John Hattaway » site maintenance

a couple-a things

smokingpen — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 10:49:44 +0000

First, I was up all night and not at work. The up all night is so that I sleep during the day and am at work tonight. Not exactly a cakewalk to not go to work… well, I did go to work and was there for about an hour when a problem I have started acting up en force and I was sent home. I would go into details, but no one (including myself) wants to hear about them.

Other than that, I started the massive project of taking all of the CD’s Erin has and all of the CD’s I have and combining them by ripping them into iTunes. Truth told, it is not glamorous and other than surfing the web and watching TV shows on Hulu.com, it wasn’t all that interesting either.

Also, I watched Bedtime Stories and thought it was both cute and worth watching, which is not something I can (or will) say about Adam Sandler movies in general. Frequently, his movies are fun and funny, but often on the other side of the fence from family friendly in my opinion. This one was very good.

Finally, for those who are interested, I’ve updated /story/ with Cassandra West and the Mage of El Paso and Cassandra West and De-Evolution. De-Evolution is actually the short version of Cassandra West and the Cave of Charles Darwin, but I couldn’t find the longer version until I went looking for the full version of Mage of El Paso and then discovered that I’d sent both to a professor during the semester I came up with this character as a protagonist, the result is that the full version of Cave of Charles Darwin will be uploaded (probably) when I get some more time off. Feel free to read and enjoy, though – like Finding Jack Mulvaney – Mage of El Paso is a might long, though still technically a short story.

And to top all of that, it occurred to me as I was looking at /story/ that seeing the links was not inherently easy. Truth told, most links on most websites are marked differently entirely so people can see where they are at. What you will note (possibly only because I am pointing it out) is that the non-visited links on my website are now blue, the visited ones are some shade of purple or pink or whatever. Anyway, this will make it easier for people to see what they are meant to be following.

As always, enjoy the fruits of my labors. Finding Jack Mulvaney (due to content) is still a you have to register story. All of the others are free to read and peruse. Which reminds me, I need to post a copyright on those pages sooner rather than later.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

Real Heroes Fly

New Top Level Page

smokingpen — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:18:37 +0000

I create a new page, you should be able to see it in the links at the top of the site. This is my todo’s page. Now that I’ve put that up I am thinking of recreating the calendar for the website… though, honestly, there isn’t as much going on in my life now that I am no longer a college student. Things like that happen. Regardless, you can check out what I am working on. What needs doing and such. I will try to add planned completion dates and will definitely add completed on dates when I get around to it.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

Real Heroes Fly

Broken Theme

smokingpen — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:01:40 +0000

The theme just broke. I upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 to see if it was easier to use and to make sure I could help wife, mother, mother-in-law, and etc. on problems that arise. Wordpress 2.7 has about five hundred thousand automatic update features and as a result the links and look and calendar and other aspects of my online life are no longer working the way I want them to.

What all of THIS means is that I was planning on changing themes anyway and after some sleep (oh blessed sleeo that I have missed for about 32 hours and counting now) may make the change and alter it so it reflects what I need it to show.

Oh well… time will tell. Since I need sleep and food and am going out of town for somewhere between fourteen and eighteen hours tomorrow and have to study and fall into packing mode very quickly, it may take me a few days to get things fixed.

Though I will admit that the look and feel of the new backend is nice and I sense that it will need some patch updates in the very near future even though, for at least two months, the development team has been announcing they are running it through a variety of release and beta candidates.

The feature I like the most, shutting off the blog and news updates from Wordpress development and from Wordpress plugins.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

Real Heroes Fly

What this does not mean…

smokingpen — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:34:16 +0000

I find myself occupied in ways that (sometimes) don’t include updating my website. Which is not entirely true as I am constantly thinking about what to write here and according to Erin have only started more and more rather than stabilizing the length of what I am writing. Truth told, I am more into the essay than the short sub-300 word blog entry and as a result, the time involved in writing is pretty big compared to what other people may do. And, as I’ve stated before (though not necessarily on this blog) people should not try to write blogs the way I have chosen to write them mostly because, if you are using this medium as one for record keeping and sharing and to write because you write every day, then trying to write thousands of words rather than hundreds or dozens of words is pretty daunting. In short, write what interests you. Stop when you are done. And ignore what I am doing.

What am I doing?

