Posted by Raul on February 27, 2010
It is somehow crazy; just a couple of days ago I was posting a thought about loosing the technology we count on everyday and this morning I learned about the earthquake that hit my country, Chile.
Fortunately all friends and family back there seems to be OK and getting themselves together after the disaster; only broken stuff in homes but homes still standing.
But there were those who weren’t so lucky; all the destruction and the death toll that is still unclear. I hope for a quick re-organization and a very small number of death and wounded people.
Earthquakes are a common occurrence in Chile due to its geography; this is a portion of the text found on Wikipedia about my country:
“The northern two-thirds of Chile lie on top of the telluric Nazca Plate, which, moving eastward about ten centimeters a year, is forcing its way under the continental plate of South America. This movement has resulted in the formation of the Peru-Chile Trench, which lies beyond a narrow band of coastal waters off the northern two-thirds of the country. The trench is about 150 km (93 mi) wide and averages about 5,000 m (16,404 ft) in depth. At its deepest point, just north of the port of Antofagasta, it plunges to 8,066 m (26,463 ft). Although the ocean’s surface obscures this fact, most of Chile lies at the edge of a profound precipice.
The same telluric displacements that created the Peru-Chile Trench make the country highly prone to earthquakes. During the twentieth century, Chile has been struck by twenty-eight major earthquakes, all with a force greater than 6.9 on the Richter scale. The strongest of these occurred in 1906 (registering an estimated 8.4 on the Richter scale) and in Valdivia 1960 (reaching 9.5).”
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Chile
This latest earthquake is said to have reached 8.8 in the Richter scale, and although lots of information can be found already in the internet, still there’s lots of work to be done to visualize the real situation and the amount of damage created.
For now, our thoughts and feelings are with those who didn’t make it, those suffering this occurrence and our wishes for a quick reorganization and back to a normal life.
Raul
Posted by Raul on February 8, 2010
It is amazing how “Dumb Person Friendly” is the version 2.9.1 of WP.
After upgrading I spent lots of time adding plugins like a madman (it is fun!). The ventilation fan in my laptop was screaming: “stop it you bastard!”
Since many plugins can be installed just clicking “Install” I tried several just to see what they can do; of course not all of them worked and some even fooled around with the pages moving things as they pleased, so I had to deactivate and delete the big majority of them.
Others had to be installed using Filezilla, so I kept uploading more to the plugging folder. At some point, when opening Filezilla for the “n” time I swear there was a message saying:
“You again?”
“C’mon be nice and upload this one for me, please?”
Still many had to be completed by adding html text in the header.php, sidebar.php, etc, so I spent lots of time with the “Copy and Paste”; update; checking the site to see what happened; going back to change the position of the added script; updating; back to see what happened again, etc.
Throughout this experimentation I learned some basics about the strange language of html ( <p>; </p>; </div>; <h2>; </h2> ), so now the need arises to investigate more about these curious coding systems (html, css, php, etc.)
Definitely Barbara’s idea (Blogging Without A Blog) of using a Test Site is a must. The first four days it was just trying things in this site so to learn how the whole system works, at least enough to know what to do, then on Friday came the time to implement everything in the real blog and it definitely went a lot smoother thanks to the previous experimentation.
So I changed the green color of the header with a picture; used the publicity space in the sidebars for pictures and text; added 400 pluggins (I already told you), etc, and all with a cost of zero dollars using a free Theme and plugins, half a bottle of Aleve for headaches and six gallons of coffee.
It is somehow funny that the Theme that best suited my preferences is called “Bible Scholar” considering that I use it for an “Alien Ghost” blog (Amen!)
Even though the process of updating is completed I still need to keep tinkering with a couple of things here and there, but now I could tell new bloggers:
“I remember the times when we had to upload plugins manually”
“Yes grandpa, you already told us”
So my hopes are that now this blog becomes less “hacker friendly” and more interactive, where people can be “seen” if they take the time to contribute a comment.
It is funny when you think that the mysteries of the universe (or at least the mysteries of computers) little by little and with lots of work can be slowly being deciphered and understood if you are willing to take the challenge and the work that implies to learn them, even if it is the basics.
“Not having enough money to outsource everything is a wonderful thing”
Raul
Posted by Raul on January 29, 2010
The time has come for me to do some upgrading to this blog.
I want to add several elements like gravatars and CommentLuv in the comment section; a list of the people commenting at the right hand of the page, etc, but it seems that the WP version I’m using is too old and tired for that (2.6.1) and also the Theme seems to be too simple for such luxuries, so I’ll be following Barbara’s advice (from http://bloggingwithoutablog.com) and create a test site to experiment for a couple of days before getting into the updating process.
Hopefully, starting this Monday, February 01 and to Friday 05, the whole process would be completed, so there’ll be no posting for that week to dedicate all the time to deal with this infernal computer technology.
Think of it as if, for those of you that don’t have a clue about cars, are going to rebuild the engine with just a bunch of hand tools, no knowledge and/or experience, and using information obtained from Google…there’s going to be bleeding hands and tears!
