It's been a good run but after four and a half years of nearly daily posts chronicling everything from my time at library school to the birth of my son to dozens of single link posts to all manner of technology stories and silly YouTube videos, the time has come to finally move this blog to a newer, snappier location.
This will likely be my last ever post at this particular URL and although my content will remain for the foreseeable future (see below), I'll likely also turn off comments in a week or two.
I've always loved the lists so let's stick a couple last ones here...
ADVANTAGE OF MOVING MY BLOG
1. Puts me on one of the leading blogging platforms on the Internet with all the advantages that provides in terms of timely development, a wide range of plug-ins and an established community.
2. The new site will be much more mobile friendly to both view and post from. It will also make it easier to incorporate other current technologies - those that currently exist and yet to come.
3. It will also have much better spam protection from what I understand. I wasn't getting a lot on this blog but enough that it was irritating to keep cleaning up comments linking to shady Australian vacation sites and so on. I also had to turn off trackbacks as that was unmanageable.
4. I think I finally resolved the issue with occasional outages that hit this blog about three times in four years as my site traffic grew but I still never liked being with a host that would shut down your site when you went over without any warning. I also got in the habit of doing a "CTRL-A, CTRL-C" before trying to do any post as I never knew when my current server was going to timeout on me.
5. Gives me a simpler, easier-to-remember domain that I now own and can take with me from host to host (as opposed to the current one which I rent and which was tied to this provider)
DISADVANTAGES OF MOVING MY BLOG
1. Since I'm currently on a non-standard platform, there's no easy way (at least that I've found) to import all my previous posts from this blog to my new one. So that history will stay here (my current host tells me there are no plans to end support for this blogging software. So as long as I keep my current jason@hammond.net e-mail address with them - which I plan to do - I'll still have my blog here at no additional cost) but won't be part of my new blog.
2. It's going to take awhile to get everything set-up the way I want on my new blog (I've got to remember that my current blog reflects four year's worth of tweaks and improvements) and though I've worked on WordPress a few times in the past, there will still be a bit of a learning curve now that it's my main platform.
3. It'll probably take awhile to re-build whatever credibility Google and other sites have given my blog over my four years of posting, gaining and trading links with other sites and so on.
4. It's a pain in the butt for you because you have to update your bookmarks, links to this site and RSS feeds (http://www.headtale.com/feed should do it.) Thanks in advance for taking a moment to do so!
(I'll stop at four because it's pretty clear that the advantages outnumber the disadvantages.)
The paint's still drying and I've got a few things to add and tweak but I'm excited to get in there and start building up my new history. So I encourage you to visit:
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Monday, August 9
The blog is dead. Long live the blog!
by
Jason
on Mon 09 Aug 2010 05:17 PM CST
Saturday, August 7
Saturday Snap - An Old Fashioned Country Fair
by
Jason
on Sat 07 Aug 2010 11:13 PM CST
A couple weeks ago on my birthday weekend, we went camping at Nickle Lake which is a regional park just outside of Weyburn where Shea's parents have a seasonal camping site.
My parents came down with their camper as well (surprising Shea's folks which is an ongoing back and forth contest between them.) On the Saturday, we all drove out to Creelman which is Shea's hometown ("population: 50 if nobody died that day" as my slightly insensitive but oh so true joke. Oops, looking at that Wikipedia entry, the populations's actually 81. My mistake!) for their annual Agricultural Fair. The Weyburn Review was out taking photos of the day's activities and though Pace didn't make the paper, he (along with the rest of the not-as-cutes in his family) did make their online gallery (see photo 15 for the shot of our crew plus a couple that Shea went to school with and their kids at the parade). There are some other familiar faces in the gallery - Shea's aunt is in photo 21 for example. And my favourite is photo 12 from the infamous "pig scramble" which we almost got Pace to enter but he changed his mind right after going into the pig pen.) I thought about putting some video I took of the pig scramble on YouTube but I'd hate to be the person responsible for getting it shut down by PETA or whichever animal rights group monitors these things. I did come across this photo on some random photo site which actually looks like Pace's cousin who *did* win $25 in one of the heats! So if you don't click through to that gallery to see me wearing a very sexy bush jacket, consider this your Saturday Snap of the week...  Friday, August 6
Friday Fun Link - 15 Most Addictive Web Sites Ever
by
Jason
on Fri 06 Aug 2010 07:30 PM CST
Thursday, August 5
Minority Opinion
by
Jason
on Thu 05 Aug 2010 11:02 PM CST
A couple recent posts talking about extended breastfeeding got me thinking about the many minority opinions and beliefs I hold.