Well, yesterday (or maybe the day before) I moved around some pages and made them sub-pages in the blog. Specifically, if you are interested in finding out why StandingWater Creations no longer exists as the domain and why you ended up here rather than there, I moved that description to http://www.johnhattaway.com/about/sw-c/. If you landed her because of In Order to Write and are wondering why I made that move, I moved that page (wink, wink) to http://www.johnhattaway.com/about/IOTW/. On top of both of those, I also added a contact me page at http://www.johnhattaway.com/about/contact/ where you can fill in some information, copy the CAPTCHA script, and send me an email without having to open anything more than this website.

What I am doing is working, mostly, on school and spending time with Erin and codename: CAMPER. On the school front, I have less than one month before we head east. That is becoming exciting and scary. Because it is one month left, I have a lot of work to finalize before the end of the semester to include a lot more reading and a lot of writing. As a result, when I sometimes sit down to write about Kung Fu Panda or All the Pretty Horses or Wall-E or a lot of other things I don’t finish those thoughts as a result of having more pressing things sitting on my mind. This afternoon/evening I get to write a proposal for a paper I still have to write, and I get to continue outlining a play, and I get to study for a test I get to take tomorrow. As a result, if you don’t hear from me for a couple of days at a time, don’t think I am suddenly following the pattern of most bloggers and deciding not to blog anymore, but that I am legitimatly busy and am working on what I need to be.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

Real Heroes Fly

site page maintenance

smokingpen — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 02:13:47 +0000

What you might have noticed is that I have created some pages for this website. Some reasons for that is because it’s easy to create (and delete) pages through Wordpress. Also, because I am collapsing my websites into this one, there is some need (legacy) for pages that describe what things were meant to be. As such, sw-c.com and In Order to Write. When my main site was run through Movable Type making pages was a bit more complicated and creating posts or changing the way the site looked required rebuilding the entire site and all of the posts and pages. Heck, even when I changed the links I have to rebuild the entire website. This was not a detractor, merely a time-consuming process.

The outcome is that I have created a Story page. Here I will post stories that I’ve written. I am hoping, in some cases, that this will be a place for either reprints of what has been published or essentially the “reject pile” of stories that were not accepted. I will probably post (pretty soon) the Darwin and Cassandra West short I did for the dreaded science class.

Immediately, I will probably post the first dozen or so pages of Finding Jack Mulvaney a possible MFA-Writing submission story. When I do this (I am still working on aspects and need to see what the submission guidelines are again, more to length) I will be posting with the intent of receiving feedback. I will post stating that I am looking for that.

At the moment, Story is open to all, nothing is there but it’s open. However, and I am not certain at what level it will become necessary, but people will have to register to view stories. Registering for this site will not be mandatory. Registering to view stories will be mandatory. I know, confusing. However, it is through the registered user that I can track what is going on and regulate how things are viewed.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

Real Heroes Fly

Because I need to be doing other things

smokingpen — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 02:46:43 +0000

Well, it has been a weekend. The weekend started out Friday night with Erin and I taking turns staying up with codename: CAMPER. This has been going on for a couple of nights now. He doesn’t want to sleep. Well, he does want to sleep, he just wants to sleep on either Erin or I and most of the time he wants to sleep on me… though at the moment he is sleeping on Erin. Fun.

Actually, when I’ve gotten some free time I’ve been working through the oldest entries in my blog. This (too) is proving to be on the slightly more interesting side. Since I don’t really have a lot to say about life, the pursuit of happiness (or happyness, depeneding on where you are getting your spelling and what Will Smith movies you are watching), or even school, babies, wife, life, church, family, driving, or politics… actually, I have a lot to say about politics, but at the moment I will let those thoughts pass by.

However I am interested in tossing out some old entires. Specifically this one on pink. And if you liked that one, how about the follow-up? Granted, those are my (still) feelings on the color pink and people wearing it.

Then there was my entries on Borders. This one and this one and this one and this one. What was really interesting to me was getting to this point whilst working at Borders. Of course, this last entry has me in a situation where I am reviewing the need to find a new job as a result of going to the hospital and discovering that I would be responsible for the entirety of the bills.

Why did I go to the hospital? Well, guess what? I wrote about that too. Seems that back in 2004 I came down with a problem that I would eventually treat as though it was Celica Disease (and since I am not to those entries on my going back through the blog).

