sky, Author at Sky's Blog

The “Journey to India” and on into the World

14 August, 2007 by sky Leave a Comment

Project Happiness students
Photo: Shmuel Thayer

When you’re in high school (late teens) you have lots of questions. You may be more than a little anxious. You may have lots of fun. And of course you’re likely to feel like you’re the only one in the world who feels this way — whatever way you feel at the moment. You’re cramming more and more information into your brain every day, and the stuff mixes and munges around, and questions get generated all the time.

I certainly remember more than a few such feelings. [Read more…]

Free blog hosting

6 August, 2007 by sky Leave a Comment

Mashable is a good source of leads – on a bunch of topics related to online activity. Today they’ve put up a post that lists more than 40 “free blog hosting” sites.

I use WordPress and I run it on my own servers, as well as running it for a dozen or so clients. Gives me a lot of control, and more features than I would have if I used wordpress.com as a host.

But I get asked all of the time where one can find a good (and free) blog-hosting site.

So, Mashable has their 40+ answers to the question.

Making WordPress administration easier

27 July, 2007 by sky Leave a Comment

Found a good post on mashable.com that lists 50+ WordPress plug-ins that come in handy for site administrators. Go read it. Amazingly, I use a bunch of good plug-ins but I did not use even one of those recommended by Mashable. Some of them are a bit lame … the 404-checker sounds really good on the surface of it, though I haven’t figured out why a WordPress page would ever go 404 because they’re basically manufactured on-the-fly.

One that really does sound useful is the Instant-upgrade plug-in, that permits you to perform a WP upgrade automatically with a single click. WP upgrades generally take me around 5 minutes per site to perform and I do about 20 of them each time WP clicks over to the next version, so this could save me a couple of hours here and there! (It requires careful setup by a server admin, but looks like it probably does things correctly.)

Where do you feel at home?

23 July, 2007 by sky 2 Comments


In the Ansel Adams Wilderness south of Yosemite

Where do you feel most at home?

I pursue an interesting combination, I think. I am at home in San Francisco, of course, but every summer for the past 22 years I’ve spent a number of days in the wilderness areas of Yosemite National Park, and have gotten to feel pretty much at home there. Yosemite [YNP] is 96% designated wilderness, and most tourists only see the 4% that comprises the main valley (Half Dome, El Capitan and other features of the valley wall are quite famous).

[Read more…]

Using “Toys” to Make Music

12 June, 2007 by sky Leave a Comment

Most of my group of tight buddies (and of course all the boys in the family) like Björk — a lot. Personally, I like both the tormented lyrics and the music.

So when Jason sent me a link to the “latest technology—the ReacTable” that is said to be used by Björk in performance, it was novel but also reminded me of a little toy that my sister-in-law’s kids have had for about a year now.

[Read more…]