I got this for my birthday… I am so thankful and I feel incredibly blessed. Thank you Cam, Sean, Caleb, Mike, Terri, Kelly and Cory!
I also got this from Caleb who thought of it all on his own!
Holly, Shane, Sara and Scott got me some great running clothes and my mom bought my ticket to the Jars of Clay concert next weekend. I am still trying to choose between a camera bag or eye cream (I am 31 now, you know! Wrinkles are imminent.) from G&G Thomson. What more could a girl ask for?! I feel very loved.
It’s no big surprise to anyone who knows Sean and Caleb well that they are HUGE Bon Jovi fans. When they discovered that Rock Band had “Dead or Alive” on it they were stoked!
We don’t have Rock Band (hence the video below) but Uncle Cory generously shares his. The boys are missing him today so….this one’s for you Cory!
I am using a new version of wordpress and I forgot to enable comments when I posted this. Comments are now enabled– so feel free to leave us or the boys a message. I had a couple emailed to me so I am posting them here:
Sara & Scott well we just watched the boys rock out to dead or alive, and wanted to leave a comment, but it said the discussion was “closed” anyway, here is our comment, scott says bon jovi rocks, but not as hard as sean and caleb, and he thinks they did the song justice!
sara thinks we have future rock stars on our hands. I love all the expressions and feeling you get from them!! what handsome boys. very fun!
loves! Carmen Sonny and I were CRACKING up watching Sean and Caleb lip sing to Dead or Alive - WAY TOO FUNNY!!! LOL…
Cam and I are changing the look of this site a bit. It will be a slow process I’m sure (you know the saying about the cobbler’s kids having no shoes…). Anyway, for now check out the most recent Flickr photo set in the right margin!
I also thought I’d send out mad props (she’ll hate that I used that phrase) to Betsy for the cool new banner image she made for the site. I loved it and thought I’d bring it to everyone’s attention.
Feel free to compliment her handiwork similarly! ;-P
Just a quick heads up. I (Cam) launched a new blog, which I’m calling Cameron Avenue (you’ll see why when you get there) over at cameronwatters.com. It’s mostly focused around technology and consists largely of quotes/links to stuff other places. I’m looking to write something original around once a week, but none of it will be family-ish stuff. It’ll mostly be about the business of software and technology with some politics and religion thrown in if/when I run out of other stuff to say.
My birthday’s coming up (May 26th, for those not in the know), so I thought it would be a good time to start posting things that are on my “wishlist”.
I should point out that many of these things aren’t practical birthday gifts, and I’m not posting them as gift suggestions. Birthdays do, however, involve gifts, so I was in that “what stuff do I want” mindset.
Feel free to complain or compliment in the comments.
UPDATE:
The original version of this design was refined based on suggestions and feedback from my lovely wife, Betsy. This version is much nicer to look at, and she deserves much of the credit.
Heh. As recently as a week a go, a search for “Cameron Watters” (without quotes) returned this site as the top result and according to the Google toolbar I had a PageRank of four. Now I have a page rank of zero and I’ve been relegated to page four of the results. I guess I don’t care THAT much, but it seems to be stupid that every comment I’ve ever left on any site with more juice is considered a more relevant result for a search of my name. Eight of the top ten results are references to my person, typically my signature on comments that I’ve left on other sites or mailing list archives.
Too bad there’s no way to find out what happened (at least not that I could find). Seems odd though, that my rank would go from 4 to 0 in a matter of one crawl. Oh well.
Cam has been encouraging me to participate more in the development of this site so I have been working with him to update the “about” page. The photos and text were two years old. When you have little kids a lot of changes take place in that time span. This last year has been full of developmental milestones for both the boys. After reading The Well-Trained Mind last spring we decided to home school our boys.