One of those things that I wrote about was the Chicken and the Egg. I proposed that the chicken and the egg evolved together and that one never existed without the other. What interests me, though, is that I also wrote on Darwin’s Theory of Evolution that in turn would lead to my actually paying attention in the dreaded science class where we discussed the evidence that showed the development of current man from a common ancestor with the apes… and that man and ape are only distantly related to each other. Wicked fun.

There are quite a few entries back in the first several months about my writing and what I wanted to do with it. This one and this one and this one all suggest what I was trying to accomplish. I am focused on writing and while driving last night (keeping in mind that I am slowly working through over 1000 blog entries) it occurred to me that I hadn’t bothered to try to get something published for over ten years. That really does need to change.

Beyond all of that, the journey back in time is a pretty interesting one. I am sure I will probably share more of these because the idea of going through all of the entries, adding categories (or removing categories) that are more appropriate, and fixing some things to include cross-referencing to other blog post, so that this blog is a lot more searchable to Google and other search engines and people in general.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

Real Heroes Fly

What you might have noticed

smokingpen — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:52:24 +0000

If you were intending to land at In Order to Write and found the URL reading http://www.johnhattaway.com/ then you are where you want and need to be. I have moved all of the IOTW posts over here (bringing my total number of posts well over 1000). This was rather easy… and took some back-end category manipulation. One of these days I will find a way to create a page that allows me to do category only posts. But then, I may still have to convince a friend to work through the process for me.

Regardless, all of the posts and most of the structure from IOTW has been moved to johnhattaway.com. Welcome. I will try to update more on writing and reading and book reviews. Granted, this will fall around my reading for class, but that is what makes all of this fun.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

Real Heroes Fly

Friday or When I Don’t Know What to Write

smokingpen — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:25:52 +0000

I’ve been working through some ideas on another post. This is something that I will post at some point between now and whenever I decide it is done. The reason for that is… I don’t really know. What I do know is that I am working through an idea that is relatively long and will probably only get longer. I might post it as a page. I may definitely create a required login for people to get to it (been wanting to limit access to various parts of the site for a while) with a required username and password (you can thank codename: CAMPER) that would also require individuals to create usernames and passwords and all to gain access to different materials. This should prove to be fun as I will also probably just (at least at first) allow people to create a username/password to access whatever. At some point in the future I will (most likely) limit access a la other people who have websites that have limited access. At present, this will not be page or post specific as I’ve not really cared for instances where I’ve seen that in other websites using similar or the same software.

What all of this boils down to (or distills as I’ve enjoyed using that when people ask what codename: CAMPER’s first name means or comes from) is that I think I am planning on moving this site in a slightly different direction. One of the elements that exist with this is that of the (nearly) 1000 posts and the definitely more than 1000 posts after I incorporate In Order to Write into this site. This is exciting since I also need to go through the original seven hundred or so entry’s and re-order the categories and links and stuff and other odds-n-ends and things that ultimately arrives at a streamlining of the website (me thinks and hopes).

Grand plans.

Grand plans that I may avoid as I have a tendency to not want to re-read my rantings and especially since what I’ve been doing for more than four years is writing rather long and (relatively) intricate entries on everything from movies to books to people to age to … everything. Yes. Everything. Okay, not everything. I seem to follow some rather interesting patterns. Honestly, I like the idea of having everything in the arsenal all in one place. One outcome is that I am interested in making sure this site is a bit more streamlined and accessible and more. Not sure what the more is, yet; but it’s still there.

And you know what, it will all prove to be fun. No. Not for you, for me.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

Real Heroes Fly

Manic Tuesday’s or not really

smokingpen — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:09:36 +0000

Well, it is officially Tuesday morning and since I rarely (these days) go to bed before midnight, and often well after, I have now seen Tuesday from a couple of different angles. Which, as everyone clearly knows, is absolutely imperative to having a clear and guided notion of what is going on in the world, life, and etc. With that said, Erin got to watch me leap out of bed late last night, over her, throwing the blankets and sheets off the bed, and racing out of the room when I heard a rather loud bang take place. First to babies room (Erin behind me) and then the rest of the house (Erin in babies room). A magnetic whiteboard/calendar we’d purchased fell off the refrigerator. I was almost immediately reminded of a couple of experiences in New Hampshire where instead of running or moving away from rather potential danger, I put myself between the danger and the individual I was with. In one instance it was, ostensibly, a large animal trying to scare us off; in another instance it was a truck that was driving erratically and far to fast for conditions and speed limit and area. In both cases, the individual I was with was moved out of the path and I placed myself in the immediate path, though with the ability to move out of the way if necessary. In the instance with the truck on the road in the nighttime (they were both at night, actually), I called the police after the man attempted to appologize for nearly killing us. Since I had his license plate number I called 911… as far as I know they never did anything about it even though Iw as assured that a police officer would be calling me about the incident. Honestly, since it’s been over three or four years since that happened and I’ve changed my phone number at least three times since then, I don’t think I am every going to get that phone call.

