Making Life an Adventure

 

My sister just returned from her first cruise and she posted this on her Facebook page, “It just came to me…Life is a party…”. Well, I can agree with that to a point, but I’d rather believe that life should be an adventure. I think I’ve pretty much made my life an adventure so I thought I should write a little something about that here. I would like to describe some of my adventures and hopefully encourage all my readers to make their life an adventure also.

I have had the privilege to know a lot of different folks around town since I first moved here. Many of them just live their lives going to work every day, they would take vacation days to work around home and never go anywhere special. Some have never tried anything new or challenging. There are some who have not even traveled more than 100 miles from home. This doesn’t sound very adventurous to me.

When I turned 18, I decided right then that I would join the Army, so that’s what I did. I was living in Florida at the time so I traveled first to Jacksonville for my physical and induction into the Army. Having past the physical, I was inducted into the Army and immediately sent to Ft. Benning, Georgia for my basic training. My first real adventure had begun. The next three years would prove to be very adventurous indeed. I traveled around the country serving at different military posts and spent one year fighting in Vietnam (not the most pleasant adventure).

After separation from active duty I came home, started college and took a job with the county. The job was with the mosquito control which meant I would be traveling around the county to all the wetlands controlling them where they where populating. The most challenging part of that job was avoiding all the poisonous snakes and alligators that I would be encountering. While doing all this, I also became friends with a local diving instructor. So the next thing I know I was getting the training I needed to get my certifications to be a scuba diver. Now, I would be diving around the area to depths exceeding 100 feet. From snakes to alligators to the little fishes swimming around me, I’m living an adventure!

Living at home proved less than desirable, so I moved on. I left west central Florida and headed southeast to where an uncle of mine lived. I didn’t live there very long when I met the girl who would become my wife. She was there staying with a cousin, having moved down from Wisconsin. We both decided that it wasn’t the place for us so we moved here to Northeast Wisconsin where I live to this day.

Not long after moving here, getting married and starting a family, I would meet someone who would introduce my to my next adventure, flying. I started with flying a Cessna 150, then later I would fly a 172. A few years later I met a new friend who would teach me to fly the right seat in a twin engine Cessna 421. I loved flying that one especially! We would fly around the Great Lakes area and out to the east coast. I had a lot of great experiences flying, too many to mention here.

My work for a local shipbuilding company took me around the Great Lakes also. They would fly me to various cities to work on the ships and I even sailed on a few of them.

I’ve had the opportunity to travel from coast to coast, north to south and points in between. I’ve seen San Francisco, Philadelphia, Miami, Tampa, Tallahassee, San Antonio and Houston, just to name a few. To write about them all, I would have to write a book. I mention them only to let you know that you can get out to other places to see new things, and meet new people. Make life an adventure!

Some of you may not be able to travel to find new adventures. But, you can find many close to home. Check your local papers and information centers for activities that are going on in your area. I’m often surprised when I hear someone say there’s nothing to do around here. Why then do tourists flock to our county for a vacation? There are things to do. There are adventures here close to my home and yours.

I’m limited now as to what I can do and where I can go. I now have to use a powered wheel chair to get around and I no longer drive myself around in my van. My adventures are my writing, helping friends with their computer skills and things like that. I find new things to do right here at home. I’m not going to stop being adventurous just because I can’t get out and about. I enjoy checking my stats on this blog and seeing that I’ve had readers from Russia, India, Germany and Canada. I hope to see many more readers from around the world. To me this is quite exiting! I’d like to make friends with some of these people to learn about them and their way of life. This is my new adventure.

Now when you’re done reading this, if your life has been an adventure, share the memories with your children, grandchildren, friends and family. I’m sure they’d love to hear your stories. If you haven’t been adventurous, then maybe it’s time to start. Life’s too short to get stuck in a rut and do nothing. Have fun and create some new memories, do some exploring, meet new people and enjoy life to the fullest. I think that’s what our creator would want for us.

Have a happy adventure my friends!

-Ed

Targeted Ads……Opt-Out?

 

We’ve all visited websites displaying numerous ads. These same ads seem to be popping up from places we’ve been around the internet. And yes, they are following us. Recently, this all came to a head when on my Facebook page the ads went way over the top with the flashing and the audio screaming at me. I couldn’t leave my Facebook page open any longer. I’d open it only to check it, then close again.

That’s what finally got me started investigating where these were all coming from. It seemed that some friends were not getting the same activity that I was. I started by clicking the link below one of the ads that read “about this ad”. Here is what I learned….

The link directed me to the website Pulse 360, an advertising agency who is a leader in content targeted advertising on the internet. Once here I first learned that I could opt-out of their tracking my movements around the web and they would no longer target ads at me when I visited any of the sites where they were posting ads. I opted out!.

While on their site they also had a link that would direct me to the Network Advertising Initiative website. The NIA helps protect our privacy online. When I clicked on their Opt-Out link I was directed to the Opt-Out page and was surprised to see the long list of active cookies that had been installed on my computer. I chose to ‘select all’ and then ‘submit’ to Opt-Out of all of them. However, there was one that is no longer with the NIA so I was provided a link to go to that site to opt-out. That one is Quantcast.

I then went to the Quantcast website and found they also had and active cookie on my computer. I opted out of that one too.

Now maybe my Facebook page was cleaned up and I would no longer have all those obnoxious ads running on my page. I was wrong! They were still all there. I then thought that if I cleared my cookies they would go away. That turned out to be a mistake. You don’t want to clear your cookies after you opt-out, as what opt-out does is to install cookies on your computer that disables any active cookies placed there by the advertiser. And, the ads on Facebook were still there anyway. I had to go back  through the process to opt-out all over again.

I continued my research to find out why I was still getting those ads. I don’t recall how I came across this next site, but this one is Plural Media LLC. They are yet another one of those advertisers on the web. As I read to the bottom of the page I saw they had a link to disable Page Rage. An application that will put a neat wall paper background on your Facebook page. That’s right, I had it on mine. Having seen it on a friends computer I wanted it too. So maybe if I disabled it the ads would go away. I went to http://www.pagerage.com/disable/ and disabled Page Rage. When I went back to my Facebook page it was refreshingly clean. No more ads.

I can now go to any favorite sites and not be bombarded with a lot of targeted advertising. Yes, there are still a few, I didn’t get them all. But my web experience is a lot more pleasant now without the ads following me around.

If your having the experiences I was having, or if you just want to have a higher level of privacy while web surfing, you know one more step you can take, Opt-Out of targeted advertising. It’s easy to do once you know where to go.

One more thing I should mention is that if you’re using more than one browser, I have four installed, you will need to go though the opt-out process for each one of them as the cookies will be installed on each browser.

I hope this gives you, the reader, a greater sense of control over the internet and you have a greater degree of privacy when using it. I know I do.

-Ed