strange feeling. I actually got an erection!

Not knowing what the mantra meant…

Very strange night as I’m writing about religion here. When I got off the bus to get on the subway train, I was the only one left on the bus. There’s always other people, but not tonight. Then, when I got off the subway train at the last stop, I was surprised to look around and notice I was the only one on the car… the subway car completely empty except for me. And now, waiting for my bus in the train station, again, I’m completely alone. The station completely empty, not a soul in sight, except for myself. Very very strange…. especially when talking about this soul topic. Ok… I’m seeing a few more people walk by now.

Back to TM…

One thing I want to say first about that Mormon who spoke to me. He said that without God, people will do bad things. Like he said why study and do homework if you’re not going to be graded. That’s just ridiculous to me. I do good not because God is watching and going to judge me. I do good because it’s the right thing to do. And I study and learn things because I love to learn new things.

Ok… back to TM. I was scared and stopped doing it, because I didn’t know what the mantra meant. Being a Christian, I thought maybe it was calling on the Devil. So, I stopped.

But now I think, there is no devil. Or maybe there is. We like to think of things in terms of opposites. Hot and cold. Light and dark. Good and evil. So, if there is a collection of souls, from which ours is a part of, maybe there are two halves, good and evil. So, maybe there is a good God and an evil God (or Devil)? Each of us has good and evil inside us.

I just did a quick search and found a table of the secret mantras, and sure enough, “Shring” is there, and I was given it based on my sex and age at the time.

I forget how to practise the TM technique though. But I’m thinking now it can help — help us feel our soul. And there have been studies for how it helps us physically. So, I should try it again. And with a clearer mind now and not worrying so much about whether it goes against being a Christian now.

Take care my love and sweet dreams,

For references, check out:

http://minet.org/mantras.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_Meditation

So, I nervously watched stocks a bit yesterday, wondering if I should buy something, but feeling rather nervous. Looking at how stocks recovered this morning, I wish I did buy something. One small stock I bought on Friday, went down about 5% from what I paid on Monday, and it still hasn’t recovered today. One I didn’t buy, went down about $2 yesterday, and recovered and is up over $1 today — CX.. the world’s third largest cement company. I worry a bit about them, for they will be affected by the downturn in the housing markets in both the USA and Spain.

So, yesterday I sat tight and didn’t buy any stocks. I can’t really afford to buy anything.

I was at home yesterday — wanting to work from home, but couldn’t accomplish much. I just responded to a couple emails. The reason for staying at home was a doctor’s appointment I had. I’ll have to go back for some tests over the next month. And then very likely have surgery later this year.

My medical problem started a few years ago — I think it was 3 years ago. I was diagnosed with an anal fistula. It’s basically a channel, small pathway, just to the side of my anus. The standard way to treat it is through surgery — to open up the channel and sew it shut. So, I had surgery done 2 or 3 years ago. But it wasn’t successful. The doctor said he couldn’t find the fistula opening on the inside. So he cut out what he could, but he said there was a good chance for it returning. And the problem is still there. It’s definitely much better than 3 years ago though. Back then, it would get so painful it was hard to sit down. Now it doesn’t bother me too much. If I watch my diet, eat a lot of vegetables like broccoli and celery, get enough sleep, keep stress under control, then the fistula is fine. But, about once a month or so, it swells up, like a pimple, and then breaks and bleeds.

The doctor said that this is not very common. He said usually the fistula opening remains open and continuously leaks. But actually that just reminds me now — my bowel movements are not very usual. I have many movements everyday. That’s the reason I always like to sit when going to the washroom — for my anus will relax when I pee and something will usually come out of my anus. Or even just sitting for a couple hours, my anus will be dirty and smelly. So, at home I do wash my bum every couple of hours.

Oh well. I’m getting older. And I’m thinking this is just something I need to live with. I’m not too concerned with getting the surgery. The doctor worries my wife a bit, saying that it could turn into cancer — just because of the bleeding and infection that may come with the bleeding.

I have a few medical problems — and I’m just getting older. 45 years old now. Like my knees are sometimes painful. And I have a nearly constant pain in my lower side. But that pain has been in my side since the 80’s — like 25 years now — so I’m used to it and it doesn’t really bother me.

Ahhh, I love writing and creating my journal now. It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it or not. I created a workflow I love and works very nicely. Editing on the go using BBedit. And integrating it with my website using MarsEdit. Working very nicely now. And I created a nice large very readable font to use in BBedit. Really, this integration is quite amazing and seamless. I just save and quit BBedit and MarsEdit, magically, gets my updated entry. One more click and it’s uploaded to my website. So nice.

Really, simple programs that don’t do everything, but do what they do well, and integrate well with other software — I just love it. Much much better than the massive buggy programs that try to do everything, and crash and just don’t work that well.

I should try creating a simple program. The thing is, what problem should I try to solve?

Take care my love and sweet dreams,

P.S. But I spoke too soon. BBedit is the most trustworthy software I’ve ever seen. Never crashes and just works. But, MarsEdit — it just lost what I spent the last 10 minutes writing. Luckily I found the temp file that I saved in BBEdit before MarsEdit lost it. I think I just did a Save instead of Save as Draft in MarsEdit. But I’m offline now, so it can’t upload things. And somehow it lost it.

Ahh, wait a sec… it didn’t really lose it. Save as draft just puts it somewhere else. I think all is well. It’s just not clear to me how to use Save As Draft.

As stable products go, there isn’t much that’s better than BBEdit. I’m just surprised that it doesn’t do the blogging itself. That’s why MarsEdit can exist. Right now, I’m playing around with the colors a bit, trying to find a nice font and easy colours on the eyes. I like a dark neutral background. But glare is a bit of a problem on the train with the overhead lights.

What a week! I need to try and focus back on work now. But what can I say. I just love technology and learning new things — maybe even more than I love sex. I also love that these programs can all check my spelling as I type. MacJournal was the only one that could auto-magically correct things as I typed. But that also caused more problems, for sometimes it would always change a word on me, like twiki.

Ok. Finally all set to blog away. It’s been a tiring week. Last weekend up till like 5 am trying to solve a customer problem. Didn’t accomplish much all week. But got my blog up and running. Now, back to designing it. And need to do some nice photos to make it more interesting. Hook up Gallery to it. And back to writing a nice diary.

Take care my love and sweet dreams.

• I started with RapidWeaver.
• Then I moved to Wordpress. I think it will allow much more flexibility and power with my blog. I didn’t want to be tied to blogspot, for one.
• Then I searched for ways to edit my blog using Wordpress. I don’t want to use a web based editor.
• I tried MacJournal. It’s ok. But crashes often (twice today). And it doesn’t work nicely to refresh itself when the blog is updated remotely. And it gets confused about timezones when my Wordpress site is in GMT while I live in Toronto. The thing is, Wordpress doesn’t handle timezones correctly and would change the time of every repost by 6 hours! To compensate for Wordpress’s problem, I need to have it in GMT. But then MacJournal gets confused, trying to be too smart, and it has the wrong time of all the posts loaded from Wordpress.
• I tried Emacs too — with the weblogger.el enhancement. I got it working nicely and like it. But emacs is hard to figure it. I like it’s power and I’m used to it — using it at work for 18 years now!
• The nice thing with emacs, if it doesn’t quite work the way I want, I can change it. I think I’ll edit the weblogger script, for I never want it to insert line breaks. I don’t want to be forced to create very long lines!
• The for my Mac I tried Ecto, but it seems very flackey. For instance, when using bbedit as my external editor, every time I edit things, is puts a new paragraph marker in. Just leave things alone! Wordpress is smart enough to turn double line feeds into paragraphs.
• Then I tried MarsEdit. I actually like it and can’t find anything wrong with it yet. It has a nice refresh capability, which MacJournal doesn’t do. And it integrates nicely with BBedit.

Ok… so that’s where I am right now. Decided on a work-flow to update my new NudeRiver.com blog. And that is, MarsEdit on Mac, Emacs on Windows, and Wordpress on my webserver.

Next… I need to figure out how to hook up Aperture and Gallery to all this. Wish me luck.

Also, I need to go back and tag and catagorize all my posts.

Ouch… just realized, when submitting a brand new post using emacs, it’s dated with GMT, for that’s the timezone of Wordpress, which is 4 hours ahead of me!! Oh well. I can correct it.

Yeah… it worked!! Except it’s emacs!!… on republishing the post, the date got messed up! Maybe it’s not fair to say this is MacJournal’s fault after all? The time got shifted by 6 hours!!

