Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be, but first I need more coffee.

Category: Stuff

I Am Still Here

As a web developer, I probably ought to update my site more often. At least to let people know I still exit and still in business. My bad. This past year has been very busy and full of ups and downs, family, health, travel, work with existing clients.

The featured image of this post is of my parents, Darryl and Linda, whitewater rafting. I wish I could remember when and where it took place, but based on their age in the picture and guessing the most likely place it happened in the late 1980’s and in Colorado. My father is wearing the White Sox baseball cap in the upper right and my mother is to his left. Note—He was a diehard Cubs fan, so I’m guessing if he’d lost the cap, he wouldn’t have felt so put out if it had been a Cubs hat. He did like the Sox a little too. I lost both my parents within the last two years. I lost my mother Linda in September of 2022 and my father Darryl in June of 2024. They had been married for 59 years. My mom made it to 81 and my dad almost made it to 83. So I am blessed that I had them for as long as I did in my life.

I won’t promised to update this more often or say how frequently. My last major project was to import all of my LiveJournal entries. I’d been cleaning up or removing bad links. Whether or not this hurts my employment prospects,  I don’t know and to be honest, I don’t care. We are all more online and if you can dig back far enough you’ll discover I’ve changed my views over time like any grown up would. It remains to be seen if I’ll stay on the WordPress platform, but it’s a good one and has a large community and that’s what most of my clients use. If that changes, I’ll let everyone know, but I’ll keep supporting my existing clients using WordPress for as long as they’d like to use me.

Camellia Oil

Apparently there is more than one kind of Camellia oil. I purchase a bodhran a few months ago and I contacted the maker on how to take care of the drum skin especially in Arizona’s dry climate. He recommend Camellia oil and sent me this link.

http://www.mehr-als-werkzeug.de/product/705280/Sinensis-Kamelienoel-100-ml.htm?lang=en

Since the supplier was in Germany and didn’t want to pay international shipping and went to Amazon and after much research and reading reviews of Camelia oil I found this.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000OW9QCW/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I received it today and opened it. I did not put any on the drum skin as it is in good shape. I started to write the maker an email that I found a source of oil in the US. Then I noticed something. I figured what I’d found was just a different brand. I bought Oshima Tsubaki Camellia Hair Care Oil. He recommended Sinensis® Camellia Oil. The descriptions were similar, but as I read over his email he said to use a verbal oil free of acid. The description of the tsubaki oil said it had Omega-9, an oleic acid. I still don’t know what a verbal oil is. Perhaps it was a typo and he mean herbal oil.

Then I realized the oil I purchased was light yellow and the one he recommended was white. The oil I bought was made from the seed of the Camellia japonica. The one he recommended was made from Camellia sinensis. There is a third camellia seed oil made from Camellia oleifera.

https://wawaza.com/pages/How-to-Use-Japanese-Camellia-(Tsubaki)-Oil.html#Japonica%20v.%20Sinensis

I strongly suspect that there isn’t much difference between japonica and sinensis oil and I could use it on my drum skin, but I’ll be purchasing sinensis oil from another vendor I found in the United States. Both are used for hair and skin care, but the latter is also used for keeping knives rust free. As for the third oleifera that is used for cooking oil in Asia. I can still use the oil I bought, either on my hair or my wife can use it. Camellia is a genus of plants and camellia sinensis is the plant where tea comes from and it is also known as tea seed oil which is not the same as tea tree oil (from a different genus altogether). However, you can buy tea seed oil in some stores like Whole Foods and it is usually camellia oleifera.

Anyway, here’s more than you ever wanted to know about the Camellia genus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camellia

Fifteen and a Half Hours

I recently went Australia. We flew from LAX to Melbourne. It was a 15.5 hour flight which is still difficult for me to comprehend.

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A-380

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Black swan and cygnets in Budj Bim

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Swanson Street in Melbourne

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