Tag Archives: media

Stanley, ID

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Yet another photo from my midlife crisis road trip.

I rolled into Stanley, ID one day on the second half of my trip. I’d started the day in McCall, ID, and would end it in Sheridan, MT. According to my notes, I drove 452 miles that day. It was one of the longest driving days of the trip.

Stanley, IDI was immediately struck by the beauty of Stanley. It was a nice, small town with the Salmon River running through it. The Sawtooth Mountains bordered the area to the southwest, the direction I’d come from.

Stanley has an airport, which I was quick to check out. Unfortunately, the elevation there is 6403. Although that’s fine for operations in my helicopter at less than max gross weight, heavy loads at high temperatures affect performance at that altitude. It would limit my capabilities. And, after all, the whole reason for my trip was to find a summer (or year round) place to live and operate my business. Stanley, although beautiful, was not the answer.

I took this picture as I was heading out of town. I stopped alongside the road, got out of the car, and pointed the camera back toward town. Down along the river, two people were riding by on horseback with a pair of dogs. The drive so far that day had been very refreshing, following one mountain stream or river after another. Although I didn’t know it then, in less than 3 days I’d be back in the desert, missing all that flowing water.

Breakwater at Rockland

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Another scenic view in Maine.

Breakwater at RocklandI couldn’t remember where this photo was taken, either. I knew it was in Maine and I knew I’d taken it on one of our outings with John and Lorna. So I e-mailed Lorna a copy of the image and asked her. The response came back almost immediately: Samoset Resort in Rockland, ME.

I remembered the drive to the parking area clearly — past the resort grounds to a shady lot with several dozen cars already parked. We walked from the lot to the water’s edge where this long, stone breakwater awaited us. There were people on the rock wall, walking in either direction. I managed to get a shot where you couldn’t see any of them.

The rocks were huge and placed precisely. It was an amazing feat of engineering — at least I think so. The surface was smooth enough for a vehicle to drive on it — maybe even a mountain bike with fat tires. But you did have to pay attention while walking on it. One wrong step could mean a badly twisted ankle.

Rockland Lighthouse, MaineYou also can’t see the building at the end of breakwater about a mile from where this photo was taken. Here it is. It was a lighthouse and apparently still functions as one. But it’s closed to the public, so you can just walk around it or onto its stone steps. We spent some time sitting out in the sun, watching the boats go by. It was a peaceful, relaxing place. There was some fog in the trees on the other side of the channel — the same fog we’d walked through earlier in the day when visiting the Owl’s Head Lighthouse. (Did I get that one right, Lorna?)

John and LornaI took this photo of John and Lorna on the way back to the car. John’s not an easy guy to get a picture of. It seem like every time you tell him to stand still and pose for a picture, he acts like he doesn’t believe someone’s really going to take his picture. So you have to take a few of them in a row for one of them to come out natural enough to use. This one gets them both.

Blogger or Writer? Not Both?

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An article and podcast from a former blogger.

I listened to the podcast first. It was in my iPod after updating yesterday, among the other Slate Magazine Podcasts. Its title sent a chill down my spine, “Stop Blogging, Start Writing.”

But the interview with the author left me with the sneaking suspicion that her “last entry” was just an attempt to get some publicity. She sounded like a giggly airhead. She admitted that she had trouble “following up” with potential assignments. Hell, she claims she’d been contacted by “several” New York publishers interested in books, yet she’d managed to come away without a single contract. Not much of a professional writer, if you ask me. Any unknown who sits around waiting for a publisher to play the ball for her doesn’t deserve to succeed as a writer.

Good things may come to those who wait, but book contracts don’t.

Still, the idea of blogging taking up too much creative juice, leaving nothing for other writing, remains with me. I looked up the article that led to the podcast interview:

“Why I shut down my blog” by Sarah Hepola. She seems to echo many of my sentiments, but spoils the piece with her last sentence:

Now, if I could just turn off the TV, I think I could finally get started.

Blogging and television? No wonder she doesn’t have any time to write! Or maybe that was some kind of joke? Ha-ha?

I don’t think that author will stay away from blogging for long. It’s rather addictive — at least I think so. Something interesting happens to you and you want to write it up in your blog, partially to remember it and partially to share it with others. You learn something new, something that could help others and you want to share it in your blog. You have a deep thought or a revelation of major importance and you want to shout it out in your blog pages to see if anyone else agrees or wants to argue with you about it.

But I do agree that blogging sucks something out of a person. That something isn’t lost, though. It’s just stored away for the future.

Gravatars Update

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I’m having second thoughts about that gravatar feature.

Last Saturday, I added a gravatar feature to this site. As I discussed in this article, the gravatar image for anyone who had one would automatically appear when they wrote a comment on this site. Just a kind of cool and funky way to add more personality to the site. Not that we get so many comments here.

On Saturday, I also submitted my own gravatar for rating and approval. And I’m still waiting for it to be approved.

Now in this day and age, we’re all pretty accustomed to immediate gratification. You apply for something online — a new account to access a Web site, etc. — and you get an e-mail message with approval within minutes. This is commonplace. So the fact that I’ve been waiting five days for a perfectly acceptable photo (G rated, I assure you) to get approved makes me wonder how serious the folks at gravatar.com are about this system they set up.

I was over on the site and it appears to be the work of a single very talented but very busy person. He’s working on Gravatar 2.0 (whatever that is) and asked for volunteers to help him rate and approve new submissions. Over 100 people volunteered, including me. I offered up to an hour a week until he was caught up. I didn’t get any reply.

The forums are a mess of extremely frustrated new users (like me) who have been waiting to use the feature. Some of them claim they’re embarrassed because they set up the feature on their sites and they’re one of the few people who don’t yet have a gravatar. I don’t feel that way. I don’t expect most of the visitors here to have one. But I am anxious to see if I implemented it correctly and the only way to do that is to see a comment from someone — like me — who has a gravatar.

Part of me urges those of you who are interested to go to gravatar.com, apply for a free account, and submit an image. Then kindly remind the management there, in the forums, that you’re waiting. Maybe that’ll put a fire under their butts and they’ll use some of those volunteers to rate and approve all the gravatars in the queue.

The other part of me says forget about it. Maybe it was just a bad idea.

I’ve always had a problem with patience. Maybe this is a test.

In any case, I’ll let you know when my gravatar appears so you can see how it’s implemented on this site. I’ll probably write an article about it for WordPress users, too. But first I need to make sure I got it right.

Time, apparently, may tell.