Image Issues

If some of you have visited over the last month, you may have noticed 2 things:

1.) I haven't posted anything for a helluva long while.
2.) Images such as the header and post borders were smaller.

I have a sufficient answer for both, but right now I'm going to address the image issue.

Sometime in early December, Picasa changed the default image sizes for photos. This means that if you used Picasa for images on your Blogger website, and did not specify a size within the image link (regardless of if you specified the height and width within the CSS), then your images would display at the new default size.

The way around this is to go to your Picasa account, locate the image, then right click (or ctrl+click on a Mac) and choose to copy the image URL. Paste it somewhere, and change the size value. The size value is specified just before the actual image file name and will have an 's' preceding it. For example, my banner size has a max width of 950 pixels, so the size within the image URL should be 's950'

I'm really pretty pissed about this, but have finally gotten around to correcting the issue here. Now I just have to cultivate the urge to look at and fix some of my other Blogger sites.

Oh, and Happy Holidays, everyone!

Summer Satellites and the Great Scar

Well, Summer is supposedly here, though it's not always easy to tell in Portland. Not that I'm bitching - you can have the heat and sunlight. The only thing that is sort of a downer is that sky-watching is less fun when it's cold and limits the amount of time you want to spend gazing upwards from a lawn chair. That said, last Saturday was a pretty decent night and after BBQing, my girlfriend and I pulled out the tri-fold lawn chairs and watched the sky for a couple of hours.

It may sound cliché, but it's really hard to argue against how well Dark Side of the Moon goes with watching the countless satellites drift through the salted sky, peppered with the occasional meteorite. I wasn't looking for anything in particular and had no hopes of catching anything mysterious -- that's not why I stargaze. But there was one particularly bright object that we caught in the Northwest moving speedily towards the Southeast. It had a brightness of 4 and was quite stunning. After a brief What The Fuck moment, we both realized it was the ISS. We confirmed this later by an online tracker that gave the exact time and location in which we saw the object.

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Cheap Wine and Plastic Cups: McMinnville 2011

I guess I'll give an update on the McMinnville UFO Festival. If you're expecting to hear my opinion of the three speakers, Robert Salas, Stan Gordon, and Paola Harris, you might as well click another link, because I only saw one of them and that will possibly be addressed in a collaborative post that Regan and I are considering. It might go a little something like this, though:

"Paola walks into a bar..."

My girlfriend and I had a mess of a time getting down to the festival. I had busted ass to get all of my work done on Thursday night so I could have Friday off to sleep in a bit, tidy up the house, and then get the Hell out of Portland. That all happened pretty much according to plan with the exception of timing. We hit the road an hour late, which turned into two hours and some change with rush-hour traffic. I use to think rush hour started at 5pm, but as I've grown older, I've come to realize that rush hour starts whenever I get on the fucking road.

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Just a Few Things

Last week I submitted my latest Saucers, Slips, and Cigarettes column to Nancy at UFO Magazine. The deadlines always catch me off guard, for some reason. I managed to finish, though!

The piece is called The Mediocrity of the Great Oz and talks (mostly) about how the abundance of information within Ufology has actually made me more skeptical of the ETH, when typically, you might expect the opposite. And yes, I am aware that many believe the so-called '4th Density' to be a non-physical realm, in which case, cocaine use would probably be non-existent. It was just funnier that way. Confused? You won't be after this episode issue of Soap UFO Magazine. Context is everything.

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Goings On

Things have certainly been brewin' the last 2 weeks, and I probably have something to say about some of them. But not just yet:

I've taken on some additional work and have been swamped, leaving me a little behind in the current drama(s) within UFOlogy, and I'm probably also behind on my next column for UFO Magazine. Though, I'm not entirely complaining. Finances have been difficult the last couple of years, so, having more work has been a much desired development.

Anyhoo, despite my heavier workload, I do have a few things in the works that should see the light of day over the next few weeks.

Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays!

(to those who deserve them)

-Deirdre

Collapsed Starstuff (And Other Stuff Too)

I'm just finishing up my next column for UFO Magazine. Got to it a little late, as my world has been nothing short of strange and chaotic since mid August. But Autumn is here, my mind has calmed, and I'm looking forward to the colder months with what remaining leaves there are on the trees, followed by the onset of Winter (I am hopeful for a decent amount of snow in Portland, this year).