Here's what I came up with... 1. Extended Breastfeeding - Not even 20% of Canadian babies make it to nine months let alone past a year (or two!) 2. Atheism - anywhere between 16-30% of the population depending on which study you look at. (And actually, this is only a minority compared to *all* religions. There are actually more atheists/agnostics/nonbelievers than all but one major religion.) 3. Socialism - 18% of the popular vote in the last federal election. 4. (Male) Librarian - this isn't a "belief" per se but men are about 17% of the profession (though also over-represented in senior management positions.) 5. Polygamist - just seeing if you're still paying attention.  6. Reader - More than half the people surveyed in the US a couple years ago read only 4 books a year on average. A quarter said they'd read zero. 7. I'm a Mac = 3.6% (Really? That seems low.) 8. Firefox = 23% (but losing ground to Chrome) 9. 3% for that "M" in MLIS (though this is also the fastest growing level of educational attainment. Master's degrees are the new BA's - which were in turn, were once the new high school diploma. ) Also with all the StatsCan hub-bub, I'm more aware than ever before just exactly how often I come across and/or use their statistics in my day-to-day life. I always say this but if you try to look at it without any political considerations, how could anyone honestly think that doing away with the mandatory long form census is a good idea? (The breadth of the negative reaction across all sectors is a pretty big clue that the Cons fucked up but good.) 10. Flames Fan - 3-5% (slightly biased poll though as it asks "Which is Canada's team?" rather than something like "Which NHL team has the most fans?") Wednesday, August 4
"Our Bodies" & Kids As Couch Potatoes
by
Jason
on Wed 04 Aug 2010 09:28 PM CST
The controversial traveling show "Our Bodies" is at Regina's Science Centre right now and they're offering a lecture series each week to go with the topic. This week's subject was "Kids As Couch Potatoes" and that seemed fairly relevant to our lives these days so we decided to go check it out.
Some random thoughts on both... - I'm not sure what I expected but the exhibit didn't blow me away. I even wondered if we were getting the full show or if we got a bit of a mini-version being a smaller centre. (My memory of hearing about it when it played Toronto while in library school was that tickets were like $50 or $75 or something. Here, I think it's $20 and we got a discount for coming on lecture night.) - the lecture revealed that kid watching TV is...bad! (Who'd a thunk it?) But still an informative talk with lots of good information and statistics (now where do those come from?) - also lots of information about our society's less-than-active lifestyles - kids *and* parents - which are obviously closely linked. - Shea and I both know we let Pace watch too much TV (and here I'll sound like that smart but not too smart friend from a recent blog post who happily used a sample size of one to show that formula feeding ain't that bad) but I watched a lot of TV growing up and I feel like I turned out okay. In fact, you rarely hear people (outside of the TV industry I guess) citing some of the benefits of watching television - it gives you cultural literacy and I'd argue a better awareness of our commonality than perhaps any other medium, it gives you visual literacy, it helps you in social situations, it can help you win money on TV game shows (okay, now I'm stretching and my arguments are collapsing in on themselves too!) - speaking of breastfeeding, again that idea that extended breastfeeding doesn't get the promotion it deserves is all over the place when you're looking for it. The lecturer pointed out that UNICEF recommends six months of breastfeeding and I felt Shea tense, knowing she wanted to scream out "two years!" (They're both right - UNICEF recommends six months of *exclusive* breastfeeding but for that to be sustained for two years. But the point - why wouldn't a PhD in children's health studies take this opportunity to promote breastfeeding for the longer length of time in a crowd with lots of parents and families present?) - Then, in the "fetal" part of the exhibit (not as bad as it sounds but they had it curtained off with an additional warning notice), they had one sign talking about SIDS which listed some of the contributing factors - pre-mature birth, drug & alcohol dependency in the mother, etc. But of course no mention that not being breastfed is now considered just as much of a potential cause of SIDS as those other things. - Lots of the controversy around the exhibit is about the exhibition of human bodies for what is, in essence, entertainment (edutainment?) There is also some concern from the religious angle which, as an atheist, I can nicely ignore. Much more worrisome is the uncertainty about how the bodies were obtained and what sort of consents (if any) were in place. I mean, I've got my signed organ donor card in my wallet. But no similar document can or has been produced for these specimens who are suspected to possibly be executed Chinese criminals or worse (body trafficking?) - our regular babysitter got her license recently and that's probably a clue that we'll be looking for a new babysitter soon. She's already gotten a job at a local bakery but says she'll still do some babysitting...at least for the time being. Man, where did the last couple years go? Tuesday, August 3
"Build loyalty & increased engagement through ongoing conversation and brand experience."
by
Jason
on Tue 03 Aug 2010 05:36 PM CST
Monday, August 2
Music Monday - "From the corner of my eye/A hint of blue in the black sky/A ray of hope, a beam of light/An end to thirty years of night"
by
Jason
on Mon 02 Aug 2010 10:00 PM CST
[Oops, forgot I pre-loaded this Music Monday post after coming across the song in a MetaFilter thread last week. So, combined with the post below, you get a 2-for-1 on the Music Monday posts this week!]
