Tag: blogging

So Much for That

I told myself that I was going to keep this new account clean.  I was going to start from scratch and forget about past stuff.  Then I was poking around the settings page and saw that they had a function for importing Medium blogs.  I didn’t know that WordPress could do that.  So I popped over to Medium and found the export function and then popped back to WordPress and imported it.  So much for a clean start.  If I was going to do that, then I had to pull in the last WordPress account too, and that account includes all of the Blogger posts and a bunch of Myspace posts too.  It took a while, and a lot of it is littered with broken image links (thanks a ton, Posterous) but it’s all here.  Again, so much for a clean start.

So it’s St Patrick’s Day.  Are you having a Happy St Patrick’s Day?  My go to line is always that I don’t have to wear green because my red hair is proof enough of my Irishness.  Har har har very funny.  I don’t drink, so I don’t really celebrate outside of eating some boiled dinner.  Corned Beef and Cabbage, hold the cabbage please.  Today though, I did something fitting.  Netflix released the new Marvel series, Iron Fist.  The traffic was light enough that I got into work over an hour early, so I watched the first episode on my iPhone while sitting in the car.  The jury is still out on the show.  I don’t really like marshal arts stories.  This feels like that kind of thing after one hour.  The interesting thing though was when I went looking for podcasts that cover the show and found one that seems to cover all of the Defenders series.  They published an episode today that discussed the first episode of Iron Fist.  That was exactly what I wanted for my evening commute.  The cool thing?  It was three Irish guys.  They wished us all a happy St Patrick’s Day.

My wife and my step daughter are going to the movies tomorrow.  My step son and I are on our own for the afternoon.  We have to come up with something interesting to do.  I have no ideas at this point.  I’d be up for an Avengers movie fest, but we should do something that doesn’t involve melting our brains in front of the tube.  I’ll let you know what we come up with.

Know What I Hate?

Do you know what I hate about this time of year?

Everything.  Absolutely everything.  That’s not what I am talking about though.  I mean something specific.

I’m working from home today.  I’m taking my lunch break, eating a sandwich and sipping some soda, checking my work email so that I don’t find myself 50 messages behind when I finish my lunch.  I look out the window and the sky is blue and the sun is out and the reflection of the sun off of the snow that kicked our ass two days ago blinds me.  That’s what I hate about this time of year.  Snow blindness.  Looking out the window at the sunny almost-Spring day should not hurt, but it does.  Now my eyes hurt and reading those work emails is painful.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again:  Screw you, Mother Nature.

Why did I start this blog?  Can anyone tell me?  I can’t remember exactly when it happened.  It was either Monday night just at the moment when I was dropping off to sleep, or Tuesday morning just at the moment when I was coming out of sleep.  The thought popped into my head, I should go back to wordpress.com.  By the time I was up and about on Tuesday the idea was solidly in place and would not go away.  Damn it.

I posted on myspace and then myspace went away.  I posted on blogger for years and then suddenly switched to wordpress.com for no apparent reason.  I posted there for years and then switched to medium.com, again for no apparent reason.  I think I lasted about a year or so on medium and now I’m back to wordpress.  Why?  What’s wrong with me?  Why do I have this need to start over?  Why can’t I just start an account and stick with it?  I drive myself nuts sometimes.  I feel like such a tool, bloggily speaking.

I will get this page up to speed, it just might take me a while.  Last time I did this I was full on psyched about a new blog account and I was throwing widgets and crap onto the screen like they were goin’ out of style.  I was a madman.  Now?  I’m just gonna take my time.  I’ll have a set of links that might include the old blogs, and Flickr, and Alonetone.com and all that stuff.  Maybe a list of podcasts that I have been listening to.  I’m all about podcasts right now, because how can some one who is an insufferable nerd start doing things that could make him even nerdier?  Right now I have a hockey podcast playing and they are ripping the NBC hockey broadcast team with a ferocity that is almost but not quite frightening.  I agree with every word.  In other words, podcasts are good.  I’ve been thinking… if I start a podcast, what would I talk about?  Nothing work related, obviously.  Cover band behind the scenes stuff?  That topic would dry up in seconds for me.  Guitar gear?  Only if I could get free stuff to review.  Yeah, I’ll be a shill if it gets me new fuzz pedals.  Oh yeah.

Back on topic.  New blog.  Do I want to do anything different this time?  Based on the last couple of paragraphs, maybe I should go all stream of consciousness and just throw out disjointed word associations…

Naw, I’ll just post pictures of my cat.

No “Now What” This Year

Every year when March comes around and RPM ends I feel compelled to ask myself (publicly, via blog), “now what?”

Not this year.