Ahhh, a quick search and this 6 hour time shift is a problem with Wordpress!! Ok… so maybe Mac-Journal isn’t that bad after all. With each repost, the post shifts by 6 hours!! I’m going to try and find a work around for it. I’m thinking that removing the time zone might help.

Right… that worked. Ok, so I just need to have Wordpress think it’s on GMT with no offset. Then all these other programs can work. I’ll just have the posts entered in my local time. What time-zone Wordpress thinks it’s in shouldn’t matter.

Ok… back to give Mac-journal one more chance.

And emacs doesn’t look too perfect either. For it puts br lines into the post. Meaning I need to type very long lines.

Actually, the round-tripping seems to work. I loaded the entries back and it seemed to work… Only thing… Mac-Journal tries to be too cute and the time of the entries back is now off by 4 hours, for it thinks I’m in GMT. Let me just shift everything to GMT time then… but how??

Ok… Mac-journal update it and the time still looks ok… Now update from emacs…. Oops… I still can’t figure out how to get Mac-journal to update — i.e. refresh from the blog.

mmm… Now, let me try MarsEdit. But I don’t like it’s editor. But… it can link nicely to bbedit. Ok… So, editing from MarsEdit. It seems good in that at least it didn’t change the date on me.

And now… one more edit from emacs…

Beautiful… MarsEdit was able to pick it up. Ok, it’s my it’s my top choice right now. And I’m getting to love bbedit. After all, I invested a lot of money in it before, so might as well learn how to use it.

So, all is fine and I think I’m happy now.

And I loved how Mac-journal was able to correct my typing on the fly. That updating was a bit annoying perhaps sometimes. But it was nice especially when I make a lot of errors typing.

Ok… me think I’ll go back to Mac-journal. Not perfect, but the best I can find so far.

One more to try now… called MarsEdit. Not too bad… Argh… choices to make.

So, Bye Bye RapidWeaver — it was fun while it lasted.

Mac-Journal with Wordpress is a tough combination to beat. The full screen mode is great for just concentrating on what I want to say. If it expires, I’ll definitely buy it — only about $35. I think I’ll get the Windows version too — they have a bundle including both for $60. Their website and store looked quite amateur-like though, but the program looks great.

And I love how I figured out how to set the paragraph spacing too. In RapidWeaver I always ended up pressing enter twice to get some nice spacing. But here, I can set it to whatever spacing I want. Love it. Now I feel like I can be a writer. I could also record and say something, but I don’t like my voice too much. And even add images and such to get fancy here.

Next step is to figure out how to add Gallery support to my Wordpress site. And then how to integrate photos in the Gallery database with my blog entries. I really do need to spice up these blog entries with some photos.

And then, just like that, I’m blogging!! Cool. Again, I started with Live-Journal, then moved to blogger/blogspot with RapidWeaver support, and then finally moved to Wordpress and Mac-Journal. And I love where I ended up.

I don’t really like to call this a blog though. True, it’s a web log, but I don’t really like tech slang like that. It’s more an online journal, or diary. As such, it’s my most intimate and private thoughts. Not very private though, for I’m showing it here. ☺

For the people in my life who I mention here. Sorry if anything I say surprises or hurts you. That is never my intention. I just want to be completely honest. And most of the thoughts are fleeting — emotional thoughts at the moment. I want to write in this way, for it shows the person I am and records all the many things going through my mind as accurately and honestly as I can. That’s why most people who write diaries want them to be private, for they are very personal.

Again, sorry to Mia, for truly I love her very much and I’m very happy with my choice. It hasn’t been easy — living together for over 5 years now. We’ve accomplished much and have 2 beautiful daughters to show for it.

And sorry to anyone I mention at my work. True, decisions that seem stupid and just cause a lot of stress are made that affect me. And stress affects what work I can. The small stupid things can have a lot of repercussions. But I do like my boss and respect him. Some things he could do better. And sometimes he overcomplicates things. Some times he causes unnecessary stress. But, overall, I like him. And I think over the past year working together, we accomplished a lot. It was a good year.

Ah, I woke up this morning and just felt so alive. I love learning new things. I love new software like Mac-Journal (which I’m still using now) and Wordpress. I love that my nuderiver.com website is finally coming together. It was like 2 years ago I started my web-dreams.

Wow… almost missed my stop… just so engulfed in my writing now, like in another world.

I’m starting to find a few things bad in Mac-journal. First off, I just crashed it. That’s not good… such a simple program and it crashes. I think yesterday I noticed it missing as well. I didn’t think I quit it, yet it wasn’t there anymore. So, my thinking, I’m getting a crash per hour or two of use. The crash now was when I was in full screen mode and tried to open preferences… nothing happened. I left full screen, opened preferences — and it soon crashed after that.

I really love this full screen mode. So much easier on the eyes. And it’s such a pleasure to use — very readable even outside. Just love it. But, just one very annoying thing. As I’m writing a long journal entry here, it scrolled to the bottom and off the screen. It’s just too hard to read when the text is near the bottom of the screen as well. Really I would love if I could set a bottom margin. So, to make this mode useable, I need to run in “keep centred” mode. Which is fine, but it’s inconsistent. As I get to the right, the text scrolls to the left. Keeping the cursor in the centre screen. This looks cool, like a typewriter effect. But I could concentrate and see what I’m writing better if it didn’t do the horizontal scrolling. Plus it doesn’t have this strange behaviour when you’re on the left side of the paragraph. Very strange. It’s like there is a big empty unused space on the right of the screen — and it doesn’t let the cursor get past the centre of the screen. Ah, that’s what it’s code must look like. And it’s too simplistic and not very useable. It simply is not letting the cursor go past the centre, in both horizontal and vertical.

Please, if Mac-journal is listening, add separate horizontal and vertical centring. And if both are on, it should keep the cursor always in the centre and move the text. Vertical centring means to always keep the cursor in the centre row, like it’s doing now. Plus, please add a bottom margin.

Anyway… let me try updating my blog now from Mac-journal and see what happens…

Wow… it went in beautifully. Just a single click from Mac-journal and it’s in. I definitely love Mac-journal for doing the text creation. Now, let me test it the other way. I’m updating this in the Wordpress editor now and then I’ll try to get Mac-journal to update itself…

I wonder though if Mac-journal can add tags? I much prefer tags than blog categories.

Ok… I got it back into Mac-journal too. I much prefer the Mac-journal editor — used to it automatically correcting my typos as I go. I just wish that the centring worked better in full screen. Let me just try adding some blank lines to the bottom… but that doesn’t work, as it’s scrolling off. Plus when I update my blog I don’t want blank lines at the end.

The only trouble with the round-trip blogging was that I needed to delete the entry from my local journal to get Mac-journal to read it back in. And then, the newlines to paragraphs didn’t work as expected. I discovered that Wordpress works best with double new lines to trigger new paragraphs to be created.

Oh well… all in all, not too bad. Let me try sending it in one more time… Nice… all my blank lines at the bottom of my post were ignored. So, this might be the best of working.

Oh, just got my second crash of the day. Just changing the preferences. Finally though found what I think is best way of working here. I set my horizontal preferences to 25% — which means that 50% of my screen is wasted. But then, when working in full screen and auto centring, at least it stops scrolling my test off the screen so I can’t see it. Not perfect, but good enough I think. Does any other journal program like this do full screen text editing.

So, here’s what I know:

1. Not to easy to do bullet items. I’ll try to edit this later to be bullet points. I remember twiki had it’s own special notation to handle things like bullet points easily.
2. To go from Mac-journal to Wordpress is pretty easy. A single click. And the entry can be updated easily. Just edit it and repost it. Remember to leave double line feeds for new paragraphs.
3. To go from Wordpress to Mac-journal requires deletion of the original entry. I’m thinking that Mac-journal is best to do the original post, and then leave it alone. The Wordpress guy becomes the master. And just be careful not to update it again without doing the reverse copy.

I should explore other solutions too. Not convinced yet that this is the best one. Software never seems to work exactly like you want it. ☹ But it’s not too bad.

One more update… Ouch… it messed with the date somehow… And I can’t seem to change the date in Wordpress. I don’t know how it’s doing the date part here. Let me try one more time.

Let me try a different way. Really I love my emacs and gives me much better control over all this. I’ll use it to update things.

Ah beautiful. Very nice. I wonder, does emacs do spell checking? And is there a full screen mode version of emacs available?

I love this technology though… learning more and more each day.

