canyonwalker | Entries tagged with livejournal

LiveJournal— yes, I still cross-post there, manually— has been sending me little nudges for the past few months encouraging me to write more. For example, I saw one like this today:

You have been writing for 2 days now. Write a post today (19.11) and extend the uninterrupted series!

Here's the thing, though. My writing streak isn't just 2 days, it's 230 days. I've written here every day since April 3. (April 2 was my last "off" day so far this year.) I track this because of my blogging baseline goal of posting every day. And I count a "day" as 12:00am to 11:59pm in my home timezone. LJ seems either to count all US users as living in US Eastern time zone or, worse yet, counts everything in GMT.

It's my 3 year anniversary of blogging on Dreamwidth. Oh, I've been blogging longer than that.... I started on LiveJournal over 12 years ago. And I do still blog on LiveJournal. I cross-post (manually 😡) to both.

Having a shorter history on Dreamwidth makes it easier to pull recent statistics from there. For example, I know from my profile I've posted 2089 blogs in 3 years and 768 in the past 12 months. That's an average of 2.1 posts per day this past year (1.9 over 3 years). I can also see which tags I've used most frequently in that time:

Most Used Tags, Past 3 Years
Rank	Tag	Uses
1	In Beauty I Walk	354
2	Planes Trains and Automobiles	241
3	Coronavirus	212
4	TV	160
5	Waterfalls	159

What does it mean that these tags are the top 5? Well, first, I'm happy that "In Beauty I Walk" remains my most used tag. It's the tag I use with all my posts about hiking. It's also my all-time top tag from 12+ years of blogging.

I'm happy, as well, to see "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles", about the trials and tribulations of travel (the name's an obvious reference to the classic 1987 Steve Martin/John Candy comedy) rise to the #2 spot. Along with that goes Coronavirus dropping to #3, and I'm happy about that, too. Good riddance!

Notice, as well, that a new tag has pushed its way into the Top 5: Waterfalls! Indeed I have written a lot about waterfalls in the past year. That shows up when I filter tag usage by the past 12 months:

Most Used Tags, Past 12 Months
Rank	Tag	Uses
1	In Beauty I Walk	129
2	Planes Trains and Automobiles	94
3	Waterfalls	78
4	No Rest for the Wicked	63
5	Weather	62
6	TV	51
7	Politics	49
8	Taking it Easy	48
9	SF Bay Area	46
10	Current Events	44

Waterfalls was my #3 tag this past year with a whopping 76 uses. Yes, we've visited a lot of waterfalls!

No Rest for the Wicked nudged up into the Top 5 this year. It even nudged out Weather to reach #4. That aligns as No Rest for the Wicked is my #4 tag over my full history of blogging.

I enumerated this table out to 10 places to show what happened to some of the other tags. You can see that while TV dropped out of the top 5 for the year, it didn't drop far. It came in 6th. My TV watching is down this year from the year before, when I watched the whole Game of Thrones series. Earlier this year I did watch a few miniseries and the current season of various shows, which is how I found 51 things to write about. Though even that seems like a long time ago as I've barely watched any TV the past 6 months.

What happened to Coronavirus? On the basis of the past 12 months it not only dropped out of the top 5, it did not make the top 10 or even top 25. It came in at 40th place, in a 3-way tie with Beer Tasting and Family, each with 20 blogs.

Well, I did it. I wasn't sure I could maintain the pace to do it but I did. I broke my record for bloggiest month. With a whopping 84 posts in September I hit an average of 2.8/day.

Five Things:

In terms of posts/month my 84 in September only ties my record of 84 posts in May 2023. But on a posts per day basis it wins, 2.8 vs. 2.71, because September's a shorter month.

As with last May, my storm of posts this month was driven by travel. That's always what drives my most prolific blogging. In September I went on two leisure trips and one business trip. A whopping 65 posts were about travel.

September was big for waterfalls. A whopping 35 of my posts were about waterfalls (tag link). A big part of that is because we chose to focus on visiting waterfalls on our West Virginia/North Carolina trip. At one point I suggested we hike a peak trail off the Blue Ridge Parkway and Hawk responded, "If there's no waterfall there I don't want to go. This trip is about waterfalls!"

