Month in Review: 2009-04-30
Initial Remarks
April, 2009 was a good month over all. I got a lot more done on my blogs. Spam hasn’t been a problem since I enabled mandatory registration of new users. My mission for the next few months is to finish uploading my personal email to the blogs, and then to startÂ
 Â
Accomplishments This Month
Â
- Solved several computer problems for  [Emmy].
- Enabled mandatory user registration in all my blogs to cut down on the amount of spam comments I was receiving. This worked well because I’ve gotten no spam since doing that.
- Published several hundred posts on the  Tom’s Love Quest, Tom’s Diary, and  Tom’s Views sites.Â
- Completed uploading my personal email that I wrote for years 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004.
- Paid Mom’s bills.
- Posted several messages of aid to the blindipod and portable-player mail lists.
- Joined a mailing list called Everything Adult Talk. Stayed there a week or so but found the list too restrictive.
- So I left that list and subscribed to another, called Blind Chit Chat. About a hundred more people participate there and most of them seem quite intelligent.Â
- Cut the grass for the first time and trimmed some low-hanging tree branches around the property here.
- Began recording detailed journal entries about all the places I’ve lived. So far, I’ve done McKee Place and Mellon Street. This activity I believe, will help me tap into memories of my distant past and retrieve some good stories about my own development for the blogs.
- Mom and I reached an agreement about that noisy chair she reclines in. It thumps loudly when she lowers the foot rest and disturbs me at night since it is located right beneath my bedroom. We’re going to move the chair into the room just off the back porch.Â
- Performed weekly backups of the blog sites.
- Sent out checks to the first twenty  WPSBC Alumni Association  raffle winners.
- The sites achieved a new bandwith-per-day record this month of 68.23 MB.
- Added links to site maps to all blogs.
- Installed a WordPress plugin that automatically updates the site map each time a new post is added to any of the blogs. This is good, because I no longer have to manually update my site maps for Google.Â
- Added several new categories to the blogs to make it easier to find the posts that were either written about or pertain to some of the most important people in my life.
- Posted various pieces to a couple blogs that talk about relationships as a means of advertising my own blogs.
- Discovered that the Victor Reader Stream has no internal clock. So it does not time stamp the note files you record with it. Since I need to retain the date and time that a particular journal entry was recorded, I must remember to say it at the beginning of each new entry.
- Assisted  [Emmy]  with a few computer-related issues with the Victor Reader Stream, and her email. Â
- Balanced four checking accounts; all are caught up now.
- Attended Lions Club general membership meeting as well as the board meeting.
- Registered my blogs with Zimbo and Google blog aggregators.Â
- Entertained  [Emmy]  for a week early this month.
- Fixed my squeaky glider rocking chair; I sprayed all joints with WD40. So far, it’s quiet.
- Wrote PHP code for new archive pages for all of my blogs. On these, you can get a complete list of postings, sorted in ascending order (oldest first, then newer). Links to these pages have been added to the front pages of all my blogs.
- Helped my brother-in-law solve an iPod syncing issue; his iPod would not sync when plugged into the computer. We discovered that the cable he was using between the iPod and the computer was a charge-only data cable, and so did not support data transfers. Switching to an appropriate cable solved the problem
- [Mentat]  and I visited  [Emmy]  in Pittsburgh for a couple days.Â
- My first new user registered to post in my blogs, although he didn’t post anything yet.
- Worked with  [Emmy]  and the Portable Player list participants to solve a problem where the letter x appears in the Winamp Media Library search box whenever you press the space bar and you are running JAWS 10. One of the list people found a problem in the JAWS script for the Winamp Library and sent me a repaired copy. That worked well. So he’s forwarding it on to Freedom Scientific, so it can be incorporated into their next JAWS release.
- Registered my blogs with ask.com and several other search engines.
Â
Planned Accomplishments Next Month
Â
- Send remaining prize check to raffle winners for the WPSBC Alumni Association.
- Post all email from years 2005 and 2006.
- Make Philly trip in early May, 2009.
- Finish journaling about all the places I’ve lived.
Â
Difficult Issues Still Ongoing
See the  Tom’s Love Quest  blog for details about the big issue still being worked.
Â
Tom Hesley