It Came From Outer Space…

There’s been a lot made lately in our community about medical coding training courses, one of my friends is actually taking some right now with the hopes that once she’s completed them she’ll be better qualified, having never worked because she’s spent the past six years raising her children she hasn’t any work experience and so isn’t appealing to potential employers, which is a huge problem especially with the way the economy is right now.

I’ve thought about going back to school several times but my problem as is often the case is trying to narrow down exactly what to do with myself. There are many different things that I’m interested in but a lot of them aren’t worth the expenditure for the end result, as was the case when I tried to do Graduate Studies in Information Services.

I’m trying to focus on things which would be easier to improve and can be done from home, working on each of the blogs in turn and changing things around so that they’re working at their peak and then also working slowly on bettering my actual writing techniques, which was meant to be the purpose of this particular blog in the first place.

I’m sorry to see that I’ve lost a lot of readers and subscribers over the past few days. My sites have been up and down for a little while but that should be over now as I’ve been able to get things sorted again, for the most part.

I’m still fixing the widgets and things, but I’d rather get all the sites back up that I can and then get the widgets sorted than play around with that right now, the feed subscription is back up and that’s the main thing as far as I’m concerned.

What happened is that on Friday a person in Sheffield initiated a scam of PayPal and to do so had hacked into one of my other domains using my password which they had somehow phished. My host is incredibly wonderful and incredibly on the ball (seriously you guys should ALL host with drak.net and tell them I sent you!) and had everything locked down within a few minutes, but that’s still meant that they had to lock all my sites down in case the person had been messing around in all of them and also that once they got me fixed I decided to take everything down and put it back up in pieces anyway because I’m paranoid like that and thought it would be a good time to weed out anything that was up on the server that probably shouldn’t have been because it was old, stale, and not being used (like my old Joomla installation).

Anyway I hope that I can regain my readership and breathe new life into everything like a Phoenix rising from the ashes of this disaster.

Thanks to those of you who’re sticking with me!

So, this blog is now officially It Came From Outer Space…. I think it’s an appropriate title on a number of levels.

I’ve always had a love of science, science fiction and fantasy. When I was younger if I wasn’t going to be an astronaut I was plotting careers living on biospheres on other planets or working on space stations. In fact the first story I started writing for myself and not for class was set on a spaceship that was traveling with colonists to different planets testing their live-ability.

While I’m not a huge fan of B-Movies they do hold a special place in my heart and in culture itself. My husband loves to watch them, and he and his father are often buying them for each other, and therefore we watch at least one on special family events. The latest batch of which are a batch of Harryhausen movies, and I was actually very pleased with some of the plot elements surrounding “20 Million Miles from Earth” and the poor creature from Venus that was rampaging around.

It may sound strange but when I write I try to bring realism into stories so the B-Movies tend to be a bit much for me. Realistic science-fiction probably sounds like an oxymoron but if you stay on this ship with me hopefully you’ll understand what I mean when I start posting some samples up.

I’m still trying to come up with a witty and appropriate title for a writing blog, but wouldn’t you know I have “writer’s block”. I thought about making that the title — but I don’t want to jinx myself any further.

I got the idea of using “Cat Among the Pigeons” but I don’t know that that’s really appropriate either. When I tried to do a “writing blog” before I had used “Ergo Writing” but naming the blog that feels like naming a ship the “Titanic”; it didn’t have good luck the first time why chance it again?

I wound up getting hung up on the space-y theme for the layout. All the rotating pictures are ones I made myself in Photoshop using brushes from Obsidian Dawn’s website. I do write a lot of science-fiction and fantasy based things so perhaps I’ll do something tied in with that.

“They Came from Outer Space…” it reminds me of the old B movies my husband and his father love to watch which I generally dislike because they’re so cliche–at the same time that’s a good reminder of how I don’t want to be–what I’m striving to move beyond, and yet at the same time honor because without things like “Attack of the 50 foot woman” or even the old “Star Trek” series (which has it’s cheesy cliche moments) we wouldn’t have the opportunities we have today in sci-fi those shows and movies paved the way and gave us some thing to dream about and strive towards. It was picking apart “Star Trek” which gave me the ideas of “Condor” which I started writing when I was 12 and intend to get finished now that I have a bit more world experience.

I’m going to give myself until this time tomorrow to get the title of this blog sorted out. If I’m going to write here, it needs to have a title. I’ve had too many blogs that are named for their domain and I really don’t like doing that. Titles are important. I wouldn’t be calling my first novel “Book About Spaceships”.

In the next few days I hope to do what I was hoping to do this week but my work schedule precluded it.

