Archive for July, 2008
Return of the CD List
Some of you will probably remember how I used to have a CD list on Juggle Chainsaws, and how it got taken away when I stopped adding to it. Well, it’s back. Sort of. It’s on a different site and has a lot more functionality.
Racks and Tags, along with Orange CD, have given me a place to display it. And trust me, it’s a lot better than manually entering everything into a MySQL database. I get just about everything I could ever want (adding lyrics to tracks would be great, or having it suck in the track times when adding something from Amazon), and it’s less work.
I’m sure a few people will think I was paid somehow for this. But I wasn’t. I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time. Well, not the online display part. That’s just a bonus.
Sapid Existence at Successful Blog
I’ve submitted Sapid Existence to Liz Strauss’ Blog-to Show. That was the easy part. The hard part is waiting another few hours to see what comes out of that. I guess my expecting to see it when I woke up is another example to egocentric thinking.
I’m hoping that things go well with that. I’ve gotten some some responses that have made me very happy, most recently this one from SuRi:
I wonder if you are planning a future in professinal sports photography. I know you have been published in your school newspaper from previous posts, but your sports photos are good enough to be in sports magazines (not that I look at many of those, but my husband does and your shots are right up there with sports illustrated)
Every time I hear that, I start to wonder if it’s something I should persue more activly. So if anyone knows where I can tart to do that in a place other than with newspapers I would love to hear about it. I just don’t want newspapers because I like to have a few days to go over my stuff and get it ready.
Why Twitter Will Never Happen
Twitter had a good run. But I think it will never be more than a novelty.
I signed up for it for the sole purpose of being able to use Sandy through an IM interface. But Twitter’s IM service went down on May 23 and hasn’t been back up since.
The folks who run Twitter just don’t seem to care. And it’s sad really. It looks like a lot of people want to give Twitter a chance to really catch on. It had the chance to be the next Facebook, something on the web that completely changes the way things work.
But really, how can you trust/rely on a company that seems to thumb their colletive noses at the users? It’s been almost 2 months since Twitter’s IM bot went offline. Two months of cery scattered “We’re working on it”s. 2 months of avoiding even talking about the issue.
Really, I’ve had it. I don’t care if this is a free thing. If WordPress was free and has this sort of service, nobody would use it. MySpace has this sort of service, and people are starting to leave in droves. This makes Wal-Mart’s tendancy to have roughly 2% of its registers open look really good.
I wanted Twitter to work. I really did. But if this is the sort of service that Twitter will provide, I can happily move onto something else.
Fun With Google
I was relatively bored, so I decided to search for my name in Google. The results were a bit surprising.
I don’t expect to beat people who have the name in the domain name. But I’m #3 and 5! How sweet is that?
Out of more curiosity, I tried the image search. Again, happiness. Nothing on Page 1 or anything like that, but I do have two on Page 2 (this post and this other post on Sapid Existence) and Page 4 had this one, although why it picked up on the archive for that day and not just the post itself is beyond me.
But not all is happy. I guess I need to start watching myself now. Potential employers can very easily look me up. And with those two other blogs of mine linking here, I’ll probably need to watch myself here too. Oh well, I think I can live with that.
The Multiple Author Quandary
I was looking around the blogsphere when I ran across a post asking about the ethical issues of setting up fake accounts on blogs. That one was specifically about setting up a news blog to look like it had multiple authors so that the blog would be picked up by Google News. I don’t plan on doing that, but I have pulled a few similar tricks in my time.
Back when Waffles Radio was a blog for my radio show, I would leave comments as other people so it looked like people were listening and leaving comments. Some of these comments were based on people I know in the real world where I would write what I’m pretty sure they would have said. But there was one alias I used, Steve, that was totally fabricated.
I’ve also been paid by a few people to make posts on a forum so that it would look populated. The posts were real, but when I fulfilled my end of the contract I stopped visiting. (more…)
A Threat, A Promise
It figures that right after I restart raise this blog from the dead Lorelle has a post about why people stop blogging. I guess it could be sad, but I prefer to see things another way.
I think that the decision to end a blog depends partly on the reason why it was started in the first place. Juggle Chainsaws will stop when there’s nothing I can do with programming stuff anymore. Sapid Existence will stop when the photography stops (which could be the day I die, we’ll see about that).
As for this, it’s a whole different ballgame. I started this as a collection of thoughts. Eventually that could either prove to be too much to keep up with because of other commitments taking over my time or I could just get into a line of work where I don’t have much to say that wouldn’t jeopardize my career. I’m already close to that working at a preschool now, but I’ve got Winthrop to fuel a lot of things.
So, about the title…. For one thing, I thought that it just sounded better than just having it be “A Promise.” It makes it more of a necessary thing in my mind. So, I promise/threaten to keep writing this blog until either the passion runs out or I just don’t have time for it anymore. And when that happens, I promise not to just kill it. Instead, I’ll put up a notice of absense letting you know that I’m taking a vacation from blogging. If you are taking the time to read this, then you deserve to see if I’ll be updating in the foreseeable future.
Why I Hate Blogger
I know, I’m branching this off of my tech blog thing and the first thing I do is to write about Blogger/Blogspot. That’s just the way things go I guess.
But there’s a good reason for this. It’s not anything to do with splogs or the overall sameness look of most Blogger blogs. It has to do with the Blogger comment system.
Over at Sapid Existence I participate in something called Photo Story Friday where people post a photograph and a story that involves it somehow. I like the exposure and seeing other people’s stuff.
What I don’t like is the number of blogs where I have to have a Blogger account in order to leave a comment. Only slightly less annoying are the blogs where I have to have a Blogger account or an OpenID account somewhere (which technically I do have but don’t feel like using, so I only have myself to blame for that one).
But what I don’t like the most is that there isn’t any indication on the blogs on what I have to have in order to leave a comment. Well, there is, but it’s below the comment box so I’ve already read the post and written my comment and then scroll down to see that I won’t be leaving that comment because I don’t have a Blogger account.
It would be nice if there was some way to let people know this before they even read the post. Because I’m getting tired of writting my comment and then not being able to say it. Or I guess I could just remember which ones won’t let me leave a comment. But that doesn’t really help when I haven’t even visited that blog before.