Slip-sliding away…

Our county road runs past our house here on the ranch, and up the hill further into the wilderness. There are two houses past ours. Yesterday those neighbors had some trouble getting to town because the road slid down the hill a few feet. The road crew came out and fixed it within 24 hours, but not before we could take some photos.

This was all caused by the excessive rain. In the last week we’ve had 7 inches of rain, as reported by my handy rain gauge. When you get that much rain, the “blue clay” substrate under the road slides down the hill. There are about 25 acres of blue clay, which makes for a lovely oak savanna. But it is hell on the roads around here.
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Democracy in the Middle East

I just read Ken Blackwell’s essay called “Purple Fingers Aren’t Enough”. He has given eloquent voice to the thoughts running around in many of our heads as we watched the revolution succeed in Egypt. In effect, most of what he said can be summed up in the quote he gives from Edmund Burke: “Men of intemperate minds cannot be free; their passions forge their fetters.”
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Beehive – honeycomb


Hell's Half Acre

Late in October 2010, before the rains started in earnest for the year, we did some burning on “Hell’s Half Acre”, our Oak Savanna restoration project here on the ranch. The burning was done to get rid of endemic poison oak and invasive blackberries, salmonberries and Douglas Fir trees, among others, that had pretty much over-run the entire oak savanna.

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Posted in Photography, Ranch Life | 2 Comments

Updated JM Blog Design

We recently updated the WordPress software for this blog, and the old theme (had it in place since 2003!) finally broke beyond all repair.

So – we have a somewhat new look, which you’ll see on all the pages of the site now.

The new design incorporates part of the old design (kept it in the image at the top of the page) and some of the colors. But I think it was time to update it anyway. My significant other simply detests all things Art Nouveau, but she somehow managed to convince me to keep the Art Nouveau design above anyway, because, she said, “You like it and I want you to be happy.”

So, guess what! I am happy with it.

We’ve incorporated the Yoost DeValk SEO module and many others, to make it as search engine optimized as it can be.

If you run into any problems using it, please let me know.


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Connie Willis quote about regret

I just finished reading “All Clear” by Connie Willis, which is some brilliant science fiction. It’s about some time travelers stuck in London during the Blitz (1940-41) and unable to return to their own time.

Toward the end of the book, she has a lovely paragraph about people doing the thing that they want to do, despite the cost to them for doing it:

“To do something for someone or something you loved–England or Shakespeare or a dog or the Hodbins or history–wasn’t a sacrifice at all. Even if it cost you your freedom, your life, your youth.”

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SEO Audits | A Good Overview from Adam Audette

Adam Audette of Audette Media, an SEO company based in Oregon, like mine, Words in a Row has done a good job of summarizing what’s involved in an SEO Audit; that is, an analysis of what a website needs to do to get better search rankings at Google.

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Posted in Opinion, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Dry skin treatment

I don’t often plug products here. I really like this one – enough that I signed up as an affiliate for them.

Skin MD Natural

I used to be plagued by dry skin, especially in the winter. I’d break out with what amounted to a rash over large portions of my back and stomach, and my hands would be cracked and bleeding. Dry skin kept me from soaking in the hot tub, which I *really* like to do after a long day of web design and internet marketing…. But exposure to hot water made the dry skin condition worse, made it spread and made it more itchy.
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Posted in Opinion, Ranch Life | 1 Comment

SEO – How to Silo a Large Website

The SEO tool for optimizing a website, called a “Silo” is pretty well described on the Bruce Clay site. But actually implementing Silos on a big website can be an exercise in frustration unless you know what you’re doing.

To optimize (SEO) a large site with a lot of categories and huge link menus, it becomes really important to do Siloing right.

If every page of a large site links to every other page of the site through the menu system, then any PageRank coming to the site from Google is passed down and diluted, not concentrated into your main categories and not USED the way it should be to get you better rankings at Google.
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The Psychiatric Drug Money Machine

Although there are no objectionable images in this short video from CCHR, it still gave me a visceral reaction — not something I often get even when watching a zombie movie or thriller. And in less than 30 seconds. Good job!

Here it is:

Psychiatric Drug Money Machine

Don’t say I didn’t warn you….
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Posted in Big Pharma, Opinion, Psychiatric Abuse | Leave a comment

Top 50 Psychiatrists Getting Kickbacks from Big Pharma

This is an interesting article about the top 50 psychiatrists paid off by big pharma, as released by ProPublica.

And here’s a list from ProPublica of the entire list of 384 physicians who have received more than $100,000 in payments from big pharma.
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