Take care my love,

Things I don’t like with RapidWeaver:

• I have one long list of blog entries right now, and growing. In less than a month, the list has gotten just too long.
• It’s putting all my blog entries and everything into one file — and it’s quickly growing. I wonder how it will handle images? I want to put a lot of images up — will they all go inside the one file too? I would prefer if each blog entry was a different file, and an ascii file, so it doesn’t lock me into using RW all the time.
• It’s Mac only and locks me into having and using a Mac. That’s fine right now — but I suspect this will be my last Mac I buy.
• I don’t like tieing my blog entries to be inside of blogger/blogspot. I end up relying on their server to serve my blog entries and pages. Once last week blogspot went down and hence my site was down too.
• But I also don’t want all my blog entries tied to only RW — which using RW internal blog pages would do. For then I end up depending on RW.

Things I like about RapidWeaver:

• It’s cool how different themes can be played with. But realistically, not too practical, for I won’t change themes too much.
• I like being able to write my blog entries all offline. And the editor isn’t too bad — a basic Mac editor.
• I was able to modify a theme without too much difficulty. But I did it by looking at the theme’s javascript or php code and modifying it directly. Actually, I just changed a css definition inside the theme. But then, on the next update I lost it.
• I love that with a single click (actually 2 clicks I think), I can republish the site.
• It’s better than Apple’s iWeb, for it doesn’t lock you into using a dot Mac account.

A year back — or was it 2, I completely lost track of time. How do you remember if something happened 1 year ago or 2? Or like with Yinqing, I remembered she only lived with me for like 6 months, but then, as I thought more about it, it was more like 16 months. I think from June 2000 till October 2001. The last 6 months were very painful on both of us.

What was I saying… ok… say a year ago I set up a little blog at work. Actually just checked, and yes, it was a year ago. For I found everyday I was learning something new. After neglecting it for the longest time, I want to continue writing my blog — a way of sharing what I learn and to record my experience and knowledge. Really if I keep at it, it could become a very valuable resource.

When I set it up, I somehow decided to go with Wordpress — and I set up WAMP for my web server. And it ended up working quite nicely.

I thought about Drupal too — but for a simple blog, Wordpress seemed more than enough.

Last night, I was just thinking — what if someday I lose my job? I’ve had the same job for over 18 years now, but, especially in technology, nothing lasts forever.

And I was thinking if I’m even in the right career? I like computers and programming and I feel I’m smarter than most. I’m you’re classic nerd type. But I don’t really see the point of spending countless hours getting the math just right. Like our number 1 customer was making a huge fuss, just because a tool I wrote more than 10 years ago was sometimes giving him the answer 0.0009 mm and sometimes 0.001 mm. And in testing it more, I found that it sometimes gives 0.000001 mm as the answer, when it should be exactly 0.0 mm. I am very good with getting details right and for tracking things like this down. But it’s very time-consuming — and sometimes I wonder if it’s all worth it?

So, I did a quick check for other jobs out there. Actually, the type of job I think I’ll love is more along the lines of a web application developer. Like php, javascript and related programming for creating web sites. I’ll probably not make as much money as I do now. But I want to train to improve my skills. Also I want to give photography a shot too.

And that brought me back to thinking about Wordpress — for it came up in my search, as did php. I think learning and building a Wordpress site is much better for my career development than RapidWeaver, or even DreamWeaver. I like programming, and not so much fiddling with the design.

Ok… so let me try converting my RW + blogger site to use Wordpress instead. And Wordpress can give me a much more professional look and feel.

I need to find some Mac based offline tools to link to Wordpress — so I can create blog entries on the train.

Bye for now… hope to see you on the other side…

I wonder about this penpalworld site now. I still haven’t had the time to write back to anyone — just too busy with work.

And the stock market is doing too well now. On Monday I saw a big drop and tried to buy 3 stocks — but low balled things too much and didn’t get anything. Yesterday stocks soared with their biggest jump since April 2003. And today they’re still up. If I increased my price a little bit, I would have made about $400 + $100 + $100, or $600 in two days on a $10,000 investment. Oh well — it’s impossible to pick the bottom of the market. When stocks go up, I don’t want to buy, for I don’t want to chase stocks and that’s a quick way to lose money, for what goes up many times comes right back down. And when stocks are crashing down, it’s scary, losing money — and sometimes each day seeming like a good day to get in, then the next day it goes down even more. I saw the big drop in January, but didn’t have any cash, so I got some cash available and sit and waited and waited… 6 weeks later I saw the chance again, but hesitated and lost out once again.

Ok… back to penpalworld. I got one strange email this morning. It sounds like the person is looking for love. But I said very clearly in my profile that I’m happily married. Strange. I worry a bit about some of the people there, for undoubtedly there are some scams going on.

I remember back in, maybe it was 1999, I was a member of a few match making sites. A girl from Thailand started writing to me. I suspected something, for she very quickly started asking for money — to help get a Visa and come to visit me and be my wife. The directions for how to send money to her were so detailed — she wanted a wire transfer to her bank — that it looked strange. For it didn’t have the same feel as her other letters. I should try and find her letters and profile and photo. Months later I received an email from Thai police. They were investigating her, or I should say him. I think it was a man working with a woman and they did manage to scam a few men into sending them money.

I got lucky in choosing and finding Mia in 2001. I did have a nice girlfriend living with me at the time, so I feel a bit guilty about it. But my girlfriend scared me — mentally a bit unstable. I wanted her to get help, but she was too stubborn. I still remember the way she cried and screamed and begged me not to go, as I was leaving… to go on a plane to China to see Mia. A part of me still cares for this girl — Yinqing is her name. And wonders if I should have stayed with her and worked things out. Maybe we would have been happy together. But, we lived together for about 18 months, from May 2000 to October 2001 — wow… was it really that long?? I thought it was only 6 months. But in December 2000 I had told her to move out, for it just wasn’t working out. Somehow she just brought out the worse in me. I don’t know why. I just hope she’s doing OK now.

In May 2001 I fell in love with Mia, and then in October went to see her. And we got married in November 2001. I returned back to Canada and then sponsored her to come to Canada as my wife. A year later, to the day I first went to China to see her, and many phone bills and emails later, she arrived in Canada. It wasn’t easy, for it’s like we fell in love, got married, and then got to know each other. There are still some qualities in her that I don’t like too much — like she likes to do things quickly, not taking enough care sometimes, and without much patience. And she gets bored, depressed — and for a time, she always seemed to want more and more.

But, 2 children later, and married now for 6+ years, living together for 5+ years, and I feel we’re happy with each other. She knows me. And I feel I know her. Sometimes we fight. But we try to talk and understand each other.

You could say I’m lucky — but I don’t feel that lucky. I bought a lottery ticket last month, an expensive ticket at $100 for the heart and stroke charity — and with 1 in 8 odds of winning, and I won nothing. Last year I won a digital camera though, which was nice. But I wish I could win something big, like a car or a house. Oh well. I’m very unlucky for money.

But in love, for my marriage. In a way, I was lucky that Mia found me. And I don’t know how it happened, but very quickly we fell in love. She said by the 2nd letter I already proposed and asked her to marry me! I don’t remember it being that quick. She was in shock. Her friend thought I was crazy. But somehow she said yes.

I almost changed my mind at the last minute though — mostly feeling a bit guilty for the hurt I was causing Yinqing. She still wanted me through all this. In a way, I remember her and miss her. But she scared me — a bit crazy. She did have a lovely tender voice, sometimes.

Mia scares me too though. She thinks of my ex-lovers with so much hatred. If she reads or sees the name Yinqing, she’ll go crazy with jealousy. So, I’m scared to write my true thoughts on this matter. I don’t want to hurt Mia. But why are women so scary? Especially when jealous. It’s all in the past. I lived with Yinqing for 18 months and in a way cared deeply for her. And I still feel guilty for what I did to her and have compassion for her. That’s one thing with me — if I loved someone, I will always love them for all my life. Even if we break up, I have a tender heart and still carry those feelings with me. For, love for me is eternal. If there was some quality in the person that attracted me, that had me fall in love with them, that quality and feeling is still there after the break-up. That’s not to say I want to make love with them or live with them again. But I will always remember the love we shared and care for them.

Take care my love,

I should get into the habit of archiving my blog though — I should try the RSS feed and see what that does.

I was thinking of using a calendar type format, but now I’m thinking not to bother with it. I have one on blogspot and it doesn’t look that good. I like the look of my diary on nuderiver.com more than the mirror at nuderiver.blogspot.com. Actually nuderiver.com is pulling in all the entries from blogspot.

Does blogspot or blogger support gallery type blog entries — or hooks to flickr?

For example, for Mia’s birthday dinner we took a lot of photos. I would love to be able to have a gallery somewhere on the page, where the gallery changes depending on the blog entry. Or better still, have a slideshow on the blog page — what the slideshow is changes depending on the blog entry. And click on the slideshow takes you to the gallery page.