Fortunately, since this process is about typing and clicking, I doubt there’ll be any bleeding at all, but I’m not so sure about the tears!
So wish me luck and we’ll see what happens, and if you have any advice about this process, it’ll be much appreciated.
Raul
Posted by Raul on November 19, 2009
The short version:
I’m crazy!
The long version:
For some, still unknown reason, I was born very weak and spent the first seven years of my life mostly in bed, with an average of only three months on my feet, with high fever that led to seizures that looked very close to epilepsy and made me have hallucinations.
Series of ninety injections in three months (three times a day), repeated two or three times a year, kept me in an almost permanent state of being “high”
Because of this condition, I spent a good deal of time thinking and imagining things, based on my hallucinations and trying to figure out how it would be “out there” while laying in bed too weak to move.
By the age of five my father taught me how to read and write (in Spanish) so I could start going to school to first grade (there was no kindergarten at that time in that small town) and with it, the opportunity for me to write my thoughts and things from my imagination.
I remember lying in my bed trying to figure out how to create artificial gravity in space and coming to the conclusion of a giant rotating cylinder with everything inside attached to the inner walls, after my father explained me what centrifugal force was. But I didn’t know how to kick a ball with my feet!
When finally I got better (by the age of eight) and became able to go to school normally, and have the chance to participate, I found myself unable to do that, mostly because I couldn’t understand the behavior of other kids.
The solution to that problem became (or at least that’s what I thought) to start reading books about human behavior so to understand other kids and being able to act like them, to be part of them.
Wrong! The more I learned about human nature, the bigger the distance.
So the following seven years, and after trying more and more to be like other kids, finally when reaching my fifteenth birthday I decide that I was born to be “abnormal” and accepted that condition, hence Alien Ghost was born.
Then the reading of human psychology books became a joy instead of a task and the observations of people’s behavior turned into a hobby rather than a necessity to be able to participate.
So you see, Alien Ghost is mostly a reflection of my own personality and now, after many years on this planet, I’ve decided to start a blog as a way to put this thoughts and questions in writing for people to read.
So why Alien Ghost?
Alien is the reflection of feeling different, misadjusted, not being part of the group, the people around, the system. It is the one that doesn’t pertain even if is one of the same.
Ghost is the reflection of standing there but not being seen by others, being present but occult at plain view in the same room. It is the one that walks around without being perceived by others.
Alien Ghost is then the one that never felt part of the whole, the one that was always different and distant, the one that observes and analyses standing there but not being perceived by the rest, the others, the normal ones.
So a problem becomes a possibility, a difference becomes an advantage, the inability to participate turns into an opportunity to observe and analyze, and now the electronic age the communication channel to offer a lifetime of observations from a different angle and conclusions based on a different perception of the same common elements for everybody else.
Alien Ghost is a different, alternative vision, a different perspective of the same situations with a new perception.
And who knows, maybe I’ll find some people who share the same thoughts and we can become a “herd of abnormal ones” having fun looking at this world with different eyes.
Raul
Posted by Raul on November 18, 2009
Definitely computer technology is not my strongest point! It’s been several weeks of work just to get this blog up and running mostly because of the different aspects to deal with.
It is about finding the theme that applies better to what I want to show and the way I want to show it so it’ll reflect not only the content but also the “personality”
Also is about tinkering with little details like implementing a contact form for people to send me emails; I know it is just a pluggin that it is pretty much straight forward to install, but when you have no clue on what you are doing (like me) then a thousand mistakes can and will happen along the process, many times forcing you to delete everything and start all over again!
Then it is about implementing the different pages and their content, the kind and size of letter and the color you want to use, and every time something is changed, everything changes in the page and I can here myself saying “What?? How did that happened!?”
For many of you out there, especially young people, probably all of this stuff is really simple and straight forward, but for someone like me that got into a computer just a couple of years ago, and spent most of that time using the computer just to read emails and keep the family pictures, everything about starting a blog is new and sort of a giant task.
Talking about technology, I wrote all my notes, observations and short tales in Spanish from previous years in my computer so to keep them in a more manageable way and discarded the paper to save room; and to make sure everything was safe I made a copy in an external hard drive just in case, but some time ago my laptop crashed and required a change of hard drive, so all the writings there were lost.
No problem, I have a copy in that external hard drive!
After the laptop was repaired and running again I went to plug the external hard drive to copy all the writings back to my laptop and guess what, it didn’t turn on!
I tried the external hard drive in my son’s computer and nope, nothing happened… the external hard drive is crashed too!
So more than twenty years of writings; about 20 Gigabytes of words were lost in time and space!
I was depressed for about a week!
Well…I guess it can be taken as a motivation to learn this computer technology a little more…and have 10 external hard drives just in case!
Anyway, since the tinkering with the blog is mostly done, the time has come to start pouring some content so I hope you’ll enjoy what I’ll be posting the next couple of days.
Raul
