Slowly I’m updating this blog and getting all the old links and plug-ins back in line. I love the old theme I had but it didn’t have variable column widths and it broke just about every widget/plugin I put into the sidebar (or at least resulted in really messy formatting.) I’ve found a colorful variable theme, that I’m not quite sure about, but at least it lets me add my widgets easily. If you have a theme you like that you’d like to suggest please let me know. Next up: re-adding my blogroll.

Well I was quite pleased to find out that I could easily import all of my blogposts from blogspot with the comments. There is a little import tab in the administrative interface and it just works.

One of the reasons I was considering the switch over to a self hosted wordpress blog was so that I could actually respond to comments by some means other than just commenting (which as far as I could tell could not be subscribed to so you’d have to check back to see if I replied.)

Another reason was to try and come up with a way to sort my content a bit more by topic/category and allow users to just follow one thread or another if they prefer. I tend to dabble in a broad range of things and while it’s fine if you want to peek in on all of them I’d love to give people an easy way to follow just stories, just social media, just virtual worlds etc. We’ll see if my wordpress theme configuring skills are up to the task.

Now to fix up categories & tags and get various useful widgets like blogrolls and the like back where they belong.

Apparently when moving my domain name “preserve dns settings” didn’t mean what I thought.  Since things neede to be reset anyways, I figured now was a good time to move over to wordpress.  The previous content (and new content and theme) will be up over the next few days.  I appologize for the disappearance and dust that is still settling.

I have moved most of the Utterz off of this blog. If you would like to listen to my audio Utterz, mostly thoughts while I’m on the road., feel free to stop by my page on Utterz.

I have been tagged by Susan Reynolds to tell ya’ll 8 random things about me. So, with a bit of delay, here are 8 random things about me.

1. My Erdös number is 3. It helps when you work with your husband and his Erdös number is 2.

2. I have met and talked with Nadia Boulanger. She was an amazing lady, and I will always remember her telling the group that was chatting with her to remember “I will not be deflected from the pursuit of my goals.” She spoke of the challenges she had faced, and how important it is to not let someone else’s perception of limitation stand in the way of achieving your goals. I was probably 7 or 8 when I saw her.

3. I am an accidental ham. (And kosher too.) My husband decided to get his ham radio license, starting with the technician class license. I went along with him when he took his test. The folks there cajoled me into to taking the novice test. I hadn’t prepared but figured why not? I passed the novice written test. They gave me 15 minutes to review the study book my husband had brought in the car, and I took the technician test, but missed by two points. I came back next test round and passed the 5wpm Morse code test and the technician test and got my “ticket”. I later tested up to getting an advanced class license.

4. My Uncle works at Skywalker Ranch as a sound engineer and has worked as the road manager for Eddie Money and Santana (at different times).

5. I ride a motorcycle, a Honda Hawk with a custom paint job. The paint job looks stock (gunmetal gray) but if you looked carefully at the bike, instead of saying Honda in the requisite logo sites it has my first name in the same font. I also got my husband into motorcycling.

6. I graduated from the University of Liverpool, but I have spent less than 8 hours in Liverpool England. I attended through an online course coordinated with Laureate Education. I went to Liverpool for my graduation which had considerable Pomp and Circumstance.

7. I play clarinet. I was convinced to learn clarinet by a friend who told me our marching band needed “More marching bass clarinets.” At least she didn’t tell me we needed more marching harps. I started with bass clarinet but moved to the B-flat clarinet when they started up the orchestra for the King & I. I have played clarinet in the Tournament of Roses marching band and in the Youth Orchestra at Cal State LA (this was about 20 (gasp) years ago).

8. I grew up on a private girl’s school campus (Foxcroft School for girls) as a faculty kid. I learned gardening, Appalachian dulcimer, and horseback riding there, even though I never attended the school. (I was too young for most of my time there and chose to go to public school for the one year I could have attended.)

Now to pass the baton: I am inviting Jim Long, Jon Swanson, Bryan Villarin, Muhammad Mosa, Gruven Reuven, Kim M. Bayne, Clarence (DYKC), and Eric Rice to share 8 random things about themselves. I totally understand if this isn’t something you do on your blog, but I wanted to know more about you so I thought I’d let you know by passing along the theme.

Now I’ve recorded a bit of a video greeting on ustream and also embedded it on the page. It was amusing. I found recording a video hello as challenging as recording my outgoing message on an answering machine/voicemail box. For someone who was quite the dramatist as a child it is interesting finding myself a bit on the shy side.

In the mean time I was pondering podcasting my Chassidus class some Sunday morning, I wonder if I would be too self conscious and if it would work well in the first place. I suppose I could always try it once.

With all these great tools and portals and new thangs out there it seemed time to add a blog to the mix to tie in the twitters and the kyte.tv and the whatnot else. Maybe I’ll even have something to say. Right now this is more of a test platform to try out stuff but maybe it will become something more. You never know.