They started school this last fall, Sean in first grade and Caleb in Kindergarten. It has been so rewarding for me and feels like such a privilege to be able to watch them absorb new concepts and ideas like little sponges. They are so eager and enthusiastic about learning. There have definitely been challenging moments throughout the year, but overall it has been my absolute pleasure to participate in their education in such a primary way. The idea of home schooling is somewhat daunting before you begin to investigate what resources and curriculums are available. The Well-Trained Mind suggests a lot of really good curriculum options.
Now that I think about it, it’s about time to start looking ahead to next fall and what curriculum we will choose for Sean for the second grade. At some point I’ll post what we have covered this year and my impressions of the curriculum we chose, as well as what we decide to use for next year.
Taking a look at the traffic stats for the last couple of months, it appears the camels continue to dominate. In fact, they garner a little more than 20% of all traffic to the site. Aside from variations on “humping” and “camels humping” (the top two strings respectively), the second most frequently used search string to get here is “death of a moth” which takes them to this paper which I wrote in high school. It also represents a low point in my academic career as it is simply an enhanced version of an essay that Betsy had written for the same class and same instructor the previous year. She got a B. I got an A-.
Interestingly, this site is the top Google search result for at least two strings: Cameron Watters (somewhat obvious) and Brian Rollo (not so obvious). I really appreciate the fact that one of the results for Brian is a comment that he posted telling me I am good in bed. Maybe if I link his name, Brian Rollo to the website for his pool hall, I’ll stop being the #1 result.
O.K. I’m experimenting with a wider version of the layout to see if I like it. My gut says the narrower one was better, but this may grow on me.
For those that are curious about such things, with the new banner image being three panes wide, and with 37 images to choose from, there are now 7770 possible combinations of photos and 46620 possible unique banners.
Hey, I completely changed the look of the site and nobody said anything. Is it better? Worse. Equally as crappy?
Other than bugs that I don’t know about, this redesign is complete. I hope to add some new images to the banner rotation, but other than that, I think I’m happy with this (and hope to be for a long, long time).
UPDATE: Apparently WordPress doesn’t deal well with un-escaped question marks in the title, so this post wouldn’t accept comments. I’ve now fixed it.
UPDATE: There are now 34 different images in the banner rotation (2 images used to generate the banner), so there are 561 possible image combinations, but there are actually twice as many different possible banner images that can be generated (as the same two images can be displayed in two different orders). More photos coming all the time.
Ok, I think I’m gonna stick with this. Based on some feedback, I halved the height of the banner graphic. Also, look for the photos in the banner to start rotating in the near future. The image is being generated on the fly with PHP. My intent is to build up a collection of appropriately sized photos and have them randomly selected to create the banner image. Right now there are only two images, so we’ll have to see how that works out. There are also a few pages that haven’t been completely updated to the new look. I’m kindof lazy about my website, so it might take a little bit, but it shouldn’t be too terrible in the mean time.
Comments on the changes are welcome.
I’ve got quite a backlog of things to write about. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get it out of the way quickly–and sooner rather than later.
UPDATE:
Looks like the comments screens are totally screwed up. I’ll work on that.
If you’re seeing what looks like an incomplete design from time to time, that’s just me testing out some design revisions. Sorry that you’re all seeing it (all 5 of you, anyway), but I’m too lame to actually set up a test environment just to test different themes. Anyway, I’ll try and wrap up this weekend.
I’ve also got some things to write about my trip to Mexico, check fraud and more!
UPDATE:
For the record, if the sidebar is on the left hand side, you’re looking at the current, soon to be former, design. The new design places the sidebar on the right hand side.
I’ve added the next ten entries in my Netflix queue just below the archives in the sidebar on the left. Now you can all see what I’m about to be watching. I may eventually add a section for what I’ve just finished watching, as well but right now I’ve got to get home.
So far this month, the most popular page on this site is this paper that I wrote in high school. That’s boring, but what is interesting is that in the last two months, this post is quickly rising to the top of the list. In fact, due to said post, the search term via which most people reach this site is some variant of “humping camels”.
I can’t imagine this site is what those searching for such things had in mind.
