Jul
Well it seems I have found myself in the process of bringing this place back to life and up to date. Unfortunately, most of my time today has been spent upgrading Wordpress to the most current version.
I began the restoration process by snagging myself a shiny new domain name, calculating8.com, and redirecting it to the appropriate subdomain on synthetik.org, calculating8.synthetik.org. I plan to eventually have the .com domain hosted instead of redirecting to a subdomain, but I need to upgrade my hosting plan in order to do so. We’ll be saving that for another day.
In addition, I have consolidated all my posts between my two blogs and placed them all back on KodyMyers.NET. I’m planning on taking C8 in a different direction – as soon as I figure out what it is.
Anyway, I suppose the software wanted to teach me a lesson for neglecting it so long. Upgrading has never taken me more than 10 minutes, but this time I ended up spending at least 5 hours trying to figure out why my redirect wasn’t operating correctly. I couldn’t tell if it was a bad .htaccess file, an invalid database entry, or problem with the DNS not propagating itself. After eliminating the culprit down to Wordpress, I found that a canonical URL feature had been implemented in version 2.3 that had apparently wreaked havoc on several peoples’ blogs that used redirects or customized permalink structures.
At any rate, it’s behind me now, though I’ve lost half a day getting it all configured. I’m starting to remember why I burned out maintaining this site. Maintenance is a menial chore if there ever was one.
More to come soon, I hope.
Jun
[Editor’s note: For purposes of contextual coherence, it may be useful to know that this post originally appeared on the discontinued Myers Family Journal before being folded into this blog. -KM]
I was always taught that no matter what kind of job I’m doing, I give it my best. I never quite understood the wisdom of this until I got my first job with a steady paycheck. The commonly held belief is that there is no need to care too much about doing a good job when you’re flipping burgers, mowing yards, jockeying a register, shoveling horse crap, or any one of the many other menial tasks that people find themselves doing for that weekly paycheck.
While working nearly every job I’ve ever had, I’ve observed coworkers doing the absolute bare minimum necessary to keep their jobs. Not surprisingly, many of them were students. Still being a student myself, I understand that holding down a job while trying to keep your grades up is a monumental task, especially when also trying to balance a personal life into the equation.
What these people do not realize is that such jobs can teach valuable life lessons that will stick with them well into the future when they get their “real” jobs. If employees can’t even expend the small amount of extra effort needed to excel in a “crap” job, how in the world can they expect to perform well in the jobs of with important responsibilities?
If only employers could see first-hand how prospective employees perform in a position of little responsibility, I would imagine they could save themselves a great deal of wasted time and training.
Anyway, I seem to have strayed from the point of this post.
My current job may not be as important as others, but I still take pride in what I do. Our fiscal year at the Murray Briggs and Stratton plant ended today with a record four million engines produced. Another notable milestone is the fifty million engines produced from the plant since it opened.
I estimate that only 150,000 or so of those engines were an indirect result of my efforts, but it’s still kinda neat to know I was a part of it. We even got some nifty shirts to commemorate our achievements with!
The plant shuts down for two weeks at the end of each fiscal year for cleaning and maintenance. Since we produced so well this year, we shut down early and my last day was Monday. Woo!
So now you know why I suddenly have found myself with all kinds of free time to write! 
[Editor’s note: For purposes of contextual coherence, it may be useful to know that this post originally appeared on the discontinued Myers Family Journal before being folded into this blog. -KM]
Seven months.
Believe me when I tell you that I’ve had the best intentions of sitting down and throwing something together on here for you to read. Unfortunately, it seems that every time that I’ve considered writing something, I’ve either gotten distracted by some shiny object or shied away from the daunting task of trying to condense several months of events into coherent sentences.
For those of you who syndicate the site, I’m sure you haven’t missed the extra clutter my posts tend to generate. However, to those who’ve faithfully and fruitlessly checked this space regularly over the last half-year, I sincerely apologize. I will spare you the excuses and simply resume writing here in hopes that someone, somewhere might still be interested.
Instead of turning this into a huge, monolithic post recapping everything at the same time, I plan to hit on several different topics in the coming days.
Until then, I’ll be gathering and organizing my thoughts. Wish me luck! 