Well, I'm back in Idaho Falls. Finally. There were some extenuating circumstances that pretty much forced me to move back up here for a while. I think it'll actually all work out for the best. In fact, I know it will. Once I get a job that is. I've been up here for about 2 weeks now, and tried to get in touch with my old boss, but wasn't able to and kind of gave up, but I'm going to be a bit more persistent now. The break from work has been nice, but I'm not the kind of person that really likes to sit around and do nothing, which is basically what I've done the last 2 weeks. I've had some fun playing and beating Halo 3, and trying (and failing thus far) to get my printer really calibrated. It seems to print really dark. All the images from Bear Lake that I made were done on my laptop that has the LCD display, and I'm printing from my desktop which has the CRT monitor and the images really do appear a bit darker on it, so what I'm seeing is really what I'm getting, but was too stubborn to change anything the first print (the add hyperlink button is gone or I would put a link to the photographs, and the URLs are too long to paste here, which is a reason I'm considering leaving Vox...more on that later though). I guess this is where digital imaging gets tough, both for the creator and the viewer; atleast for viewing on the Net. Not all monitors are created equal, and the average Joe isn't going to have a properly calibrated monitor. My monitor isn't even calibrated. So each end user's experience is going to be different, i.e., going from my laptop to my desktop. Oh well, just a kink I need to work out.
So, at the chagrin of my few viewers, and whoever has my blog linked from their own, I've been considering leaving Vox for a Word Press or perhaps Movable Type blog, which are hosted blogs (meaning I have to pay for server space somewhere to get them on the Net). Vox is really basic, which is what attracted me here in the first place, but after having used it for some time now, there are a few features that I would like to have that just aren't here, i.e., comments. You have to be a member of Vox to comment and none of my friends/viewers have a Vox account. With WP and MT all the commenter needs is an email address and to enter what is in the Kaptcha image to comment. Also I can't organize my links in any manner at all, which is really frustrating, because I am regularly blogging links to interesting sites I come across, and I would like to keep my friends blog links at the top of my list, but without a way to organize them, the links appear in the order in which they were added. I would also like to have a few widgets from my Jaiku and Pownce feeds, but Vox only allows one widget. So I've been searching out some Word Press info and templates and such to get a blog started there. All of my favorite blogs are on Word Press. Well, all the geeky/techy blogs I read. I really like the customizablity Word Press offers. If you know CSS you can pretty much create your own layout. The switch probably won't happen for a month or two, but I will keep the progress updated on that. One drawback, is there is no easy way to import/export posts from Vox to Word Press.
Oh yeah, for those of you who have Firefox 2.0 and are frustrated with how buggy it is, I strongly suggest you check out Safari. It really is a pretty neat browser. It doesn't have all the plug-in options that Firefox has, but that is actually a bit of a relief. My toolbar was getting a bit cluttered with a Google, Mahalo, and StumbleUpon toolbar. One caveat here, is that I'm a HUGE Apple fanboy and if I had the money I would buy just about anything with the Apple logo on it, so take this reccomendation to switching to Safari with a grain of salt, I guess.