Two keys to hitting a record-breaking 84 posts last month were managing to post 3/day through most of my trip and a gonzo 4/day the past six days. I managed both of these by writing lots of drafts on LiveJournal and saving them with future dates, then setting the dates to current as I completed them. I did this on LJ because DW still doesn't support saving posts to publish in the future.

Notes about tags: In Beauty I Walk got a lot of exercise this month, giving it to a commanding lead as my most-used tag. Planes Trains and Automobiles also got a bit of a workout and has now eclipsed Coronavirus for the #2 spot in my nearly 3 years of writing on Dreamwidth. Over on LiveJournal where I have almost 12 years of writing, Coronavirus has been in the #3 spot for a while but will soon drop to #4 when No Rest for the Wicked surpasses it. I am glad to see Coronavirus recede.

It's my 2 year anniversary of blogging on Dreamwidth. Oh, I've been blogging longer than that.... I started on LiveJournal over 11 years ago. And I do still blog on LiveJournal. I cross-post (manually 😡) to both.

Having a shorter history on Dreamwidth makes it easier to pull recent statistics. For example, I know from my profile I've posted 1,321 times in the past 2 years. That's an average of 1.8 posts per day. I can also see which tags I've used most frequently. My top 5 in the past 24 months are:

Most Used Tags, Past 2 Years
Rank	Tag	Uses
1	In Beauty I Walk	225
2	Coronavirus	192
3	Planes Trains and Automobiles	146
4	TV	109
5	Food	99

What does it mean that these tags are the top 5? Well, first, I'm happy that "In Beauty I Walk" remains my most used tag. It's the tag I use with all my posts about hiking.

"Planes Trains and Automobiles" was the tag I started my blogging with 11+ years ago. It marks my posts about traveling around the world. I don't mind that hiking has pulled ahead of this. I do mind that Coronavirus took the #2 spot in the past two years. Across my whole history on LiveJournal it's only at #3, but it makes sense— sadly— that it's been more prominent over the past few years.

TV and Food round out my Top 5 of the past 2 years. They don't rank that highly in my overall history. On the 11 year scale, food misses the Top 5, ranking only #6, and TV doesn't even make the top 25 (it's #27). I figure food gained a notch in recent history because I've been cooking at home a lot more since the pandemic started. Meanwhile TV leapt up 23 spots not because of Coronavirus but because we cut the cable a little over 2 years ago. In switching from cable TV to streaming we not only greatly reduced our monthly cost but also increased the quality of content available. Among other series I've watched The Sopranos and Game of Thrones, writing many blogs about them.

I've been busy at work the past few weeks. I'm hip deep in a pilot project with a prospective customer. "Pilot" means we implement our software in their environment and get a small slice of their process running to prove our value. Once we prove it, they buy a lot of software from us.

I haven't written much about this involved project at work because it... seems boring. Boring to write about, I mean. Yet it occurred to me this week that it was precisely this kind of project that got me writing this blog in the first place! Over on LiveJournal I use the subtitle Tales of a Traveling Wiseguy. Umpteen years ago this blog was about all the travel around the world I did to run pilots with customers.

With this pilot, though, there's a difference: I'm not traveling. 😨 The work days are still long. The IT problems are still the same. The customers I work with are still the same mix of brilliant people, clowns, and assholes— sometimes all in the same team! But the lack of travel makes it seem so much less fascinating.

While the lack of travel makes the job less fascinating, it's also a relief. I'm not spending lots of time just getting there & back. I'm closer to my company's support systems. I work from home instead of in a cavernous office building in an industrial park outside some city. And at the end of the day, even if it's been a 10-11 hour day, I can unplug and be home. I don't have to fake it eating food in a chain restaurant, drinking cocktails in the hotel bar, and Skyping with my spouse 6,000 miles away before going to bed.

Part of me does miss globe-trotting for work. That's the part of me that takes strange pleasure in being squeezed in an airline seat with my knees up to my chin, hurtling through the air in an aluminum tube at 500+ miles per hour with 200 complete strangers. The other part of me is happier knowing that once I close my computer for the day, that's it; I'm home.

