Two weeks ago, I changed the hosting provider for my blogs and implemented Akismet to reduce my comment spam. Since that time, I’ve noticed that I don’t have any trackbacks listed in the comments of any of my posts.

It’s sad that it took me two weeks to look into this problem, because I noticed almost immediately that something was funny with the Akismet stats right after I moved my blogs to the new host. The number of spam comments Akismet “protected” me from was steadily increasing, but there were very few comments in the Askimet Spam queue.

It’s been raining here every day for the last seventeen days and they are forecasting rain for at least the next seven. I don’t necessarily mind the rain, but here in Oklahoma, we don’t normally get this much.

We usually average 35.85 inches of precipitation each year. We’ve already had 30.01 inches of rain this year, with a staggering 8.23 inches this month. The ground is totally saturated and I have a river in front of my house.

Please forgive the forthcoming shameless self promotion.

I’m on cloud nine today because one of my posts from NewBlogger.net got dugg on Digg.com yesterday. The post that got dugg was: Tweak the WordPress Live Plugin to Exclude Your IP Address. It’s not popular or anything, but I thought I would mention it just in case you wanted to digg it too.

It doesn’t take much to make me happy (obviously), but if that post had more than two diggs, I would be ecstatic.

I was tagged by Roberta Ferguson to share a little about myself behind the scenes. The Face Behind the Blog meme was started by David Airey to encourage bloggers to share some photographs to show your personal side. Here is a glimpse into the other side of me.

One of the things I really love about my wife is that she thinks I can do anything.  She’s always telling her friends “my husband can do that” every time something is broken or needs to be built.  In the three an a half years we’ve been married, she’s turned me into the resident “computer guy” and “Mr. Fixit”, so her friends don’t hesitate to call when they need help.  I don’t mind helping out but I need a break sometimes.  Recently, when one of my wife’s co-workers saw an advertisement in the newspaper for adirondack chairs, she was very quick to offer my services. 

…well, at least that’s what Roberta Ferguson thinks, anyway. 

 I was just tagged as an Awesome Guy Blogger and got this nifty badge:

Roberta started the Rockin’ Girl Blogger award yesterday and was kind enough to give us guys a cool award too.  (she could probably hear us guys crying for being left out.) 

One of my responsibilities as an Awesome Blogger is to tag some other Awesome Guy Bloggers, so here goes in no particular order:

I’ve been out of pocket on my blog for nearly a week now, and I apologize. It’s just been one of those weeks… Part of the reason I have been away, besides a killer workload, is because I have been migrating my websites and blogs to a new hosting provider.

Today is the eighth day since I quit smoking and the fifteenth day since I started taking Chantix. I’ve had my moments of weakness, but I’m settling into a groove now where I’m wanting to smoke less and less. I am still very pleased with Chantix and will continue to recommend it to everyone that asks.

Have you ever had one of those days where you wake up the next morning wondering why you did something the night before? Yeah, me too. I had this feeling Sunday morning…

My wife and I went to a party Saturday night. I bet you can guess what happened…I smoked. I’m not going to beat myself up about this any longer, but I will say that I am really disapointed in myself for blowing 3 days without smoking. I am back on track and that is the only thing that matters right now.

Today is my quit day. I am a non-smoker now.

I have been taking my Chantix for the last week while still smoking as I normally did. I think I actually smoked a little more in the last couple of days than I usually do, but that was mostly because I was nervous about quitting. I suppose I wasn’t totally convinced that Chantix would actually work for me.