Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Out of Touch

Friday, April 17th, 2009

Before I moved to Oregon, I was constantly reading and keeping up with the news. I always stayed abreast of the latest events, and knew what was going on everywhere from locally to internationally. Ever since I moved, though, I really haven’t been keeping up the same way. The bad part is that I have a lot more time now to invest in that sort of thing, but it’s just not happening. As a result, for the last three months, I’ve been pretty out of it. I really think that I need to change that. I miss knowing what’s going on, and feel like I’m part of the ignorant masses when I don’t keep up. My biggest problem has been my lack of routine. Back when I was working a full time job, and basically did the same thing every day, I had reading the news as part of my daily regimen. As it stands right now, I don’t really have much of a routine at all. What I do every day changes. I had a week where I was in somewhat of a routine, but other changes put a stop to that. With any luck, though, I’ll be able to get myself back into the swing of things. One of the things I’m actually trying as part of this attempt at order is to post more. I’m doing pretty well this week, hopefully I can continue it into next week too. I am going to aim for a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule, and see how that goes. I might switch it to a Tuesday/Thursday if I’m not hitting three a week. I realize that trying to put out posts just for the sake of posts may not do me a lot of good in terms of making every post of great quality (this post being an example of one that’s sub-par), but the idea is that if I make myself write more, I’ll be more likely to write when I do actually have a good idea. As it is now, many of my good ideas never make it past the idea phase, as I’m not in the habit of writing. 

So, to sum it up, I need something that resembles a routine because without one I’m not making myself keep current and I feel like an idiot. As with before, wish me luck.

It’s All My Fault

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

It’s no secret that I suck at posting on here. In the past, I’ve managed to always have some reason as to why I wasn’t posting. It usually inolved being busy with something which led me to being lazy in my free time, and hence the no posting. Well, since my move to Oregon, I’ve had considerably more free time, but significantly fewer posts. If anything, I was doing better when I didn’t have so much free time. What does all this tell us? Well, it means that I’ve got no excuses for not posting, and I have to own up to just being -that- lazy. I’ve had a few thoughts for posts, but haven’t followed through. I’ve had plenty of time to come up with topics, but have done bupkis. We’re going to see if I can do anything to change that. I told a friend (actually, multiple friends) that I’d try to have at least a couple posts a month for a while, so let’s see if I can stick to that. Wish me luck.

Birthday Month

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

May is my unofficial birthday month of my site. Technically, I don’t actually remember when I started it, and all original documents relating to it are long gone. However, May 20, 2002 was the first post that I have record of, and May 23 was when I purchased my domain. That means that unofficially, my site is six years old this month. Throughout the years, I’ve varied on how active I’ve been, and what I’ve written about. I started out writing at least once a day, and pretty much just talked about movies. Then I moved to being less active, and posting a lot of personal stuff. That’s what it was for most of the time, but now I’ve moved to less personal and more random. I pretty much just post about stuff that’s going on in the world, with an emphasis on technology. I’ve been asked/told to move back to personal stuff, and I probably should. Mostly because if I get too busy to read up on things going on, I still would have something to write.  That’s been the case lately. You’ll notice that the last post I had was about a month ago. That’s largely because I’ve been pretty busy this last month. I’ve been going out nearly every night for the last six weeks or so.  I don’t stay out late, but it still eats into my time that I could be reading or posting.  Anyhow, we’ll see if June is a more active month for me. I hope that it is, I miss writing on here. Plus, it’s pretty hard to garner any readers when I never post.

Writing What We Want

Monday, September 10th, 2007

Ok, so I’ll admit that I’m only writing this post to test out the Windows Live Writer that I downloaded last night.  I’ve been hearing good things about it for quite some time now, mostly from Scoble, and wanted to try it out.  I never actually got around to it, though, because I didn’t really see a need for it.  I didn’t really ever write when I didn’t have a net connection, and I don’t really have a major problem with Blogger’s post creator.  It seems, though, that in the last few days I’ve been hearing a whole lot more about this.  I think that it is largely due to Microsoft just releasing their Live Installer to install their suite of Live software.  As an aside, I’ve actually been a fan of all the Live stuff I’ve tried (which I admit is fairly limited).  They all seem to be some nice products, though.  Anyhow, I finally decided I’d grab it last night and give it a shot.  

Part of why I never really felt the need for a special writing utility is that I don’t really do anything other than write some text.  I hardly ever use images, and never really do anything else.  So just throwing out some text, and the occasional image, I couldn’t think of why I’d need something special.   However, if I did decide I wanted to do some more adventurous posting, this definitely makes it easy.  They have a button for just about everything.  Also, with the ability to add plugins, you can make adding anything to your blog just a click away.  One thing that I’ve already found and love is the recognition of short-cut keys that are default across Microsoft products.  To create those links I made, I just highlighted the text I wanted and instinctively hit ctrl-k.  Sure enough, up came my hyperlink window.  Beautiful!  It’s great to have the things that you use as second nature to work how you’d expect and want them to. 

There is one thing that I don’t really like, though, and that is how it does its HTML code.  It puts in all sorts of stuff that I really don’t think are necessary, and I personally don’t use when writing it myself.   I suppose that you make trade-offs for writing in a formatting friendly environment instead of just typing the code.  Then again, when all I’m posting is text it makes you wonder why I don’t just write in HTML anyway…

I do enjoy that I can write posts while offline, and then post once I get back to the net, though.  Before, if I did happen to be without a connection and wanted to write something, I would have to type it up in Word or Notepad, and then copy/paste it over later.  This wasn’t horrible, but it did make it inconvenient with the title and tags (yes, I realize the extent of the inconvenience was having to copy two other items, but when the comparison is zero or two, zero is obviously the winner).  This is definitely nice if I decide I’d like to go sit in a Starbucks and write some, as I’m not going to shell out for the use of the hotspots.

For now, I’ve got it installed on machines and I’ll use it exclusively for updating until it does something to piss me off.