L found this little guy hopping across our living room floor. He was too small to physically pick up. After a brief modeling session, I set him free on the porch. Bye Froggy friend.
My Froggy Friend - On a Magazine
My Froggy Friend sitting in my hand
My good wonderfully talented friend Chris, over at The Shiny List was taking requests for art projects, and just finished this for me. You ought check out more of his work…
Steampunk Badger, originally uploaded by xtopher42.
Technorati Tags: The Shiny List, Steampunk, Badger, Art
It seems, that much like the road to hell, this blog is becoming paved with good intentions. Be that as it may, work is being done.
Podcast #3 is largely complete and I’m toying with the idea of both doing a weekly ShoutCAST stream, as well getting a proper microphone and a small mixer and actually APPEARING on my own damn podcast (Novel, I know…)
I’m also trying to objectively look at my time commitments before I consider adding a tLog to Living in Blue Shift [dot] com. My rational being:
But, my hang up is, I struggle to maintain this site as much as I’d like due to equal parts exhaustion, more pressing responsibilities, lack of inspiration/motivation, and of course laziness. I’d rather not take the time to create a framework for more content only to let it collect dust.
With all of this, I’m also looking at diddling around with Yahoo! Pipes [wiki description]service to effectively lifestream my online activities. While it might be of some interest to others, I feel that largely this is for my own academic gratification (Which I then question, why the hell I’d need a lifestream, I’m the one living it… But I digress). Somehow the idea of a long string of aggregated RSS entries being my lasting scrawl seems fitting.
This all leads up to a series of entries I’ve been semi-writing for months now regarding the integration of so-called Web2.0 technologies into our lifestyles on and off the grid. If I get my ass in gear, part one could actually be up soon, assuming I don’t get distracted as usual.
Technorati Tags: podcast, tLog, Micro-blogging, Yahoo! Pipes, Web2.0, Aggregation, technology, blogging, procrastination
Well, for those of you who might think a plumbers pipes never leak, I can assure you with all certainty that they do. And when they do, it often floods. What I am eluding to is my recent string of bad luck with electronics (i.e.: A dead iPod) and now compounded with failed sectors in my companion laptop, meaning my laptop is dead until I can get a new hard drive in it and reload EVERYTHING [Grumble]. While I am relatively sure that the majority of the data will be recoverable, and luckily my music collection was spared on an external hard drive, I am still too fucking frustrated for words. At least it happened AFTER the wedding. I am trying hard not to take this as a life sign that I ought to be doing other things.
That being said, maybe I ought to be doing other things; like writing a damn article about the end of the labor union strike on Broadway for the company webpage that the boss wanted me to write (For those of you just tuning in, I am the IT Director, not a Public Relation Manager or a Journalist…) Then again, maybe I should take that as a sign that I should also be blogging more over here…
Photo by me, taken some time back. There are more pictures over at my flickr page.
Technorati Tags: Frustration, laptop, hard drive, writing, career
I could should be working right now. But I really just have no motivation to. I’d rather go sit outside with a cocktail and a book that I could feign reading before drifting off to sleep. Right now it’s a gorgeous “Fall” day in Houston [No comments on REAL seasons from The Other Professor Middents]. After the typical humid summer, I’m definitively enjoy this.
Two weeks from tomorrow L & I will be married in Santa Fe, NM. I’m a mix of nervous, excited, and exhausted. I didn’t think I’d get nervous; hell I’ve done this before, right? But I strangely am. It’s not cold feet, or question whether this is right, it’s just nervousness over taking that step. And obviously the excitement needs no real explanation. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to spend the rest of my life with this woman. And as for exhausted… Fuck, I am so tired of wedding planning and minutia-level details. I just want it to be done, and get back to pre-wedding planning life. I look forward to getting back to things like trying to make something interesting out of this site, the podcast and all my other stupid projects that are simmering somewhere in the back of my brain.
I’ve been working [albeit at a snails pace] on a handful of things
I’m just want to try to get back to whatever it was I use to call normal.
Anyway, I suppose I should think about building a mass email that needs to go out Wednesday for the office. Blarf.
Vegetarian
Corn-dogs and wine. So Tasty.
How White-trash am I?
Technorati Tags: Haiku
<WHINE>
Ugg, I’m fighting the sickness from hell currently. In fact, ill enough that it has taken me 3 damn days to even get this much written. I feel like someone has placed party balloons in my sinuses and inflated them to the maximum volumetric amount without bursting. My whole damn body aches and I can’t get comfortable. I took Tuesday off from work, when this first struck, but work called more times then I care to count. Basically, I’m miserable. That being said, the Goblin raised my spirits today after showing me the card she made me at school the other day. Clearly she understands how I feel as evidenced by this:
Click on the image to see why I almost peed myself with laughter.
Yes, my daughter has been pinned pretty well. Dramatics and all. Ok, I’m done…
</WHINE>
Oh happy day for geeky little basey! The new version of ml_ipod [the ultimate non-iTunes iPod manager for WinAmp] was released quietly early this week with a feature I’ve been lusting after since it’s inception, Audioscrobbler/Last.FM support! These means all everything I play on my iPod gets ‘scrobbled too! [My Last.FM Page is here].
For those not in the know… shame on you. Audioscrobbler/Last.FM basically tracks EVERYTHING you listen to [up until now limited what one listened to AT their terminal] and uploads the information [not the song] to your personal Last.FM page. Thus you can communicate with others who might have similar music taste to your own, as well as learn about artists you may or may not have been exposed to. They also include a Radio function, that plays things it thinks you might like, that you can more or less tailor to suit your preferences, that also tags songs to your profile. Thus you can avoid that whole “I heard this really great song on the radio but I have no idea who sings it” issue. The other great feature, that I am sadly don’t have much time for, but would love to use more, is personally tagging artists with your own keyword tags like “Shoegazer, Post-Rock, Bands-I’ve-Heard-Live, etc.”
