Ryan McFarland

Yesterday I cut some pussywillow and put them in a vase on the counter. Hex liked them.

I pointed out before that Consumerist has featured photos of mine in the past.  As a pagerank 7 website those incoming links are great for my site.  I specify in my Flickr photo descriptions that credit has to be given to zieak.com and Ryan McFarland.  Unfortunately, a new plugin for Wordpress has been released that will allow any blogger to easily insert Flickr photos of any user that has an open Creative Commons license right into their blog posts.  The PhotoDropper plugin automatically adds credit to the photographer by grabbing the user name and linking to the Flickr profile.  No consideration for any special instructions will be made by anyone using this plugin.  I think the plugin serves a wonderful purpose.  I just really would like credit passed to my site instead of Flickr.

[news via Problogger]

Last night the main roof of the house shed snow onto our shed. The shed was far from complete but I think that spot may not be the best for my workshop.

You can see the front steps and the amount of snow collected from shoveling off the porch. Two more feet on the way? Where will we put it all? Mid week it is supposed to warm enough to rain. We should clear our roof before then.

Last night I had a meeting in town. On my way to it just before 7 there were people on the roof of First Bank shoveling it off. Almost two hours later these two impressive piles of snow flanked the bank entrance. They were gone this morning. Winds are supposed to pick up tonight and the wind chill is supposed to dip to 20 below. Watch the weather page for some fun numbers! Also, Saturday we’re supposed to get up to two feet of snow. I’ll post some pictures of the house to show we don’t need it.

With four cats in the house, sleeping in a position you want to be in is sometimes difficult.  Ollie sleeps at Cena’s feet most of the time.  Yeti sleeps next to my head.  This morning Ash was curled up between us.  Hex will visit but doesn’t seem to sleep the whole night with us.  She’s the outsider.  And right now she’s tearing up one of our living room blankets.  Ollie is outside — probably sitting on the porch watching the snow fall. Yeti is patrolling the house.  Without a cat door he can become quite annoying.

A post on the Consumerist website today used one of the photos that i have submitted to their Flickr pool. Kevin Dean and i have both had a number of shots that they have used to illustrate their posts. We wouldn’t be able to do it without Flickr but we have the link and credit directed to our sites so we get the good search engine mojo from the almighty Consumerist. Adding images to their pool on Thursday is probably best - they pick out a few favorites every Friday.

Here are links to stories that have used our pictures.

• Gas pump
• Thrift Supervision and again
• Cheap laptops
• Wed Thu Fri = WTF and again
• Luggage
• Cash money

Why do i care and why is it good that they are using our images?  Well, their main page has a Google page rank of 7.  Links from them pass on their PR7 authority.  You can’t pay for that kind of coverage.

Cena has patiently uploaded almost 1500 photos from our trip.  So if you want to see just about everything we took photos of just check out her albums here.  It is worth noting that all of the pictures of beer bottles is for another web project i hope to work on.  I did drink other beverages than beer - i just took pictures of all of the different beers that i drank!

I have won four Instructables robots shirts.  One gray one for me, a plum one for Cena,  a green Halloween one, and a tan one is on the way in the mail right now.  I brought the gray one with me on our trip to Southeast Asia after someone asked where people had worn their shirts on this post on the Instructables forums.  Here are some pictures…

In Cambodia near Angkor Wat.

More Khmer temple Instructables Robot exploration.

On the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam after a night on the town.

Relaxing on the beach in Nha Trang, Vietnam.

Chilling with other primates at the Monkey Forest in Bali, Indonesia.

It goes well with the mandatory sarong at the Elephant caves in Bali.

Blue’s Clue finds a clue

Originally uploaded by zieak

I only moved Blue’s a few inches and stood him up for this picture.