Category — Administriva

I’m officially behind a month on publishing my Project 365 photos. They are all shot and EXIF will validate the dates they were shot, I’ve just been busy with work and some other projects around the house. Oh, and the Brewers are playing again.

I’m hoping to plow through the backlog over the course of the next two weeks.

In other news, I may have found my publishing vehicle for creating a print version of this and the 2008 project. Instead of a book, I may go with a quarterly magazine, published via HP’s MagCloud. Stay tuned for more information.

If you subscribe to the feed you probably just saw a ton of new posts comes through.  Since I back date all of my Project 365 posts to corespond to the date they were taken on, they might now show up on the front page. I haven’t had a ton of time to process photos lately and fought with Photoshop most of the day.  For some reason, my color management got screwed up as such, pure red was showing as orange.  No amount of clicking through adjustments to my working space and proof setup got things the way they should be.  Someone gave me the tip that I have have a corrupt monitor profile (and made the comment without skipping a beat that Photoshop was comparing apples to oranges), so I went into the Vista control panel for color management and deleted the profile created by my color calibrater (a Pantone Huey).  I then re-ran the calibration, ensuring the lighting in the room was consistent through the whole measuring process, and bingo, red was red again and I was back to comparing apples to apples.

I’ve been slowly going through the past two weeks worth of photos I’ve shot.  I have a tendency to completely get away from the computer when I go on vacation, and the week I took off before Labor Day was no exception.  I’m caught up on Project 365 photo through September 4. If your reading this after the fact you might not notice, I back-date all the photo posts so they appear in the right order.

Yeah, I was on vacation last week. Just a quick shout out to anyone who has sent me a message (email, Facebook, etc,) this week.  I do plan on getting back to you, I’m just pretty slammed with stuff at home and work right now. I’m also going to have to edit images one of these days, since I am running out of space on my cards. I hope to be back up to speed by the end of the week.

I’m back from my long weekend in Vegas and trying to get back into the swing of things. Me and the misses had a blast, but suspending reality for even a weekend takes its toll and work has been a difficult adjustment.

Nothing happened that needed to "stay in Vegas," but a few highlights for those who care:

• Midwest Airlines switched our outbound plane to their charter plane that they flight sports teams like the Brewers and Bucks on. This meant there were chairs that faced each other with tables in between and more leg room than most 1st class seats. Extending my legs, I could just barely touch the seat in front of me.
• At the recommendation of several people, we saw Cirque du Soleil’s "O" at the Bellagio.  We would highly recommend it.
• We are not huge, high-rolling gamblers, but made our fair share of wagers and probably came out close to even for the whole trip.  The Brewers sweep of the Giants over the weekend was very good to me.
• We had an amazing lunch our last day at Enoteca San Marco at the Venetian. My first trip to a Mario Batali restaurant, and it did not disappoint.

I’ve got a ton of photos to process and will be posting as soon as I get some time.

It started innocently enough. 

Looking at my referral logs I saw someone found me via a Google France search for "Dysart." Anytime I see an inbound link like that I go look at the results. But not for the usual ego-surfing most people do.

I’m sort of a nut when it comes to my family name. It is uncommon enough that you don’t find it everyday, so when I do it’s sort of special. On the way back from my grandmother’s funeral in Northwestern Iowa, I drove almost an hour out of the way to go to Dysart, IA.  I have a t-shirt from Dysart’s Transportation, a trucking company in Bangor Maine as well as a cookbook from the truck stop that bears the same name. The only two "famous" Dysart’s I’ve come across are the actor Richard Dysart (who rose to fame in old westerns and later the TV show LA Law), and comic book writer, Joshua Dysart. I’ve never met either of them, nor am I probably related to them.

As far as the Google results, I think I was the fourth on the page (it wasn’t the first page), but two links above me were related to Dysart Castle near Kilkenny City in Ireland and the Dysart Music Festival near there there. Growing up, I’ve always been under the assumption that the Dysart name was Scottish, named for the small town of Dysart in Fife, Scottland.  This was probably through a Dysart family name book my parents got a long time ago through. This sort of put the possibility out there that the name could be Irish, which would have pleased my paternal grandmother to no end (her maiden name was Whalen and was 100% Irish heritage via family in New Brunswick Canada).

The whole thing got me interested in digging into the family name a bit more.  I sent an email to my Mom to see if she knew my paternal grandfather’s father name (there is a long story here, but I knew she’d know more readily than my father). Turns out his name was Royce Dysart and I got a Google hit on Ancestry.com for a census record of him living in Nicolet, MN (which I knew to be right).