UPDATE:
The camels have now taken a commanding lead (nearly double the next most popular post). I wonder how many other people looking for porn I can get to come (no pun intended) to my site erroneously…
I fixed the archive pages today. WordPress has this setting labeled “Show Most Recent” that you can use to limit the amount of content per page. This is great, except that it applies not just to the front page, but to every page, including the archives. I prefer my archives to simply list all posts that meet the particular archive criteria (daily/weekly/monthly/yearly/category/etc.).
Here’s a link to my posting in the WordPress forums about the specific changes I made to force my archive pages to ignore WordPress’s “Show Most Recent” setting.
There are a number of other things that could be set similarly to enable other template specific limits on the displayed posts. Hopefully they’ll be better documented someday.
I think I’ve got all of the old links working. A little mod_rewrite magic and fixing the slugs for all of my old posts in WordPress seems to have done the trick. I’ve also imported a couple other things from MovableType, which should be the final items. I’m really liking WordPress and just how easy it is to use. I’m going to need to find a bookmarklet and I might experiment with the e-mail posting as well.
It’s going on three months again since I last posted. In an effort to re-inspire myself, I’ve freshened up the layout of the site and migrated the site to Wordpress. Initially, I’m somewhat impressed. I definitely like the admin tools more than MT 2.6. I also like the no-refresh.
I’ve deleted a few of the more meaningless posts and I’m still working on getting my old permalinks to work. I guess there isn’t much point calling them a permalink if they’re always changing. Anyway…
I’m also evaluating online photo hosting services. I’ve looked at Flickr and smugmug and I signed up for a free Flickr account. I think I’ll try them out for a while and see how I like it.
So I’ve completed the initial stages of the redesign. I’m sure I’ll continue to tweak it as time goes on. The primary goals were to give the pages a little more definition as well as a more flexible page layout. In the future, I imagined that I’d want the flexibility to add various “features” to the site, and this allows me to do that without having to redesign again for a long time. Granted, I’m not a professional designer and I tend to favor “boxy” layouts.
A little bit of restructuring has occurred as well. Although the index page points to the blog index currently, I’ve laid the groundwork for having a homepage that isn’t the blog’s front page. More re-organization will likely come as I continue to adapt my MovableType installation (2.6, not 3.0) to my preferred blogging style.
I tried a few other blog systems and I just didn’t like any of them. Maybe I’ll jump on the WordPress bandwagon someday, but for now, I’ll stick with what works. While there remain a couple of nice-to-have features that I’m currently lacking w/ MT 2.6, all in all it is a good product that continues to get the job done.
Now, hopefully, I’ll be able to focus more on generating content and less on the actually layout/software I use to maintain it.
Not that anyone was wondering, but I’ve fixed the problem with comments. That’s what I get for renaming a directory and forgetting to change the form action.
I’ve made a couple of changes. Removed all of the political entries. No particular reason, but I figure, if I’m not going to stay current, and I’m not going to write compelling opinion pieces, why post political items?
Anyway, baseball season starts soon (Go Mariners!). Maybe I’ll be inspired to write about that. I’ve been so busy of late that it’s hard to find the time to write anything worth posting. I’ve also discovered that the three “readers” I appeared to have were just bots spoofing IE anyway, so it isn’t like I’m being missed.
I’m still working on getting some of my older essays from high school, etc. posted in the writings section. While the writing style is a bit more plain, some of it was pretty interesting for me to read. I’ll probably edit them a bit to try to make them flow better if I can.
O.K., so I’ve been trying this blogging thing for a little while, trying to settle into a rhythm. I think I’ve decided that I’m not necessarily much of a breaking news/current events blogger. I’m sure I could do a decent job at it if I had the time, but it seems that I’m only able to post right around twice a week at the moment.
I’ll still post interesting items to the links list in the little box on the front page, but I don’t have the time or energy to update daily. That’s also not my writing style or preference. I prefer to write longer, more-reasoned pieces than the kind of quick hits that I’ve been writing.