So, yeah, the ability to also catch all the things I listen to when I am driving or out and about, makes for a happy basey.
I read a wonderful post just yesterday that I stumbled upon whist looking at something completely unrelated (don’t ask me what it was, I ain’t got a clue). It was a blog entry on “Why I blog” that really made sense to me. I’ve been self-editing so much; thinking “No blog something serious and meaningful and deep and blah, blah, blah.” that I hardly get anything out.
Basically, what I’m trying to tiptoe around here without scaring you is that there’s no point to anything and then you die.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, cheer up! As oxymoronic as it sounds, sheer insignificance can be really empowering. The pressure’s off. You don’t matter and never will. So it’s time to do what you want! “Ohh, I shouldn’t be spending so much time playing solitaire/watching TV/picking my nose.” What are you feeling so guilty about? You aren’t going to cure cancer, and even if you did, you would still die, and so would everyone you cured, so unless curing cancer is fun for you (and it certainly is for some people), do something else. Whatever you want. It can even be something really stupid. Like collecting rocks. Or sitting and pretending to be a rock. Or sitting and pretending to be a rock who likes to play video games all day while eating cheese. Not because it matters, or because it means anything, but because you like doing it.
An excerpt from Why I Blog – written over at Schnozzfest
I need to accept that I don’t have to have something epic to say. My life is as thrilling as everyone else’s. And I have my moments of clarity and humour. And besides, I imagine few other people can say they were hit on my a dwarf in a bear costume… [It was a Rockettes incident, I never got around to blogging it...] I’m going to write about what I want, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll find it interesting, or think I’m funny (please god, tell me you think I’m funny…). Maybe you’ll like the podcasts. Maybe you’ll hate them. It really doesn’t matter. The end all is, I enjoy doing it. And I needed to remind myself of that.
Technorati Tags: ml_ipod, iPod, WinAmp, Audioscrobbler, Last.FM, tagging, blog, self-editing, Sick
It was brought to my attention the site navigation bar was broken when viewed with Internet Explorer [I use Firefox, it looked fine there...]. I tracked down the tags that I had neglected to close in the code and it should be working fine now. Sorry. I suck.
The quiet of post-holiday madness has now passed at the office and it’s ‘business-as-usual’. My body is killing me; everything from my hips to my wrists ache from either constant movement [scurrying about the building fixing or assessing things] or long coding sessions. Management has officially dropped the edict that they want a new website, as they currently HATE the design & structure of the current site [Linky-linky]. So, I get to work from the ground up on a new design, framework, and all the associated web-applications required for it. I’m both excited and overwhelmed. Meanwhile, we are also expecting the installation of the new electronic marquis for the front of the building at the end of February, and yours truly has to do all the content for that [That will actually be a bit of fun, as it's strictly graphic design and I fully intend to hide things in the pictures for my own amusement]. So, it goes without saying that I’m a might bit tired.
On the non-boringless-boring, I’m-a-big-dork-front, I discovered that Ned’s Atomic Dustbin released a brand new single in ’06 and I have acquired it and am re-living the 90′s quite contently. I’ve also rekindled my love affair with modern Icelandic music, specifically anything by Biggi [Birgir Hilmarsson]. With my new iPod, and long sessions at the terminal, I’ve had the opportunity to enjoy listening to music again [and my office is so far away from everything else, I can listen as loudly as I like...] This makes basey a happy little Puffin. This is also helping me build the tracklist for the first of my long-intended podcast which I expect to post by the end of the weekend.
All of this is exceeding had to really concentrate on as I am two weeks away from my five-ish day venture to Sarasota to visit L [Whom I have not seen since Dec. 27 and will be gone until mid-March]. So yeah, time is both flying past me in some aspects and crawling at an agonizing pace in other ways. Less mundane posts to follow soon…
Technorati Tags: website, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Icelandic music, Biggi, Birgir Hilmarsson
My poor blog is rusting away here in the wild of the blogosphere lately. I’ve had so much going on lately between the new job [I've been here almost amonth now] and parenting and relationships, I’m just too damn tired [and frankly sick of sitting in front of a terminal] to blog like I should.
Things are starting to become more routine at the office; less fires to put out. It’s a bit lonely, I have to admit. There are only about 14 full-time employees at the Hobby Center and everyone keeps busy, so I go hours without seeing another face somedays [If only I could get the phone to stop ringing now]. And to boot, my office, while huge, is in the back corner of the building, so no one really walks PAST. But I like the quiet. I learn new things every day, and get the feeling that I am about to be given the task of compeltely rewriting the website, which could be fun [And I have being toying with the idea of being all "web 2.0” and coding it using a goodly amount of AJAX, which I have wanted to learn anyway].
L has been an absolute blessing over the past month; being support during all my frustration, self doubt and long hours at the office. She and are have continued decorating the house, though we’re paused at the moment as she left to work in North Carolina for 27 days. I miss her already.
Other irons in the fires right now that once again I can’t discuss until the moment is right. Hopefully I’ll get around to updating some of the other content of this page soon. But right now, I require lunch.
Technorati Tags: new job, tired, Hobby Center, web 2.0, AJAX
all text (c) 2006-2008 Living in Blue Shift.
powered by wordpress and one grumpy badger
