I feel a little like Henry Thoreau, seeing as I am writing this post from the shores of Deep Creek Lake in Western Maryland. I have spent a vacation day to come out here and spend some time with my wife and mother-in-law who have been out here all week. Deep Creek Lake is nestled into the Appalachian Mountains far out into the panhandle of Western Maryland. In the winter, the trees on the slopes have been cleared to turn this area into a large skiing destination (Wisp, for example). In the summer, the weather is warm enough to make Deep Creek Lake a boating haven.

Seeing as how this is a boaters paradise, we thought we would share in the fun. So I strapped the kayak onto the roof of the car and drove it out here. Margaret and her mother have gone up and down the lake in it and seem to really be enjoying it. I’m hoping to take it for a spin with Margaret tomorrow.

This is very much a resort town, as there are bumper boats, go carts, mini-golf and whatever else you would expect from a summer resort town. And this includes no shortage of places to dine.

The girls, when not out on the water boating and swimming, have been relaxing in other ways. Watching movies, reading, needlepoint, and so on. I hope to partake in some of this relaxation tomorrow as well.

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I have switched from using the on-line Wordpress editor to using an offline one on my Powerbook called MarsEdit. My main reason to switch is that I can work on blog posts while disconnected (but also the built in spell checker. I’m sure all my readers will appreciate that!). But the problem is two fold: Wordpress doesn’t support tagging without a plugin (I use Jerome’s Keywords) and Jerome’s Keywords isn’t supported through the XML-RPC interface that MarsEdit uses to talk to Wordpress (my opinion: small design problem on Wordpress’ part to not allow pluings to do XML-RPC stuff).

But I stumbled upon How to make ecto work with Jerome’s Keywords, which also will work for MarsEdit (and probably any other tool that uses XML-RPC to talk to WordPress).

First, make the two modifications to the Wordpress PHP code as mention in the ecto article.  This will allow you to set the keywords from MarsEdit.  But I went one better and allows MarsEdit to read what the tags are as well.  Make this modification to the same xmlrpc.php file:

In the mw_getPost function, look for the line that is creating the respone ($resp = array…).  Add the following line to the end of the array creation:

‘mt_keywords’ => get_post_meta($postdata['ID'], ‘keywords’, true)

And then you can fully use the keywords in MarsEdit.

Oh, and I also had to tell MarsEdit that I am using Wordpress so it could turn on the Keywords feature for me and I was good to go.

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When I was doing obedience training with my dog CJ, I was told that dogs remember smells. This is why they want to sniff other animals rear ends and also why they want to smell your breath. All ways of them better remembering who you are.

I had a similar experience today. Our weather is shifting a little today from hot and humid to not-so-hot and humid as a low pressure system moves through. Of course, this means unstable weather and thunderstorms. As a result, this is almost a musty, moist smell in the air that reminds me of the smell of the lake at my grandparent’s house. They lived there for so long that they probably don’t even notice it anymore. But I can’t help but notice it every time I step out of the car for the first time.

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