I’m going to officially close this site, as far as the business and tarot side of things go, and get everything over on to The Silver Path, which means that this blog will be on thesilverpath.net/blog. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to keep up with things a bit better once I adjust to my “out of the house” work schedule.

I also know that over the next few days we’re going to be putting up a reading special, though Kore will probably have more slots open than I will because she’ll be at the house more.

We’re hoping that just having a set “low price” for readings will be a little less intimidating for people than the “name your own price”. I think that tends to make people a bit nervous and unsure. They want to take advantage but they don’t want to be considered “shorting” their reader. So, hopefully this will enable people to get readings and us to open ourselves up to new clients.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen with this place. I’d thought I would be closing it, but I think instead I will just change the content around. I’ve had a separate blog for writing before–and it would be nice to work on my portfolio some more.

I’m always on the look out for a good deal on items that we need, whether it be packs of cheese or RAM for the computer I try to find the best product for the best price. In the past few weeks I’ve been looking at sale after sale, because our income is getting smaller and smaller whereas we still need to buy things, and in some cases we’re getting to the point where we have to replace things otherwise we’ll be out completely.

With all the computer problems we’ve been having recently I’ve been looking into purchasing a back up hard drive. Our computer itself only has a 160 GB hard drive, so a 1 TB back-up drive is more than enough, but when it’s at a good price it’s worth the extra space to save the money–where would be the point in buying a smaller hard drive for the same amount or just slightly less? I don’t see there being one. I had the same thought when I bought the RAM upgrade. There were 4 GB of RAM for under $50 so it made sense to do that rather than just buy a single stick for the same price.

Also with the 1 TB back up drive we can back up this computer, Kore’s computer and when we’re able to get the additional computer we need we can back up that one as well and have plenty of space.

My husband and I have been discussing the possibility of getting a new laptop for Yule. I have to rein myself in because I started browsing to see what sort of money we’d have to save up and was getting sucked in by specials and coupons and was ready to put something on credit. We don’t need another credit line right now. I can be patient.

They have all sorts of deals going on all the time. Most of the stores ask you to input your desired ROM and RAM and video card and if you want wireless or not, and then give you a list of various options that you can have whether it be Acer or Toshiba or something else. BestBuy.com actually has a laptop I was looking at for $300 less than Gateway itself BUT we don’t need the laptop right now…well, we do, but we don’t. I can get by just waiting until we’re back home from friend’s houses to type up readings I’ve been making notes on in the mean time, and I can wait until Yule for the benefits of another laptop, especially because it seems that Vista (which is all that a new laptop would have on it) will probably not be exactly compatible with my network. A friend’s suggested a MAC, which might be workable. It’s all about doing more research.

As my husband says it would be good to have the extra computer then I could do my work anywhere, and when I’m doing the graphic design work I could have it with me at friend’s house, or take it with me to client’s places and show them live mock-ups of their sites. Anyway…patience. I’m trying to teach it to my son I should learn to have more of it myself when it comes to shiny new technology.

Do you?
I changed my hair!

Well…actually a few weeks ago I did change my hair, but tonight I changed the layout of the site. I’m still tweaking some of the side bars and things a little bit, and I’m going to try and make things look a bit more professional over here.

We’ll see how well that goes.

My laptop has taken a dive again. I wish it was something simple like computer memory being the issue, but it’s not. I’ve replaced the power supply, or at least have an order in for one, but it seems like the monitors not working either. It’s very frustrating.

I’m locked out of quite a bit of work, and all the email I received in the past two months as well as the article for the Tarot World Magazine and a couple of stories as well. It’s very frustrating. I’ve put a new screen, and a new keyboard in already in the past two months, and replaced a battery. Now I’m going to have to replace the battery again, no doubt, because the power cord will probably have killed it, and then I might have to replace the screen again…but it’s very frustrating, I’m wondering what’s going to go next.

It might be better for me to buy another laptop for cheap, and refurbish it and start over from scratch at this point. If I keep having to replace parts on this one I may as well.

I do have the desktop PC that I can use in a pinch, as I am now, but I like the laptop because I can take it outside and do work on the patio while the munchkin builds sandcastles and I can take it in the bedroom if I’m feeling ill and things like that.

I’m going to be trying to write a lot more in here in the next year. I’ve been censoring myself a bit, inadvertantly, wondering about writing about things and then talking myself out of it. When I should just write things out and let the chips fall where they may. I become wary because most of what I write will be in the realm of personal experience, rather than text book learning, and I need to stop that. Experience is a valid form of understanding.

This isn’t like choosing which type of golf products to buy: Mizuno golf or something telse. This is the sort of thing which benefits from anecdotal records.

I’ll cite people when I need to but the rest is just going to come from me.