I've been keeping up my blog on LiveJournal. I moved over to Dreamwidth a few months ago because friends were here and I could crosspost to LiveJournal (to maintain a consistent history of my blog). Now crossposting to LJ is temporarily broken. Each attempt delivers the following error message to my inbox:

Crosspost to canyonwalker@LiveJournal failed.

Failed to crosspost entry to canyonwalker@LiveJournal: Client error: Your IP address is temporarily banned for exceeding the login failure rate.

While at first glance the error message may look like a problem with my password— because it refers to "Client error" and login failure— it's actually something on the DW server side (the client that tries to login to LJ) that's screwed up and gotten itself on a denyList.

I filed a help request with DW two nights ago, noting the problem had already been happening for two days. I waited two days before opening a case thinking maybe the problem would clear up as getting denyList'ed would be temporary. But it's still happening. And DW staff have not responded to my ticket yet.

...Not that I expect much from DW at this point. My last ticket was "Feature X doesn't work as listed in the FAQ, how do I use it?" and took almost six weeks to be answered... with "It's actually not implemented at all." 🙄 And when I search for other tickets related to crossposting problems I find open tickets describing them same problem from as far back as 4 years ago that were never answered. 😨

I'm having serious second thoughts about sticking with this platform. It's got a feature set similar to LJ circa 2008 and volunteer maintainers who are mostly MIA.

In Beauty I Walk. It's the refrain of a Navajo prayer called Night Chant. It's also a tag I've used 450 times in my LiveJournal blog to describe my joy and harmony of hiking in nature. It's my #1 tag over there, eclipsing even the "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" tag I started blogging with.

You wouldn't know that from reading over here on Dreamwidth, though. In the month and and half since I made this my primary platform I've used it exactly... never. I realized that as I went to post an "In Beauty I Walk" entry today. Blame a combination of Coronavirus and weather. Coronavirus has made travel out of the area impractical, and weather the past few months has made this an unsatisfying time of the year for hiking locally (recent lack of rain has left vegetation brown and streams dry). Plus, honestly, after 10 months of barely being able to leave the area I've grown bored with the options locally.

Saturday we put those frustrations aside as we got out for a real hike for the first time in a long time. We went to San Bruno Mountain, just south of San Francisco.

San Bruno Mountain [Jan 2021]

We've been to San Bruno Mountain a couple times before, most recently on a trip in late July. On that trip we didn't get to the peak because we misread some of the one-way markings (to promote social distancing during the Coronavirus pandemic) on the trail map and didn't want to violate the rules like most of the other people there. This time we took the correct trail to be able to get to the top, legally. The top, BTW, is that antenna farm you can see in the upper left corner of the pic above.

The trail we hiked Saturday began by looping down through a ravine. For what's supposed to be a peak hike that was disheartening. Climbing back out of the ravine to a neighboring ridge gave us extra exercise, though, and once we topped that ridge the views became expansive. Yes, the scenery gets better than looking up at that antenna farm above. Way better. Keep reading (next entry) to see.

Crossposts: https://canyonwalker.livejournal.com/892789.html

2020 was so awful even LiveJournal is bagging on it. They've run this picture with a caption about how optimistic they are for 2021.

LiveJournal "optimistic" about 2021

"Frank The Goat and Mr. Kapusta are optimistic about the future," was the caption posted underneath this picture. Yes, they're so optimistic that they're lighting their 2020 Christmas tree on fire. 🤣

Either way, good riddance to 2020.

Crossposts: https://canyonwalker.livejournal.com/889664.html

🎵 I'm coming up so you better get the party started! 🎵

It's better to come late to the party than never, right? Even if I'm, like, several years late. I've spent that time keepin' busy over on LiveJournal. Take a look over at canyonwalker.livejournal.com to see what I mean. Now I'm getting ready to move here. Let's get this party started!

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Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Entries tagged with livejournal

LJ Doesn't Understand Time Zones

Three Years on Dreamwidth

New Bloggiest Month: September 2023

Two Years on Dreamwidth

Busy Weeks at Work. But No Travel.

Dreamwidth and LiveJournal

In Beauty I Walk. San Bruno Mountain.

Even LJ bags on 2020

I'm Coming Up