Inspired by a wonderfully thorough MetaFilter post, I'll highlight a song some fans call the most beautiful song in the world...
Music Monday - "When your infant starts to nurse/Oxytocin's released from the brain with a burst" (Happy World Breastfeeding Week!)
by
Jason
on Mon 02 Aug 2010 08:14 PM CST
It's World Breastfeeding Week so here's a song, written by a nursing student, about the subject.
I don't usually do a long narrative for my Music Monday posts but I'm got to say that I'm so amazingly proud of Shea for the dedication she put into breastfeeding Pace for over two and a half years - never spending more than 24 hours away from him in all that time (actually, she might not have done so to this day!) Breastfeeding (and especially extended breastfeeding) is one of those things in life that you feel like you can't talk up because it's (sadly) such a minority position. Shea once mentioned to a friend that part of the reason we haven't had a second child yet is that it's so draining to do extended breastfeeding and she feels like she's just finished doing it for our first child even though he was now three. "Well, you don't *have* to do it that long" the friend responded. Now this friend wasn't one of those new mothers who leaves their freshly hatched baby with the grandparents when the baby's three (weeks, not years!  ) to go on a jaunt to Vegas. In fact, she's fairly "crunchy" (eg.
hippy-esque) in most ways. But still that suspicion of extended
breastfeeding comes through when you hear comments like that - even from
people who you'd expect to be a bit more open-minded.Another friend who's otherwise extremely intelligent brought out the "I was formula fed and I turned out okay" argument. True, this person is smart but apparently not smart enough to recognize that a sample size of one is statistically invalid!  Anyhow, I didn't mean this to be a rant (and I'm very aware that's how many "lactivists" are thought of within larger society. Or should I say, that's how they're portrayed. There are some very powerful corporations and special interests who stand to benefit greatly by marginalizing breastfeeding and making it shameful.) But one of the ways that Shea's influenced me is by making me an even bigger believer in breastfeeding than I hope I would have otherwise become. (It's not something I probably thought a lot about before getting married and having kids. But I'm pretty sure I would've been a breastfeeding believer on some level - if for no other reason than the common sense science of it. Hmm, something the human body has evolved over thousands of years as the perfect food to give a newborn every advantage or...a powder made in a factory?) We happened to just watch *Grown-Ups* the other night (thanks to the staffer at "Live with Regis & Kelly" who put it out as a torrent!  ) and one of the running jokes was that one character's wife is still breastfeeding their child at four years old. "Oh well, at least extended breastfeeding is getting some publicity?" I said to Shea.On the other end of the pop culture spectrum from Adam Sandler fart and poop movies is the supermodel Gisele who is a proud breastfeeding advocate, saying it helped her regain her figure after giving birth and if she could, she would make it law that new mothers have to breastfeed for a minimum of six months. (Yes, I know all the arguments about "My milk didn't come in - I had to bottle feed" or "My baby just refused to latch so I had to bottle feed" but that's a whole other post for some other time.) So anyhow, given a choice between a supermodel and Sandler, I know who I'd pick! Sunday, August 1
Au revoir, la france
by
Jason
on Sun 01 Aug 2010 09:32 PM CST
Edmonton writer and columnist, Todd Babiak, has just posted the last in a year-long series of columns about his family's sabbatical in France.
Having gone with his wife and two young girls, some of his thoughts on the experiences we (try to) give our children were particularly resonate for me (though I have no one year sabbaticals on the horizon...unfortunately!) The full series of columns is available on his Edmonton Journal page. Saturday, July 31
Saturday Snap - We Haven't Done Recycling In Awhile...
by
Jason
on Sat 31 Jul 2010 08:26 PM CST
I'm not sure how often we take can & bottle recycling but it's usually once we get about 4-5 bags. This time, we had more like a dozen!
(We also love when the local soccer/hockey team comes by on bottle drives as they often feel like they've hit the jackpot when they hit our house - we usually just give them whatever we've had built up!)  |
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