That’s when I hit the pay-wall. Ancestry.com won’t cough-up the goods without a membership that costs about $12/mo when paid annually. Pretty steep for just a curiosity. So I left it at that, knowing I could find something if I really wanted to.

But it kept nagging me.

I saw Ancestry had a 14day trial and though what heck and signed up.  It didn’t take me long until I’d traced the family name via census records back six generations Joseph Dysart in Pensylvania who was born sometime around 1795.  That is where the trail goes cold.  Census records prior to 1840 only list the head of household’s name and number of people of certain ages.  There seem to be a lot of Joesph Dysarts (often spelled Dysert) from around that time that I cannot definitively tie to my family. Interesting enough is my lineage back to this point is all through first born sons.

Maybe with a bit more digging I can make some sort of connection, but still it was pretty crazy to go through the information Ancestry.com has.  The not only have digitized most government records related to genealogy, amost every record links back to a high-res scan of the original document.  Seeing the hand written census logs from 1840 listing my great-great-great-great grandfather’s house hold which included over $10k in land was pretty amazing to see (since in 1950, $10,199 would be a lot). I’m on the fence as to whether I’m going to cancel after the free trial – my wife got hooked and found a passenger manifest for one of her great grandparents, so there is definitely interest in flushing out the whole family tree.

Nonetheless, if you’ve read this far, thanks for humoring me, especially for my normal subscribers.  This post is squarely a post directed at Google in hopes of finding other Dysarts out there who share my weird obsession with the family name.  If you are or are not related to me and found this while looking up the name "Dysart", send me a quick message on the About page of the site. I’d love to hear from you.

I can’t recall how long I’ve subscribed to Brian Clark’s Copyblogger, but I’ve been a lurker there for a while. On a whim I entered his Twitter Writing contest and won a second honorable mention.  the contest?  Write a story in 140 characters or less. My entry was:

The priest at the funeral home asked if she had been a loving mother. The children all stared at each other. The silence spoke volumes. [original tweet]

For my honorable mention I get a signed copy of Hypnotic Writing from Joe Vitale. I’m actually looking forward to seeing it as I’ve never heard of the guy before.

It’s going to be a slow week around here – we’ve had a death in my wife’s family and we’ll be attending to family stuff for the next few days. I’ve every intention on keeping up on the photo project, but posting will be slow.

No plans for taking photos at the funeral mind you, but a question to the readers. A co-worker described the last funeral they were at where people were taking pictures with the deceased at the funeral home. Like, arm around the body, smile for the camera type pictures.

I realize different cultures grieve differently, but does this strike you as weird?

I finally got around to upgrading my WordPress installation, the dashboard had been nagging me for a few weeks. I also finally got wp-cache working after following the directions for getting it to work on IIS. It is not like I get a server crushing level of traffic here (though it still is fun to watch my traffic steadily climb), but it feels nice to be prepared.

I think the next step is to update the theme. Cutline has served me well, but quite frankly it seems a little played out lately. Everywhere you turn online you seem to run into it. As much as I’d love to roll my own, I think I’ll probably go with another pre-built theme. I just don’t have the time (if any of you reader out there have the inkling, send me an email on the about page. I’m not looking for anything fancy, just something clean.)

I’m also kicking around the idea of moving my photography site to WordPress. It currently is a simple static site I threw together fairly quickly, but I’m thinking WP will allow me to update it faster and keep it fresh. There, I might actually invest in a real theme, since its a business site. My budget isn’t huge, (we’re talking double-digits here), but again if your interested, drop me a line.

[Update: I'm seeing weird behavior in the Dashboard with wp-cache enable, namely it is caching dashboard pages, even though the plugin isn't supposed to. I'll have to look into that. Since I mainly post with Windows Live Writer, it should affect me too much.]

[Update #2:I stayed up way too late tweaking the site and settled on yet another Chris Pearson template, though I tweaked his 3 column design down to two. I'm pretty happy with it and will probably stick with it.]

Man, I was far behind on posting photos – two weeks to be exact. I’m finally caught up on my photo backlog, with all my Project 365 entries up, as well as all the vacation photos up on Flickr now.  If you’re really interested in seeing the later, add me as a contact on Flickr and I’ll friend you as I marked all the vacation photos private mainly as to not pollute my photostream with a ton of family pictures.

My note to myself?  Don’t get that far behind on your photo workflow again.