The Sacred Path

No, you’re not in the wrong place, The Sacred Path has gone shopping for a new look and i think I’ve found it. I haven’t even begun to explore all the possibilities with this theme, because well, it has more built-in options, bells and whistles than you can shake a stick at.

Over the next few weeks, you may see changes to the arrangement of the sidebars and more features will be rolled out as I get the time to explore them and decide what is useful and what is not.

Let me know what you think, good, bad or indifferent. All comments and suggestions will be warmly received.

I’ve been tagged by KatKMeanders! I knew it was only a matter of time till I got pulled into one of the blogging games. I ignored the signs, living recklessly, fast and loose. It caught up with me finally.

Here are the rules:

1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog
2. Share 7 facts about yourself
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blog
4. Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog

Seven facts about me:

1. I love Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream. I’ve been know to eat three pints of it in a week. I may go months without having any, but then the urge will hit and I’m off to the grocery store.
2. I hate brussels sprouts. It’s the only vegetable that I absolutely will not eat in any form, and no, I will not like your special secret recipe.
3. I love to drive fast and especially on twisty mountain roads (only when there is no traffic). Since I sold my twin-turbo Audi Quattro and bought my Prius, that thrill is gone. I used to love to mash the pedal to the floor at the beginning of a freeway on-ramp and watch the speedometer pass 100 mph before I reached the point where I merged into the freeway. I do like knowing that I’m putting less than a third the amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than when I was driving my Audi, and the fact that my fuel bill has dropped to less than a third what it was. Thrills of a different flavor.
4. My favorite movie is What Dreams May Come with Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Annabella Sciorra. I have the DVD and watch it probably four times a year.
5. I watch SouthPark. I won’t apologize for it. I find it extremely entertaining in a sarcastic, satirical, ironical sort of way. It’s one of the only TV shows I watch.
6. In 2000, I voted for Bush. Before his first term was half over I realized the consequences of my choice was going to be 1000 lifetimes of bad karma for me. When the last canoe leave planet earth, I’ll be standing on the shore waving goodbye. Please make it a little easier on me and take your trash with you so I have less cleaning up and rebuilding to do. Thanks in advance.
7. I like my cat Sidney better than some people I meet. He is what he is with no masks, no deceptions, no illusions, no delusions.

Not to choose seven victims. FrankDeMarco , you have been tagged. BreathingEasy , you have been tagged. MuseEditions, you have been tagged. Thistimethisspace , you have been tagged. Lettershometoyou , you have been tagged. Terraflora , you have been tagged. Theartistsopinion , you have been tagged. Ode2Food , you have been tagged.

If you realized that the nurtured spiritual part of yourself would accompany you on your eternal journey and that everything that you have labored so hard to accumulate would vanish the instant you depart this world, would it alter your daily agenda? - Walter Cooper

I help out a little in the WordPress.com technical support forums answering questions and helping with problems where I can. It’s an interesting experience and I find joy in being able to help people out. A lot of it is simply answering the same questions over and over. The search functions in the frequently asked questions (FAQ) and forums leaves a little (OK, more like a lot) to be desired, but a good portion of people don’t even attempt to search, they just type in a (many times cryptic) question and hit the submit button. Some of us (volunteers all) that help out have files we keep on our desktop with answers to questions asked frequently and with links to FAQ’s and answers that already exist. With questions we have an answer for in our file, we just copy and paste. No sense describing (inventing) the wheel over and over again.

A small portion of the posts are frantic and thick with drama, in effect saying, “my blog is my life and if this problem or that isn’t solved this moment, my life is over.” Panic, fear, stress, doom! One such case lately has to do with a bug in the Akismet spam filter used at wordpress.com. The bug, according to WordPress staff is ellusive and they have not been able to track it down. Since 92% of the comments made on blogs are spam, disabling it is not really an option (some blogs get over 4,000 spams a day), and because the software used at WordPress.com is multiuser, it would be difficult to give us each the option to turn it off on our individual blogs. There are a number of us caught up in this bug (don’t really know how many) that are not able to review all the comments caught by Akismet so we cannot tell if it is catching legitimate comments or not (apparently for some it is). A problem to be sure, but is it really the end of your world?

I took care of this by putting an explanation of the problem on my “Contact/Comments” page, so if you make a comment and your comment doesn’t show up within a day or two at the most, use my contact page and I’ll manually add your comment for you until such time as WordPress solves the problem.

Continue Reading »