I should take some time now and explore aperture more — for it has some blogging capabilities as well.

But, I’m thinking, one plan is to figure out how or if aperture can export to a “Gallery” type web gallery… and then figure out how to have blogger or my RapidWeaver page work with gallery too. And then things can get much more interesting — adding photos to my site.

And then slowly and surely, my website can come together — after 10 years of waiting, finally getting out there again… just by doing it. Just write and write and say anything and whatever is on my mind.

Next step is to figure out photos and how to put them up too. I won’t worry too much and just try and get them up.

Some things I’m looking for:

• have a beautiful slide show.
• hooks from aperture to the gallery.
• allow tags for keyword searching and organizing the photos.
• allow aperture to update the photos and tags and have the gallery be updated with the new images.
• hooks from my diary/blog to the gallery.

Ok… a new plan of attack here. I need to figure out if RapidWeaver does photo galleries. Or if Aperture has hooks to RW or to Gallery. Aperture will be the key, unchanging piece, where the photos are kept and organized. RW and blogspot is where my blog is. The problem to figure out is how to best hook the two together.

Take care my love…

I think it’s a great idea, whoever created the site. I’m not looking for love, for I have a wonderful wife and family. Mostly I just want to learn about new people, in different countries, different cultures. And to exchange ideas. And it seems other people are like me, for the site is getting over 400 new members each day.

In just a couple days, I’ve already received about 6 or so emails — all from far away places… 2 from Africa, 1 from Germany, another from Britain, one from China, and one from Korea. Pretty cool. I’ve been so busy though over the weekend, with family life and with my job, that I haven’t had any time yet to write back to anyone. Hopefully the penpals don’t expect quick replies from me. I think we’re a bit spoiled with email — expecting quick replies.

I think that’s the only thing with the site — it’s a bit hard to know who someone is and to reply back to them. So, I’m contemplating joining as a VIP member, for then that gives me access to their message centre. $99 for a lifetime membership seems the best deal. But then again, maybe just exchanging my gmail address is best — for that’s the easiest way for people to reach me.

But also, I’m just completely burned out with work right now. Completely burned out and exhausted by this high stress problem that came up on Friday. I need some release of this stress, or it’s just going to kill me. I’ve never really felt that secure in my job. Never easy — 18 years of dedication and hard work. I wonder if my boss realizes how hard I work and the pressure he puts on me. Maybe my job is just too hard?

My new wife is the best and my oasis in a sea of madness. My ex-wife is just driving me to an early grave. My job… it’s hard to say. I love my job mostly. But sometimes the responsibilities are just overwhelming. I need to cut back on my hours and find more of a balance in life.

Tomorrow I need to put this latest task aside and move onto other things that need to be addressed. I just have no more time nor energy to spend on it.

Really I hate my boss putting this pressure on. He needs to put more pressure on the customer to be more reasonable. Like ridiculous that they expect updates on the problem every morning at 9 a.m. We have a software product to get for bloody well sack. And we have no time for distractions like this — especially on a problem that has existed for a decade or longer.

We do charge a ridiculous amount for our software and a huge amount for maintenance… but I don’t know… It’s just stupid what we go through just to try and keep our single most important customer happy.

The first restaurant offering the free birthday dinner was Mother Tuckers — now called Tuckers Marketplace. But I don’t like the food too much — mostly Italian… They have nice roast beef, but that’s all I really eat there. Not really worth it, unless there’s a free birthday in it.

The new restaurant we just discovered and which we went on Saturday is Imperial Buffet. More of the type of Chinese food we like. And they had more huge crab legs than I ever saw before. And lots of shrimp dishes. Jennifer doesn’t really like going out though and needed to be held a lot. And the snow storm made it a bit nerve wrecking to get to the restaurant. Mia drove very slowly, just about 20 km/h, and got us there and then back home safely. We took a lot of pictures. And they had a chocolate fountain and fresh fruit, so I made a lot of chocolate covered strawberries. And I took many pictures, trying to take some sexy pictures of Mia. So, all in all, a nice birthday and Mia was happy.

Sunday I fought mostly with computers — trying to get our passport applications done. Really it’s much easier to just get the paper forms and write out the information by hand. The hard part is to get things printed at a high enough quality. And I followed their printing directions exactly, but it still didn’t print out correctly. And I tried installing a new printer, but the computer kept dieing during the installation. All in all, following the usually rule, if something can possibly go wrong it will. I can see why people give up on Windows OS and switch to Linux or the Mac. Windows really has problems. And it’s like, I have a completely new system, a fast machine, and very quickly, it becomes very slow and starts to have problems. Like just installing a printer and it kept rebooting on me.

I need to try installing Vista soon and see if that helps things at all.

At least I can run emacs and compile and test and run the same software I develop at work. So, that’s good. And at 3:30 a.m. last night I finally figured out what was going on with this bug I started looking at on Friday. I just need more sleep now.

I don’t know what is with Asian girls with long straight flowing hair. When I see them, I just feel an attraction — a feeling of wow, and caught by the beauty. I subscribe to some newsgroups and get like 1000 emails a day through them. 99% of them are nothing special and a lot of ads. But there are some, I saw one this morning, that just makes me think wow. I forget what their called. It’s like Japanese beauty shots, maybe topless, maybe nude, maybe wearing something sexy — but just beautiful photos and not what I would consider porn… not showing intercourse or concentrating on and opening up the vagina. Just beautiful photos. Those are the types of photos I really want to take — and photos I can be proud of. I want to take photos to show beauty — and nothing bad or degrading. Photos to capture beauty. I think the expression on the girl’s face is very important. And most important is for the person in the photo to love the photo. That’s what I want to do with my photography studio.

I feel a bit guilty, for it’s Mia’s birthday and I’m thinking about other beautiful girls. But it’s just I have dreams and hopes still, regardless of it being her birthday. I still think about her and love her and want her to be happy. But I want to feel relaxed and comfortable in our love. Not to take it for granted, but just comfortable and not wanting to worry about our love. I don’t want any hard feelings on her special day — just want to relax and be happy with our nice family. For, on my birthday, that’s all I wish for — just a happy peaceful loving family.

And one thing I’ve been wanting to do for a while is find new friends. Mia and I met and fell in love over the internet by writing. And, as you can probably tell if you’re reading this, I like writing. I don’t want romance, but just new friends. To learn about someone else’s life and to share my personal stories with.

Mia and I met through Asia Friend Finder. And over the years, I joined Friend Finder and Adult Friend Finder. Friend finder is a bit limited if you don’t pay. And AFF is full of people who just want to meet us face to face and have sex with Mia or watch Mia and I have sex. Maybe someday we’ll be ready for that, but not yet. Mia keeps my hopes up though. Really I think it would be good, to join a swinging type lifestyle, to help spice up our lives.

…. ahhh… on my way home now…. I think I got lucky and just caught the last subway train east. Cutting it too close. I should plan out a night route home, just in case I miss the last train. There are all-night buses, but I have no idea how they cross the city to find the route to take me home. This was a crazy day at work. First, I felt too sick — thinking that I should just stay home. But I had food at work, plus a meeting in the afternoon, so I pumped my body full of medicine and headed to work. The meeting was a big waste of time though.

And then my stupid manager — I don’t want to put him down, but I don’t know how else to put it. At 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon he wants me to look at an issue. Someone else is looking at it, but I have more experience. So I start looking at it, and helping out my coworker. Then, at 4 p.m. he distracts me with some small little task. He could have just done it himself. Like there’s a very serious bug to look at and every minute of my time is precious, and I’m sick, and he throws something to me that he could just as easily have done himself. Anyway, so I do it. By about 7p.m. I’m back at looking at the very serious bug. 7:15 p.m. he comes by my desk and asks me what I know. Like I don’t know much of anything yet. And he goes on and on, talking about a completely pointless topic. Like he has to tell the customer a response Monday morning at 9 a.m. So he asks me what to tell the customer. My response, of course, is I don’t know yet. Like give me a bloody break and at least give me some time to investigate the issue. I said from what I know so far, we need more time. So tell the customer to give us 2 more days. Fine. Then he says what to tell the customer in 2 days. Like what the F***. Why waste time in all these stupid scenarios talking about air when I could spend time investigating the issue and find out the facts.

My manager really just makes me so mad and frustrated with him sometimes. He just causes so much unnecessary stress. I’m not the type to go talking BS when I don’t know the facts yet. He however is. That’s why he’s a manager.