I'd been out of touch for the last few months, as noted, and so the the last couple of weeks have been spent catching up on all the UFOlogical zaniness I had missed. Not a whole Hell of a lot has happened (much to my unsurprise). There were some predictions, some more sightings, some speculations on the possible rocket launch in in Southern California, the failure of Jeff Peckman's kooky ballot measure and such, but that's been about it.

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Absence makes the heart grow -- oh, fuck it!

I've been gone a while. Without getting into the details, I'll just let you all know that I have been coping with a breakup, and then most recently, the death of my dog 'Tuff' who passed on yesterday afternoon. He was such a darling little man, and I miss him terribly. My heart is broken.

I feel horribly out of the loop, and there are 175 emails in my inbox, all labelled 'UFO'. I have a lot of catching up to do and hope to be writing more again within the next week or two. I have updates to add to UFO Mag blog, WOE, Queeranormal, and of course, here at IHW. I should also probably get on my next UFO Magazine column.

Yeesh! I fucking hate falling behind!

That's all for now. Take care and see you soon!


~Deirdre

Technology, Privacy and Nothing About UFOs

A popular discussion for many years has been the acceleration of technology and our dependence on that technology at the cost of less human memory usage. This is not a new take on the idea that we are losing some of ourselves to an increasingly gadgetized world, but rather just my input, which tends to fall on deaf ears when discussed with most people.

We certainly love our devices. Our phones, our laptops, our Global Positioning Systems, and the myriad softwares available for each. Our phones process faster than all of NASA’s computers during the age of the Space Race, our laptops packed with more punch and much less size than a 386 IBM circa 1996. We carry with us music studios, vast music libraries, and thousands upon thousands of photos & documents. The total collection of each of our lives, comfortably fitting on a handful of gigabytes with room to spare. These are, of course, amazing and impressive things, but what price have we paid beyond dollars?

How many of you could tell me 5 of your friends phone numbers without referring to you cell phone’s contact library?

I can barely remember my own, let alone the number of anyone else. I’d be proper fucked if I had to make an emergency phone call, sans cell phone. Yeah, I could try 411 if anyone I knew was listed.

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Sometimes It's Just a Giant Sumerian Phallus

It's July 19th, and while I'm unhappy that we're officially in the Summer-zone, I'm glad May and June are over. Not that May was a bad month. In fact, it was one of the better months I've had in many years.

A lot of change has happened (and still continues to happen), that really began to show form in early May and carried on through until the end of last month. As anyone who has gone through significant life changes can attest to, it can be positively exhausting! I've not written much anywhere in the last few weeks -- been too busy fighting through the cloudiness and disorientation that often travels with discovering new perspectives... but I hope to be coming out of that haze sooner rather than later.

I've been thinking a lot about my voice (however small it is) in UFOlogy, and it's been occurring to me that I pick on so many topics, that some of you might think I don't believe in anything. I even began to wonder if I was looking like a debunker more than someone actually interested in sorting out the un-sortable mysteries of the world.

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New Site

Just a quick message to let people know that I have started a new blog called Queeranormal. It will mainly be a place to write about my experiences and esoteric interests outside of UFOlogy.

I'm not ditching IHW -- not at all. It's been a slow Summer for UFO crap, and believe it or not, I do have other interests!

Take care,

~Deirdre

Rayguns: Practical Applicatons

As sick as I am hearing about Roswell, I think I’m more sick of people talking about how sick they are of hearing about Roswell.

And of mysterious alien technologies, too.

There’s a lot of people swearing by extra terrestrial technologies that could be made available to humanity that would cure cancer, solve our energy problems, and cleanup the BP oil spill. Boy, ‘those aliens, sure do have everything, don’t they!

“Commander Zorlagh, it looks like those neurotic ape-people have fucked up the ocean again. Better pull out the ol' OS Raygun.”

Jeff Peckman, the godfather of Metatron Technology and the Extra Terrestrial Affairs Commission, has told the Denver Daily News that if we made contact with ET, they could fix that big BP mess right up:

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I Haven't Died... Yet.

Nor have I left 'the field'. *wink*

I would have made more of a joke of that, but as they say: "It's too soon!"

Never mind.