On that note, I recently dug up some of my older writings from eight or nine years ago and I thought I might post them on the site. Much of it is probably dreck, but I thought it’d be fun to put up there. They’re all from high school or my one year at the University of Washington. Some of them are from literature classes and some just aren’t very good. That’s O.K. It’s an interesting thing to look at.
I’d also like to begin the process of writing more personal items about interesting or pivotal moments in my life. So, the three of you that appear to be reading, stay tuned!
Ok, I’m nearly done with the infrastructure changes to this site. The original design sucked. This might not be too much better, but it’s better. I’ve just got a little bit more of the static content to finish up and then I’ll spend any time I have for the site composing original content. That could be good or bad.
The Grand Re-Opening of h2os.org is currently scheduled for February 1st, a.k.a Super Bowl Sunday. Hopefully, I’ll have an opportunity to blog the game live.
Although I don’t have any readers, I feel somewhat obliged to post a quick update about the changes I’ve recently made to this site. I wouldn’t want GoogleBot to feel unappreciated!
So, first of all, I’ve completed (for now anyway) the “about” page. In the future I’ll link my resume and an informal career history from that page.
Additionally, I’ve enabled comments & trackbacks. I used a trick that I saw in Mark Pilgrim’s Moveable Type Templates that combines comments & trackbacks using the Simple Comments plugin for MoveableType.
UPDATE (2004-01-14): I had to tweak some things to get trackbacks to work. In mt.cfg I’ve set my CGIPath to an https:// path because I prefer to edit my blog using a secure connection. Well, the library that trackback uses doesn’t appear to support https:// URLs. Because I continue to want to manage and edit my blog over a secure connection, I had to manually override the path that is used to create trackback URLs in MT. Right now, that change is pretty ugly. I wonder, though, whether or not this is a feature that MT could add relatively easily…maybe I should just code it right and send Six Apart the patch…
Ok, so I’ve finally put something up on this site. I think I’ve had the domain for nearly three years and nothing substantial has ever been hosted here (for those that might be curious, h2os is a really lame pun of sorts on my last name).
I’m using Moveable Type to maintain the site. As time goes on, I’ll enable things like comments, trackbacks, and I’ll try to resolve any issues with the design or functionality as I go along. I’ve tried a number of times to sit down and set up an entire site all at once, but I don’t really ever have the time to finish it, so I give up. This time, I just put SOMETHING up and I’ll let it evolve over time.
Credit Where Credit is Due
I used Mark Pilgrim’s MT templates to help me better understand the template system and my options. I didn’t actually use any of his templates verbatim, just as a reference.
The simple layout was inspired by John Gruber’s Daring Fireball and, slightly less so, Dave Winer’s Scripting News. I should point out, however, that I had the layout concept developed BEFORE Dave redesigned Scriping News. I just liked the photo-as-a-banner idea.
Speaking of the photo used for the site’s banner, thanks much to Doug Ford for allowing me to use his work on my site.
Anyway, content will continue to come, slowly at first as I spend some of my time working on the site’s structure & features.
I should point out that many of these things aren’t practical birthday gifts, and I’m not posting them as gift suggestions. Birthdays do, however, involve gifts, so I was in that “what stuff do I want” mindset.
They started school this last fall, Sean in first grade and Caleb in Kindergarten. It has been so rewarding for me and feels like such a privilege to be able to watch them absorb new concepts and ideas like little sponges. They are so eager and enthusiastic about learning. There have definitely been challenging moments throughout the year, but overall it has been my absolute pleasure to participate in their education in such a primary way. The idea of home schooling is somewhat daunting before you begin to investigate what resources and curriculums are available. The Well-Trained Mind suggests a lot of really good curriculum options. 
The Eleventh Hour
See the Morning
Roots
Furthermore: From the Studio, From the Stage
Vintage Jesus: Timeless Answers to Timely Questions (Relit Theology)
Jesus: 90 Days With the One and Only (Personal Reflections)
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome
The Phantom Tollbooth