In any case, after looking deeply at the issue over the past 6 hours, I think I found out what the problem is. But my stupid manager. Like he makes this issue so very important. I send him 2 emails in the evening telling him my findings. And he doesn’t respond at all. I remember a few days back, I phoned his cell, needing him to do something — to approve a change I’m doing. He said he’ll do it by around 7:30 p.m. when he gets home. It wasn’t until 9 p.m. when another manager did it for me. Like does my manager expect me to wait all night at work for him?

Ok… back to what I was saying…

…. Now it’s Monday morning after an exhausting weekend. Too much snow. And the stress of work hanging over my head. Finally, Monday morning at 8 a.m. my boss sends me some email to thank me for my thorough analysis of the problem and my effort over the weekend. I wonder how the customer discussion went this morning for him. I stayed up till 3 a.m. last night to continue my analysis and complete my understanding of the problem. Now I’m a bit exhausted — really needing more sleep.

Too tired to write much now, so I’ll end this entry now.

So, I downloaded and installed ArtRage at home this morning — for I think my daughter will love it. And she drew on it a bit this morning. At first, it’s not that easy for her to use. The one thing she likes to do often and which is hard to do is clearing the page the starting on a new drawing. And when I see it now at home, it looks more as something for kids than a professional drawing tool. Yet, not easy enough for a 4 year old to use. I still think it’s amazing and want to try learning how to draw using it. Maybe the software my company created is better for my daughter? For it has a more slicker look and is easier to use. Like a single click on an icon creates a new page and saves the old drawing. I won’t draw any opinions yet; not until I get more experience to know what I’m talking about. And I’ll let my daughter be her own judge as to which she likes and uses more.

What my daughter loves most about ArtRage is the mixing colours together part. I don’t want to get into any trouble at work, so I won’t say the company I work for or the software I’m comparing ArtRage to. Suffice it to say, ArtRage seems better at handling colours and in creating a digital metaphor for the real world paint brush and canvas. It’s a true digital tool that mimics what artists currently do with painting and colours. And it’s a great tool for children to learn about colours too. I’m surprised they don’t have a finger paintbrush, just to push the colours around. The software my company created, even though I’ve had nothing to do with it as I work on a different product — it seems better at quickly and very easily sketching with a pencil.

Myself, I’m not much of an artist. Probably my 4 year old draws better than me. But let me see, and see I can create something beautiful. I particularly like the feature where a photo can be used underneath, in tracing image mode, or brought forward and used like paint.

And it’s such a simple concept really. I wish I could invent something like that. The concept of ArtRage looks to be that in addition to assigning a colour to a pixel, there’s the concept of how much paint is on that pixel — thus allowing the paint to be pushed and spread around. There is also the concept of how wet or dry the paint is. So simple, it yet works. I also love the stencil idea — plus how any .png image can be used as a stencil. Very well done. The ruler is amazing too.

Some things I wonder about:

• Can the stencil be scaled?
• Can the stencil be used like a hard edge — such as drawing a line up against a ruler.

And the answer to both questions is an emphatic Yes! Stencils can be scaled by pressing the alt key. And moved around by holding the spacebar. I actually love the mode-less nature of ArtRage, where you’re almost always in a brush tool and always painting.

A few of my co-workers love ArtRage. One used it just to create a collage of photos — to create nice brush effects to blend one photo into the next. He said ArtRage is just like crack. And I agree, for it’s highly addictive. I can hardly wait till I have some more time to play with it again.

He also told me a secret trick. If you hold down shift when saving a file, it saves out each channel in a separate file. Like I guessed, it has 5 channels for each pixel. 3 for the RGB colour. 1 for an alpha (transparency) channel. And 1 for something else. He called it a bump map. But I think it’s what I guessed, and that is for how much ink is on a pixel. That 5th channel is where the beauty and magic of the program lies.

He also said the program was developed by 5 guys in New Zealand. They did some work for Corel. He also said that Corel is suing them — a bit sad. Corel Painter likely has similar functionality, but is no where near as easy to use. That is sad, to do something so wonderful and to be sued for it. I own some Corel stock and it makes me feel like I should just sell it all.

Take care my love. Oh, and the stock market is a scary place now, with the US dollar collapsing, metals and oil prices exploding, and the economy looking bad with the housing collapse in the USA. On the bright side, my mortgage rate is coming down. But also, my stocks are at their lowest level since I started tracking more than 2 years ago… and that’s even with me adding more money in. I don’t know if I should pump more money in, to take advantage of the low prices now, or just sit tight and ride out the storm.

But I write to write… not so much caring if people read what I have to say, but more so for people to know who I am. A recording of who I am and what I’m thinking; just so people will know who I was.

I need to put more effort into my journal entries though. For I know people don’t like reading that much. Hopefully my English is OK and readable and flows naturally. But I know my grammar might not always be that good. Usually when I write something, I need to reread it and edit it myself a few times, but for my diary entries I don’t do that too much. A diary is meant to be my thoughts, feelings — and to just flow as if you’re sitting here beside me and we’re having a nice chat.

How are you? What are you thinking? Who are you?

Maybe someday I’ll go through my diary entries and make it all easier and more enjoyable and fun for the reader. I need to add some pictures. But I truly hate the busy and noise in pages like what’s on myspace. I want a very simple and clean journal.

Anyway — I bought a new software program tonight called ArtRage 2.5. And just found it hard to put down. I played with it for a couple hours and just found it amazing. Whoever designed it was a pure genius. It just has concepts that make it so intuitive. It has a manual too that is actually good for teaching the concepts. It simply is the most fun program I’ve ever used.

The company I work for has worked hard for a number of years developing and selling a similar program. And in terms of the user experience, I think ArtRage simply blows us out of the water. We do a couple of things better perhaps. But we’re barely in the same league. ArtRage just feels so much like using real paint. With ArtRage, I think artists can really forget about using real paint and simply work in a digital world — it’s just that good.

Like ArtRage has a simple concept called Stencils. It’s their so simple and beautiful, it’s ridiculous. The stencil actually looks and feel like a real stencil used by artists to limit where the paint will fall.

And ArtRage costs just $25. I highly recommend downloading the free version and trying it out. Of course, you will need a Wacom tablet. I’m using the new bamboo one myself. And I love the scroll wheel on the bamboo — works like a charm with ArtRage to zoom in and out. I tried the same thing with the software my company sells — and, of course, they don’t work.

I just wish I could have an idea like that. So simple, yet so eloquent. Quite amazing to see a computer program that just works and is so simple. I envy them.

Anyway… time to get some sleep and need more rest with this cold of mine.

Take care my love and sweet dreams,

As a compromise now, and because I really want to live once again in the country, I bought a trailer in the nudist park last year. I miss it, in a way. It’s stressful though. Mia and I fought a bit, for she hates packing, and I take a long time to get everything ready for the trip to the trailer. Myself, I like to be prepared. So, we had a few fights over the packing thing to get ready to go to the trailer.

And then there was my ex-wife and my parents not approving. Basically, it came down to my son and my ex-wife saying that she will not allow me to take my son to the nudist park. My son also is a bit shy and uneasy about going. I feel a bit sad, for my son has grown apart from me. I used to feel completely at ease being nude in front of him, but not any longer. He’s 13 now. Somehow, I just feel more distant from him, like I’ve lost him.

I have a new wife now though, and 2 wonderful daughters — Jennifer, just 3 months old, and Angelina, 4 years old. Angelina is a bit wild sometimes and very independent, and easy to get mad when she doesn’t get her way. I wonder what she will be like when she grows up. But I’m trying to teach her that it’s OK to be nude, when appropriate. Sometimes she runs around the house nude — like after going to the washroom… just looking for some attention. She loves being the centre of attention and loves talking non-stop. And I feel completely at ease to be nude in front of her, or in front of my wife. I think when my son was 4 I felt this way too. So, we’ll see. When she grows up and brings friends over, of course I won’t be nude in front of them. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but people will always have their ill-conceived notions about the dirty old man being nude in front of children, for sexual or some type of perverted pleasure.

Again, I like to be nude in my own home just because it’s more comfortable. It’s nice to be able to go the washroom without worrying about closing the door. It’s a very small washroom too. And nice to take a shower and walk around nude afterwards, while I find some shorts or something to put on. And I sleep nude too. I started sleeping nude when I went to university, living on my own, and it’s just so very comfortable. Clothes are OK to keep yourself warm, or to protect yourself. I don’t see myself ever wearing pyjama’s again — and don’t see the point.

I love that Mia too loves sleeping nude — agreeing that it’s much more comfortable. She does get cold easily though, so usually wears a top, but no pants. And now that she’s breast feeding Jennifer, milk is dripping sometimes, so most of the time she wears a bra. She doesn’t like wearing a bra to sleep — just she needs to.

