My daughter has been sick with a persistent cough that has kept all of us awake at night. After getting about four hours sleep, she woke us up. After my wife finally got her asleep, I was still awake. Every time I dozed off, I immediately woke up. I kept thinking about my Tai Chi school and what I need to do to get it rolling.
Lately, I've been struggling with what I need to do. When I was laid off over a year ago, my plan was to take on project work because I wanted to be my own boss. It never materialized like I wanted it too. When I got my certification to teach Tai Chi in February, I started to plan my Tai Chi school.
I was trying to find a new twitter widget for Blogger to show my Twitter updates. The one I'm using now, which is the same that is included in WordPress as well, is plain and boring looking. I came across a new widget from Twitter. Not only did they update the look of the original widget, but they added a new widget to show updates based on search criteria!
You can find the new widgets here: http://twitter.com/goodies/widgets
I tried the new widget on this blog, and it didn't look quite right. The header was too tall and the updates didn't scroll properly. So I had to revert to the original.
I tried the new widget on my Rivyoohoo site and it looks great. There are a few parameters that you can modify. The author of the widget Dustin Diaz has a blog post that explains some of these options.
Showing twitter updates based on search criteria is really cool. I can't wait to find a place to use that functionality.
Twitter also updated the widgets for Facebook and Myspace.
If you need to revert to the old widgets, you can find them here: http://twitter.com/badges.
For the 6 readers and 1 friend (I had 7 readers, but one dropped out, probably because I post too much :-)), you may have noticed a slight change in how my blog posts are displayed. I've been doing a lot of work in WordPress lately for several projects. One of the things I really like about WordPress is the ability to show an excerpt on the main page with a link to read more. This helps to keep the main page clean (as long as you don't overload the sidebars with widgets).Blogger does not support this feature natively. By editing the HTML of your template and some optional "magic" tags in each post, you can mimic the excerpt functionality. This isn't for the faint of heart and requires some technical skill. I found the following post very helpful:http://webupd8.blogspot.com/2009/04/blogger-read-more-post-summaries-fix.html
To get it to work properly, I had to translate the & tags to the proper character.
My daughter starts school next week and my thoughts (as incoherent as they are) turn to what I'll do with all the "free" time I'll have. Since being laid off last year (exactly one year tomorrow), I've spent most of my days taking care of my daughter, surfing the web, making lunch, doing the laundry, helping my wife with the technical side of her jewelry business, looking for freelance projects and starting up my Tai Chi school I suppose my days won't change too much, except my daughter won't be here, but they do need to change.
The other day, a friend and I were talking about how life can drastically be changed by things that can happen on a lazy Tuesday afternoon. We were talking about things with global implications such as a hurricane hitting Florida, two countries going to war, those newsworthy stories that can affect a large population. They usually happen on a lazy Tuesday afternoon when nobody expects them, when we're busy enjoying the sunshine, out shopping, or sleeping in. Those things can happen to us at a personal level as well. Those events that can change the direction of our life forever.
Note: I was asked to write an article for The Peaceful Dragon newsletter. I've reprinted the article here for posterity.
Earlier this year, my daughter (who was three at the time) and I were having an argument about the cleanliness of her room. She was adamant about not wanting to clean her room because she couldn't. I was adamant about her cleaning her room because she should. Either way, it ended in tears (hers, not mine) and her storming into my office declaring, "I want a new Papa!" and then storming off to the living room to cry. I guess her room was too messy. Moments later, she comes back to my office still sobbing. I looked at her and asked, "Do you still want a new Papa?" She looked at me and between the sobs she said, "No, he would be just as difficult." I was stunned and I almost fell out of my chair in hysterical laughter. I asked her to repeat herself to make sure I heard correctly and so that I wouldn't make her cry further by laughing at her. I'm not sure if I was stunned because she didn't want me to be her Papa or that I was being taught a life lesson by a three year old. Probably a bit of both. I got over the former (she has told my wife that she wants a new Mama), but I'm still stunned (and impressed) over the latter.
My daughter has been sick with a persistent cough that has kept all of us awake at night. After getting about four hours sleep, she woke us up. After my wife finally got her asleep, I was still awake. Every time I dozed off, I immediately woke up. I kept thinking about my Tai Chi school and what I need to do to get it rolling.