Still here and still kicking! Inadvertently took more than a week off of writing due to a number of appointments, social engagements and of course, work.

I'm finishing up and article for Women of Esoterica, and then a new article will appear here shortly thereafter.

Hope all of you have been wonderful!


Take care,

~Deirdre

Erik Has Left the Building

Just a quick note:

Erik Stitt is calling it a day in regards to the paranormal. I waited a while to see if he would change his mind, but alas, it would not be so. Therefore his site  Contact will not only cease in updates, it will cease to exist period. In fact, this is already the case.

Please join me in wishing Erik the very best in his future endeavors, that he finds a way to return to his much-missed homeland, and  back to the good things in life.

Thanks for the brief but wonderful contributions you've made, for your friendship and for your support. Though I will always be in touch with you, I know you will certainly be missed by many.

Take care, darling!


~Deirdre

PS If you come back after I've written all this, I will probably choke you.

IHW: Updated Site Design

For those who care - I've made some modifications to the design of this site. A lot of the layout is intact with a few minor changes, such as line-height and the angled corners of the columns, as well as the main navigation tabs. But the most significant change is with the header image.

While I liked the previous design, after a while I wanted something that reflected my own personality better, and was a bit more 'fun'. So, I began brainstorming a few new ideas about a month ago. Finally, after tossing out some not-so-snazzy mock-ups, I came up with the current header design.

I may be tweaking things here and there, with the overall site and header itself, but I think it will probably remain pretty close to the what you see as of the date of this post.

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My Secret, Scandalous Love Affair

I work a lot with WordPress. A lot, a lot. It's the software of choice for most people & businesses looking for a CMS. It's functionality is pretty damn sweet and with it's standalone package available for running off your own hosted account (and the fact it is almost completely customizable), WordPress is a no-brainer... except for one thing:

I have this secret love affair with Blogger.

While many moved on past Blogger once they became more serious bloggers, and took up residence at sites like WordPress and Live Journal, I've stayed here (I do briefly mention UFOs here, eventually). It hasn't always been easy, and there have been some major frustrations with it over the year -- namely, the use of Google's own propriety code which is not compliant with W3C standards. Not too big a deal for most, but for me, compliancy is a necessary evil that I have to tend to often, when designing and building sites for clients. Nevertheless, my attraction to Blogger has withstood it's sometimes not-so-minor issues.

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Another Brief Update (Still Void of Panties)

I just posted my first Women of Esoterica article entitled Get Ahead, Go Figure, Go Ahead and Pull the Trigger. It's my take on the 2012 thing, brought on by a curious question my girlfriend asked me this evening.

I have an article for IHW in the works that I'm hoping to finish tomorrow. It's about all of the lunar and planet anomalies Hoagland pulls out of his magic ass -- so keep an eye out for that. Or don't.

And I still have to finish 2 other articles I have been promising to finish for over a month now. *le sigh*

Greetings from the Merlot Madam

Somewhere between the treadmill and my first glass of wine, I decided to -- whoops! Silly me, I went and left my wine on the kitchen counter!

Ok, back! I didn't just get off the treadmill, for the record. That happened around 5. Afterwards, I spoke with a friend online regarding some interesting info, which then lead to a 45 minute roast of paranormal television and nutty exopolitical leaders. I think I even mentioned David Sereda's name, which is a rarity. That reminds me -- Joseph Capp of UFO Media Matters just posted a new article called UFOs: Deconstructing Sereda. I think a few of you just might enjoy this, so give it a read if you've got the time (and lets face it, if you're reading the crap I'm writing, you've certainly got the time.

Speaking of crap I write, I finally broke down and purchased a domain for IHW. I wanted to break 6 months to see if it was actually being read or that I actually kept maintaining the site before doing so. And while it will probably affect my page ranking, I figured I might as well do it now rather than when its way too late. So, the new official URL is: http://www.interstellarhousewife.com/

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Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I'm all caught up with the current UFOlogy crap. Took a couple of hours, but I made it! Now on to the wine!

Happy St. Patrick's Day, my friends!

XOXO

~Deirdre

Brief Update

In case anyone was wondering, I'm still alive! I know I promised a new article a week ago, but I am stupid busy with work -- which is taking up my days and nights. *sigh*

I'll get around to something, soon!

Cheers,

Deirdre