Strange how these entries go. First I was talking about the snow storm, then my farm and divorce, and then talked much more about my life being nude.

How I would love to have a job where I could be nude all day. Maybe I’ll create a software company that is just that. Or my photography studio maybe. Would people think it strange if I’m nude when taking photos of them? They can be nude too, so it’s only fair. I doubt I’ll get sexual pleasure out of it, or an erection, for that’s more mental than anything else. Of course, if a nude woman suggests something to me, my penis will very likely spring to life :). Or if something brushes against my penis. But sex is more about the mind and what you’re thinking than about what you’re wearing. And when I’m taking photos, my mind is on the photo and how to take the best photo. Of course, I hope to someday get to the point where taking photos is just second nature to me, and then I can enjoy the subject of the photo more.

But I miss my farm. It was wonderful to take photos on the farm. And nude photos too, in complete privacy. And to be outside nude. I love gardening nude, for it’s a wonderful feeling, lying down in the cool sand, nude and feeling nature on every inch of my skin.

But I lost my farm in my divorce. The time was just not right. And it was just too hard, commuting from the farm to the city everyday. Now I have my trailer in the nude And in the summer, Mia can live at the trailer, enjoy the swimming pool and friends there, and our children can play there. Really it’s a great experience for our children. Angelina improved her swimming a lot there last summer. She started the summer wearing a life jacket to swim, and not being too brave, holding onto me tightly. By the end of the summer she’s swimming with no life jacket and little fear. So really it’s a great place for children.

But you just need to worry less. There’s no telling what’s inside someone’s mind. Men are a bit easier to read though. And I think with everyone nude, it’s harder for people with evil minds to hide. Like, if a man is staring at people and his penis is erect, he’ll stand out and be warned and/or thrown out of the park. They have rules.

Some people are overly sensitive though. Like once, by the pool, a new member told me to be careful about a man wearing sunglasses. She felt he was staring at the nude women. And maybe he was. I don’t know. Wearing dark sunglasses, it’s impossible to really see where he’s looking. But Mia felt something strange with him too. But he was a member for a few months — the woman complaining had just joined that day.

People do gossip about each other too much in the nude park. By being nude, people are more friendly though, for taking off the clothes somehow makes everyone equal and tears down the walls. At home in the city, I never say high to people I walk by in the street. I might say hi to two of my neighbours, but that’s all. In the nude park, as everyone is nude, it’s somehow easy to just say hi to everyone you walk past. And Angelina is the princess of the park, the youngest there.

The one thing though that we worry a bit about. We have a new neighbour in the park. We bought a nice big trailer there and loved it. And we picked a spot that wasn’t too crowded, as there was a tent campsite beside us that was empty most of the time. But last fall, they managed to squeeze a new trailer into the trailer site beside us. True, our site is still the size we were promised, about 30 feet wide. But as we have a big deck, 30 feet isn’t very much. The openness was nice. Now it feels a bit crowded. But, I think that’s common with trailer parks, where they crowd the trailers and pack them in as tightly as possible.

Hopefully I’ll like the new neighbours. It’s a man, a little bit older than me, and his girlfriend. At first Mia was a bit shocked and upset, for the rumour we heard was that he was a Mormon with 2 wives, and looking for a 3rd. Really Mia thinks that’s terrible, especially when we have 2 young children. There’s a TV show that I love about polygamy called Big Love, but I don’t know how real it portrays their life. I forget the neighbours name, but I’m sure he heard how upset Mia was about this. The park is supposed to be for families. Anyway, when I saw my new neighbour in the park in the fall, he explained that the more than one wife thing was a joke. I don’t know… that’s not the type of thing to be joking about when just joining a new park.

In any case, I hope it all turns out for the best. He has an Asian girlfriend — I haven’t seen her yet. He seems like a nice man, very handy. A bit strange though, for he said he’ll stay in the park all winter — even though he’s in a part of the park with no water. Sometimes though — he’s a good talker, but says things that just rub me the wrong way. Like he always referred to Home Depot as “homeless depot”. He did say he planned to live full-time in the park later, and run some type of internet business out of the trailer. The only thing I can think he might be thinking of doing is porn — but I can’t say. But he somehow thinks he’ll be rich again soon. Like me, he’s also divorced and lost much.

I just hope Mia feels comfortable. We really had a great summer last year there and I’m hoping for another nice year. There is a bit of a dark side perhaps to this nudist thing. Like the guy we bought the trailer from — his wife cheated on him with a man from the park. Undoubtedly, just like in real life, people end up cheating. And perhaps when people are nude, open, and very friendly — it’s easy for emotions and attractions to come into play. And, of course, affairs are easy and attractive, when one’s marriage is hard sometimes. Like I know Mia has a hard time looking after 2 young children and is easy to get emotional and depressed.

Anyway… winter still has a while to go. And myself, I’m coming down with a bad cold right now. Sorry this entry rambled on for a bit too long. Hope it’s not too hard to read.

Take care my love, and sweet dreams…

There’s a trip to China my wife wants to do later this year. To be honest, I do find the trip a bit stressful for money. At first I figured the trip would cost about $5000, but now I’m thinking I’ll have to budget more like $7000 for it. It just doesn’t seem worth it. $7000 just for 2 or 3 weeks in a different country, and with much stress and worry. And it’s like almost a 24 hour trip to get there. The visas alone will be like $200. Right now we’re busy to get things ready to apply for our passports. Saturday we went to get our passport photos done.

But I know my wife will be very sad, disappointed, mad, if we don’t go back. I know she misses her home and her family. She’s been in Canada now 5 years without going back. And this will be her mom’s 70th birthday. Money will be very tight this year, mostly because of this trip, plus also stocks are doing bad now, and the window replacement job we just finished. The first 3 months of the year are always harder for money — as I need to pay and EI again (I hit the maximum by July or so). Plus I spend too much as with the new year comes new dreams and hopes. Or old dreams brought back to life again.

One thing that came in the mail today — and which I need to hide from Mia, for it’s a bit expensive. I just received new personalized license plates for my car. On a whim, I ordered them last month, not expecting that I would even get them. The name is so good, I thought someone must already have it. Or it may be too sexual and I’ll be rejected. But, surprisingly, the order was accepted and the plates arrived. Cost was about $314 — not too bad, as I’ll have the plates for all my life. Plus I don’t want my parents to find out — for they’re very conservative and don’t approve of some of the things I do, and don’t like the way I spend money.

My new plates are “2BNUDE”. I thought it’s a great name, to promote the idea of nudism/naturism, and promote my new website, 2bnude.com. My mom I especially worry about, for she has a problem with nudity. So, for now, I’ll hide away the new plates.

It feels a bit sad though, that I cannot be completely open about things with the people that mean the most to me. I like being nude — nothing sexual, just a nice feeling of being free and the way God created us.

Oh, BTW, I could write a whole essay on my religious beliefs. Suffice it to say, I believe in a God, but not in a single supreme being that watches us. It’s more that God is inside us all, connects us all. We collectively are God.

The thing is, being nude is a wonderful thing — it’s the way we were born, created. We need to be closer to nature, to the natural world, and not separated like we are now in concrete cities.

True, some people are just sick. Like I was just reading in the newspaper about a couple men caught streaking in a school or flashing, exposing themselves to children.

And when I tell someone I’m interested in porn, and I’m also a nudist — sick thoughts go through their mind. Like whether I ever streak (ran naked in public).

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a nudist. But, I guess, by the same token we wear clothes to protect ourselves from the sick people out there. People who are into child pornography and people who are just plain sick when it comes to sexuality. That’s why children get abused, sexually and physically, and women get raped. It has nothing to do with being a nudist. But it has much to do with sick people out there.

And the thing is — a nude photo by itself has very little to do with sex. If a penis is inside a vagina, fine — that’s sexual. Or if the penis is erect, that might be viewed as sexual as well. Myself though, I like to take nude photos of my erect penis. But I think it’s mostly just that as a child I never felt myself attractive to the opposite sex. I never went on a single date until university. So, in that regard, I would like to have photos of my erect penis out there for people to see — just to help me feel that women might desire me. Even though I would never cheat on my wife, it’s a nice feeling to be desired sexually.

It’s the same with girls who like to wear sexy revealing clothes. What is the best way to refer to female people? Girls, women or ladies? I like to use girls sometimes — not meaning children, but just that women like to be young, sexy, attractive, beautiful. Lady shows more maturity and respect. Women — the word to me just feels older and more stuffy and boring. That would be a good survey question. Do you get offended if I call you a girl? That reminds me of a song “My girl”… young innocent beautiful love.