With that said, I had my American Lit since 1960 class this morning. I think, honestly, that people intentionally miss the nuance keys that authors place into stories and intentionally choose to be dense when it comes to what is actually happening. More, I think we often mis-represent and mis-understand what the elements of a story are confusing a story that might contain religious elements with a religiously centric story. Rather than discussing a short story that is by a Jewish author and, reasonably, covers a Jewish boy asking questions of his Rabbi as a story about a boy who is asking questions of an authority figure AND they happen to be Jewish we confuse that with a story about a group of people who are Jewish and one of them has a lot of questions he wants or needs answers to. And yes, I am being particularly nuanced in this area as I believe that there is a signficant and important different between telling a story and having it contain a certain kind of person or telling a story about a certain kind of person and having it contain specific elements. In truth, when discussing literature, talk should encompass more of the former and less of the latter; though the latter is informative when discussing author influence and what was intended by said author for the audience. It is important, in a story where you have the and they happen to be Jewish as an element in part because the author is drawing your attention to the nature of (in the case of the discussion) the kinds of questions coupled with the kinds of answers and the disparity between existing questions and the answers one might expect to hear in a given situation as opposed to the answers one might want.

Which leads to: Just because you are asking a question does not mean the person answering the question has to give you the answer you want.

And: Just because you may not be comfortable answering a question does not mean you have the right or lack the responsibility to answer the question in a way that is satisfactory to the person asking.

Fiction is meant to entertain, first, and inform second. Informing should be on the human condition, in some form or fashion, and by informing an audience should be given opportunities to see how things might be different if they are willing to look; but that same audience should walk away from the experience feeling they were entertained in some way. Not all fiction entertains all people in the same way. Because this is true, we have different kinds of fiction from general and literature to Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and others (Cowboy or Western and more). Each genre appeal to a different group; though, when an author does the job or writing well, singular pieces can transcend genre boundaries and end up becoming more than was realized. Regardless of case, fiction is first to entertain.

As I am talking about writing and fiction, and as I am in this mode, I am thinking that I may be taking “In Order to Write” (all of the domains), copying the posts, and adding them to johnhattaway.com and forwarding inordertowrite.com, inordertowrite.net, and inordertowrite.org to point here rather than to have a separate address. I am working on a new page (for this website) that will explain some of the personal logic used. However, the process does require some effort and it is that effort I need to work through before I leap into the process of making the change.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

Real Heroes Fly

Calendar Update

smokingpen — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:10:47 +0000

Hey all. I added a PAGE at the top of the website: Calendar. This is my new Google Calendar that will show people what I am doing in my life. Not sure how in-depth it will be since, truth told, I am using the Apple iCal on my computer which is, helter skelter, attached to my Entourage Calendar, which is attached to my cell phone; but if I can get all of these calendars to work together (or simply remember to update my Google Calendar and my phone calendar and forget the other two) than things will be a lot nicer.

You will note, however, that the calendar starts this week and moves forward. Not sure how much of the past I am going to add. Though, as I was considering it (and as I am becoming more and more an advocate for web apps that work as well as computer installed apps) I may add due dates for reading assignments, writing assignments, when tests are, when things are due, and when each of my finals are. I have added the two major holidays between now and the end of the year, halloween and hanukkah. Actually, I don’t know when hanukkah as it changes every year and is celebrated in part because of its proximity to Christmas. Regardless, I may update things and if people want to know what I am doing or what is occupying my time and why I am not as reachable as I could be (at least on a schedule) than they have access to this.

With all that said, if Erin determines that this proves to be too personal, well… then I may have to make changes or add password protection to the calendar. Though, that adds a lot of stress and responsibility on my wife who is busy baking a baby and as a result, I may just try to be more sensitive to her immediate needs in regard to what I am sharing online and respond accordingly. Granted, this entire paragraph may cause people to become anxious for all the wrong reasons and as a result… I should just move on.

Anyway, welcome to my world and my schedule.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

Real Heroes Fly