Where was I? People like to be attractive. For women, it’s about looking beautiful. Hiding parts of the body, and revealing in sexy clothes. It doesn’t mean they are slutty or want a lot of sex. Though, it’s easy for women to be thought of that way when they dress too sexy. Still, sex sells. And it can be tasteful and beautiful, the body shown in a beautiful way.

There can be a lot of debate over photos and clothes — whether it’s too sexy, too revealing, and to the point of being embarrassing or pornographic. And it’s different for me. Men wearing revealing, sexy clothes — it could start to look gay. Men want to look strong, masculine. Myself, I don’t have much in the way of muscles. All I have that could be attractive are my face and my bum. My penis is OK… medium in size I think. My bum and legs are strong, for I’ve done a lot of bike riding. But also, women have found my words attractive.

I’m not a woman though, so I don’t really know. But do any women find an erect penis attractive. Like can you see an erect penis and think about kissing it, sucking it, and having it inside you? For men, myself, I can see a woman showing her nice vagina, holding it open with her fingers, and think about licking it and giving her beautiful pleasure.

So, the thing is, nude photos is one thing, and some photos are definitely sexual — but it’s mostly a photo with 2 people, touching, kissing, and penis inside vagina, which would be said to be sexual without question. Nude photos by themselves, most are just very beautiful and not sexual — showing the beautiful body and world created by God. And then, there are a lot of photos in between, where judging whether or not they are sexual depends on the mind of the viewer. By the same token, nude photos of children are not child pornography. The sexual intent needs to be shown by the person taking or viewing the photos.

People who study are have already done this type of studies I suppose. There are figure nudes — not sexual or porn, but a part of any art class. Nudes have been a part of art for as long as there’s been art. Porn could be viewed as art too — perhaps.

I wrote this earlier, but not sure now where it fits in…
And with photos of vaginas, again, if there is a finger touching it, to excite it sexually, then it’s sexual. A lot can be read in the woman’s expression too — whether it’s a beautiful expression of orgasm. Women are lucky in a way. For men have a penis hanging there, and if it’s erect, then very likely the man is thinking something about sex. But it’s healthy for men to think a lot about sex.

One thing I would love to do is to do nude figure studies. And focus on particular parts of the body. Like I would love to get many penis pictures together, and breasts, and vagina pics. Just mostly from a curiosity and scientific standpoint. So, if you have pics of yourself, please send them my way.

Like, the thing is, I’m a 45 year old male, have been sexual active since 1983 (over 25 years now), yet I’m still not completely sure where the woman’s clit is. Is it different from where a woman pees out of? And then, when a woman “squirts” during an orgasm, what hole does it come out of? Not that I have any experience with a woman who squirts. And I’m also not sure what an uncut penis looks like. I don’t want to see drawings. And in this day and age, we shouldn’t be teaching sex education through drawings… just show the real sexual organs. Without shame or embarrassment.

Good night my love and hope to see you.

I worry a bit about how reliable blogger and blogspot is. For with no warning and no notice, it was down tonight. Maybe just some end of month maintenance — I don’t know. But it was giving 502 errors shortly after 7 p.m. this evening. I tried again an hour later and it was working again.

And my Aperture 2.0 software arrived today! So, now I can play with it and learn it.

I just need to sleep now. Just totally and completely exhausted after this busy week — the final days of getting our software ready to ship. I do probably have to be careful what I write, for in my company I do know some confidential information that cannot be shared. It feels though that I’m just writing these entries to myself, my own personal diary. Even though it’s out there for anyone to read, I don’t want to worry about hiding anything.

Hence my name, NudeRiver. Life is like a river, starting from a few drops of rain, growing, getting stronger, flowing, changing, a path that is sometimes difficult, and along the way sharing the journey with others, affecting others, and then eventually out to sea — not dyeing, but joining with others and becoming something much larger. I do believe we all have souls — something inside of us that is not of the physical world. And I believe all of our souls are connected, joined, a part of something much larger. Just like a river, going out to sea, becoming a part of something much larger, our souls too are joined, becoming a part of something much larger when we die. And what we become a part of is God. At least, that’s what I think.

And it’s a never-ending circle of life. Like the water that comes from the sea, evaporating, going higher, into the clouds and falling back as rain — to keep the river flowing and bring new life with it. Our souls too come from the larger God, into the new born baby and becoming a part of who we are.

By the same token, it only makes sense that every living creature around us has a soul, just like ours. From the chickens we eat, the bugs we kill, and our pets. But then, where does it start. Like does an small little ant have a soul? And if so, we can go smaller — I think bacteria and germs definitely do not have souls. Maybe the soul lives in our DNA. Could it then be said, if a creature has DNA then it has a soul?

We cannot see souls, yet I truly believe they exist. And I believe they are like water — combining and resting in the ocean, and separating, ready to be born, in evaporation, and flowing and interconnecting with others and living through rivers.

Take care my love, and I hope my words can somehow make sense to you, reach you and touch you.

I’m thinking I’ll stick it out with RapidWeaver and blogger (and the RapidBlog hook) — for I still like it. Wordpress is another choice. As is using the built-in blog of RW. Somehow I trust blogger more. And it has an API so I can create general programming pieces for what I need — and I could even share it with other people.

What I need right now is a simple calendar type navigator — for really my blog is an online journal. I hate the navigation of blogspot and want to build my own. And I hate these extremely long pages that seem to go on forever.

I wonder though — why do other blogs get lots of comments. The blogs I’ve done have not received a single comment. Yesterday I added my blog to feedburner, so maybe it will give me some stats — whether anyone is even seeing my blog or not.

I don’t really like that term “blog” — short for weblog. I like ‘diary’ more… or ‘journal’. Blog is just much easier to type than diary… one less key. And it’s slang that seems to have caught on. I think of a blog as a more impersonal, journalistic, newspaper type format. While a diary is more about my life. Ok, let me change the name to “My Diary”. That looks better. But maybe less people will understand what it means versus ‘blog’.

Ok…. back to what I need to do to get this all up:

• blogger keeps all the entries on its server. I request a feed from it to get the entries. Seems quick though, which is surprising.
• I’m surprised no one has created something that sucks off the blogger entries and creates webpages from it all.
• To do a backup, I just need to suck off all the entries.
• I still want to build my calendar. I can borrow some concepts from the blogger calendar I found, but it’s looking like I need to write my own.
• To start, I want to learn more about the blogger API. And start with something very simple, like pulling out the entries. Actually, there must be something inside of RapidBlog that already does just that.
• Examine more and learn more how things integrate with blogger, using RW and RapidBlog as an example.

Just switched from subway to 504 streetcar now. And luckily just caught the streetcar before it left. But the stupid driver closed the door just as I was getting on, and the door hit my chest a little bit. I think I’m fine though.

Really the MacBook is good just to use — to be a user. Like here, just to write my journal entries using RW. It’s ok for checking spelling too, but as good as say Outlook or Word, which can also check grammar. Actually, I think there’s a plugin for Word too so that it can hook into blogger — another reason for going with blogger. Blogger’s API is what makes all this possible. Ok… blogger it is.

What was I saying? Back to my MacBook. When it comes down to programming things like finding out how the RapidBlog plugin of RW accesses my entries on Blogspot — for that, I’m much more productive and happier going to my windows computer… just downloading the website RW creates and examine how it does what it does.

Ok…. looking good. Oh, and my Aperture 2.0 software arrived today! Much quicker than I thought. I just placed my order for it on Wednesday I think. I was shipped out yesterday, Thursday. And it arrived today, on Friday. The next thing I need to learn now.

RapidWeaver has a blog thing too built in. Does blogger really have much advantages over the RapidWeaver blog utility?
And then there is something else I should check out — wordpress I think it was called. It can do a lot of what I need — but it’s all database driven, so harder to set up, and harder to write the entries remotely, right? But it can look much fancier and prettier.

I have to think about this some more Here’s what I know. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

• With the RW built in blogger, each blog entry is a separate page. I can see all my entries, and easily back things up. I like the idea of seeing all my entries as separate html pages.
• How do I get pictures into my blog, whatever I end up using?
• With blogger, all the blog entries on on their server. This could make things slower to load. Plus I feel like I’m losing control. They might censor my entries, for instance… there have a flag feature. Still, all my entries are local
• Having things on blogger might make it easier for people to find my blog — I expect it will be indexed better by google.
• The problem I’m having now is with the calendar feature I want to use to
• Wordpress or drupal or whatever might be harder to set up, and harder to create entries while commuting and with no internet. I do like being able to work off-line, but I don’t want to
• I like the theme concept of RW, so really would like to make it work… instead of going the database route just yet.
• I can easily bring in my RW blog into blogger, but I don’t know about the other way around.
• I cannot simply copy and paste the blogger calendar code in — it doesn’t work, as it’s using blogger specific tags.
• I need to learn the google blooger API to get access to my blogger entries.
• I had thought that blogger allowed posting of my blog to my own site, but it looks like that feature is gone. What they do allow is having my site point to their nameserver.

Ok… more questions I need answers to:

• can I download my entire blog from blogger?
• where does RW rapidblog store my local entries? I can’t seem to find them anywhere on my computer here. Maybe it’s all part of the RW file?
• how can I customize my blog entries, with things like pictures?
• and then, continue to learn the blogger API.

This morning I woke up just thinking about my job. I spent a day working on a problem, finding a solution — but I did it in the old C-style way, for that is the way I’m most familiar with and I feel most comfortable with. That is my 18 years of experience showing. Well… I showed it to someone else, and he showed me a different way of doing it — in the newer C++ way. Changing 20 files became just one file. And the change was smaller, simpler. But still, I find the C way much easier to understand. With C I can understand each line and know exactly what’s going on. With C++ it’s harder to know the actual flow. C++ is great when it works, but if things are not done just right, it can be very difficult to figure out why things don’t work. I guess C is the same way. I’ve spent countless hours, late nights, debugging code to find out why it’s just not working.

Strange, for the newer programmers not exposed to C, who learned C++ in school, 10 or 20 years younger than I am — to them the C way of doing things is a mystery, but they are so much better at C++ than I am. I need to try to get myself better with C++. Or, maybe I should leapfrog them and learn about C# instead? Or Java. There’s always something new to learn and I love learning. I think, above all else, that is why I’m still here. I can be thrown into any situation, with almost any piece of code or problem, and I can find a solution. This past year I worked on 7 various problems. If the code I’m working on is C++, then I try to find a C++ solution. If it’s older C code, then I work with C. I can work on the lowest geometry/math type algorithms, or the high level UI code.

I think my weaknesses is I still find it hard to look at C++ code and to figure out how to use it to create a solution. Like, if I see a class and I want it to do something more, I think of adding a method to it to do what I need. And when I look at C code, I know exactly what is going on. When I look at C++, I have no idea. I can cut and copy C++ code, but I don’t really understand why or what the best way…. it’s like reading Greek to me, and I realize that really I don’t understand it enough.

Really what I need is to work on a design and then pass the design to other people and discuss it and figure out how to make it better. I think really C++ causes me difficulty because it requires too much brain and memory activity. Like I often get into the problem where I’m in a tool, it calls a class, which calls another class, and then I need to find the class it’s derived from, and go up and down the hierarchy, and deeper and deeper — and then I forgot how I got to where I am and even why I’m there and what the problem I was trying to solve. That is, C++ is like a maze to me and many times I get lost in it. Does this make sense to people?

I wish… I wish there was some C++ forum or a way for me to improve my programming skills. Not sure if I should learn C++, or Java, or C#. CSS though is nice.

Plan for today is to continue learning… learning about RW and how to modify the theme to make a nice blog. I like learning and it seems no end to the things to learn. The only question is how to decide what to learn.

Yesterday was just getting things set up on blogspot, and figuring out how to add a calendar.

Tonight was to figure out themes in RapidWeaver and how to modify them — and using a combination of RapidWeaver and Microsoft Expression Web. As it’s all php based, I also installed Wampserver, just so I can view the pages locally. It took me a while to even figure out how to copy the built-in themes out of RW, but I finally found a trial version of a program to do it for me. And then I did some goggle searches and figured out some basic CSS. CSS has always been a mystery to me, but then I discovered it’s really quite basic — especially when I see the example that RW is using in it’s template. It’s just a matter of learning it’s syntax and keywords.

Ahhh, but wait a second. The themes I copied out were not showing up in RW. Strange, a couple restarts and they showed up. But I also learned how to change the theme name inside the package too. Not to hard to figure all this out. Really I feel good doing this, learning, and solving problems. I’m really a programmer and proud of it.

And it gave me a great sense of satisfaction — changing a theme to do what I want it to do. Like I didn’t like that the theme was using the same colour image for both the rollover and after clicking. There’s a certain simple design I’m looking for, and it’s great that I can figure out how to modify an existing theme so that I can get it more to the look I want.

Feel excited, learning all this. Oh… BTW, I finally gave in and bought Aperture 2.0 for $165. Don’t tell Mia. But it’s really something I want and need to use for my photography studio — to help organize my photos. I haven’t had much time to play with the demo yet — and the 30 days trial is finishing soon.

Anyway.. this trip is too fast, as I’m almost at my stop now… I think really I will get to like RapidWeaver and the concept of changing a template to change the look and feel of the whole site. It’s a great idea, to separate the content from the design this way. Database driven sites also can work this way — but it seems to make more sense to build the pages automatically using a tool like RW… build the pages statically… At least it will make it easier for search engines to index my site too.

Ok… now at home… time to sleep… good night my love… sweet dreams… my love.

Love,

All I want to do is to make a blog site — very simple design. And have a calendar for navigation, for that is the type of navigation I like best myself. I don’t want long pages that scroll on and on. A blog page should be like a page in a book.

I like blogspot, for I figured out how to have a calendar on it last night. At least rapidBlog here inside of RW maintains the blogspot site, so I don’t lose anything there. It posts all my entries there. I’m thinking it also posts it to my website as well. And all that is fine and nice. I just wish it would also have a calendar for navigation as well. Maybe I can figure out how to put the same javascript that created the calendar inside my RW theme as well?

Blogging is something I want to be very easy to do — and I like RW, for it makes it easy. BUT, I don’t like the website it ends up creating. The website seems very slow to navigate. And it’s not very smooth — a lot of flashing when changing pages.

Today I want to look more at what type of builds, see if I can modify the theme, see if I can figure out why it’s slow to load the site and clean it up, or, failing all else, look into another application like Microsoft Expression Web, as I downloaded the trial last week. I still hate that Microsoft charges a 30% markup because I live in Canada. I can buy Expression Studio upgrade for $350, but as soon as I tell them I live in Canada, the price shoots up to over $460. Still, I can buy it from Ebay for a little bit cheaper… $320 plus shipping for upgrade.

But really I want to use RW, for it has a lot of nice features, plus it runs on my MacBook. Expression Web is only for Windows. Plus my website is hosted on a linux platform. I would need to switch over to a Windows server to take advantage of many window centric enhancements in Expression Web, right?

I’ve been struggling for many years to get a website up — finally, I’m just going to do it. Any pointers?

Again, this is my plan:

• Continue learning about RW and try my best to use it.
• Figure out how to modify the RW theme.
• Figure out why the RW themes seem so slow and not very smooth to load/traverse the pages.
• Figure out how to add my blogspot calendar into my RW theme, either by moving the Javascript code over, or by embedding the external site inside of RW. Embedding is always a choice, but it won’t be as clean an integration, and won’t allow me to preview the site remotely.
• Add statcounter code to my theme/blogspot page, so I know if anyone is even reading what I write.
• And more so than the past, instead of writing rambling journal entries that go flow from thought to thought, write more focused entries, but still entries that flow from one to the next. Should be easy when using RW, for it’s very easy to create new journal entries… just push a + key and start typing.

Ok… a plan and a todo list. I like plans. In my work, the best days are when I stay focused and organized by making a plan and todo list for that day.

Bye for now, my love. I’m on the 504 streetcar right now, almost arriving at my work. You know, if you examine all my entries, once my blog is more complete that is, you will have a very good idea of who I am and what my life is like. And that is the reason for my blog… but I like to call it more an online journal, or simply my journal. It will show you the journey my life is taking. That is also the reason for my website name: NudeRiver.com — sharing my life’s journey, completely nude, open, and honest…

Love,

How to format things nicely though?? I like working with html or something that allows things like bullet points and simple formatting. And at least some spell checking.

• Ahhh… cool… RapidWeaver can do bullet points

What about spell checking?? Yupe, it can do that too. And add links too. I’m just hoping it manages to preserve my calendar template I set up on blogspot tonight. I wonder if I can modify it somehow to have a similar calendar too?

Now, I have to go back and edit and add in some of my older posts that I just stored locally here.

But also, I want my posts to each be a concise and meaningful topic. For I know people don’t like to read long and rambling posts that go on and on. People are lazy after-all. I need to have short topics that say something. And then not to be afraid to just create a new posting whenever there is a topic change.

Ok… new topic… deer

Love,