Musically speaking, of course. This year I am not really in that space. Maybe having to rush the RPM Challenge process at the end has taken the air out of my sails. I don’t know. I have started messing with one new song idea this month. The idea is to write a song that the band can play, but every time I do that it falls apart and none of the guys show a lot of interest.

It doesn’t matter.

As of tonight the RPM process is officially complete. I uploaded my project to the RPM website’s jukebox, and I also uploaded it to bandcamp.com.

https://robertparker.bandcamp.com/album/foaming-at-the-mouth

Posting to bandcamp is always the last thing I do. It marks February as officially over.

Musically speaking, of course.

Mood Swings

I went to the RPM Challenge website during my lunch break to check out any new blog or forum posts. There aren’t many at this point, but come February 1st, there will be a lot. I figured I’d add a blog post about how I sort of want this year’s project to sound one way, but it will probably end up as something different. I think I tapped into something unconscious. This is what I posted:

These days I am stuck in a teeter totter of mood swings that go from depressed defeatism to just roaring mad. This is the world we live in now, I guess. If it weren’t for my wife and step kids I’d probably go nuts.

Join me!

I want this year’s music to be mean and angry and complicated and anti-social and to have as little as humanly possible to do with what anyone else might want me to write or sound like. Of course I lack the talent to write music like that, so at best we’ll get noisy songs that sound kinda mad but otherwise sound like everything else I’ve ever done.

Or, I’ll go into it wanting angry and mean and anti-social and end up with quiet and moody woe-is-me stuff (with the occasional wah-wah guitar solo).

How the hell should I know what it’s going to sound like? I’m not even sure who I am anymore. I had all these preconceived notions about the world outside my door and BANG they’re all wrong.

A wise man (who played in a band called Traffic) once said, “who knows what tomorrow may bring?”

Two weeks from tomorrow. Come on February, you son of a bitch. Bring it on. Do your worst.

Okay, where the hell did that come from? I think I can guess, and I think the answer has to do with a certain American transfer of government that is scheduled to take place on Friday. That’s pretty much coloring every thought these days.

Geddy’s

My tiny little brain is so easily confused.

I was going to write something about how the last time I officially swapped blogging services was just before a long weekend get away my beautiful wife and I took to Bar Harbor, ME. I was going to connect it to today by saying that we need to go back to Bar Harbor for two reasons. First, I changed blogging services. Second, the t-shirt I bought at Geddy’s has a hole in the armpit and needs to be replaced. That would be a funny post, right? Ha. Funny.

Then I realized that it wasn’t the Bar Harbor trip that coincided with leaving Blogger, it was a long weekend getaway to the White Mountains in New Hampshire where we stayed in a cabin set off from the rest of the hotel and there was an outdoor hot tub and we used it even though it was December and about zero degrees out, and also drove all the way out to Dixville Notch for absolutely no reason at all.

So my coincidental t-shirt/blog service post is null and void.

I still want to go back to Geddy’s though.

The view from Cadillac Mountain in Bar Harbor, ME.

Trump Fans

I never had any interest in using any of the wordpress.com themes that don’t show the full text on the main page.  I thought they were stupid.  Un-Bloggerish, if you will.  Then I used one for Lizardfish because the background image looked awesome.  Now I’m softening.  I put this theme on last week and so far I haven’t started hating it yet.

It has changed something for me though.  Now I want every post to have an image.  There’s a function called a featured image, which is used here, but I have to add the image to my wordpress.com storage.  That’s going to get old quick.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to write about themes…

I saw something on Facebook today that made me laugh.  Someone shared a canned search that finds all of your Facebook friends who are fans of Donald Trump’s official Facebook page.  It’s a nice way to blanket stereotype people as Trump-esque neo-fascists.  In much the same way as the Donald, in the most blatantly un-American move I’ve personally ever seen a candidate make, has blanket stereotyped all Muslims as terrorists.  Gee… my buddy’s five year old son doesn’t seem like a terrorist, but if the Donald says so it must be true!

The search returned three people.  One of them is already muted due to insufferably offensive conservatism.  The other two have given me no reason to take action as of yet.  It’s possible that they liked the page before the campaign.  I mean maybe they are just fans of his old TV show. Note:  That is an example of not painting all people who have a thing in common with the same stereotypical brush.  That’s how it works.  Get it? I so disapprove of fascists, but reading a fascists Facebook page does not make you a fascist.

So what’s the relevance of the featured image at the top of the page?  It’s a picture of Trump Tower in New York.  At least I think it is, it’s an old picture.

Blame the Snow

What? That’s twice in a week that I went a whole day without posting anything. What the hell is wrong with me?

Blame it on the snow. I have been in a snow induced cloud of aches and exhaustion for the last week or so. I have never wanted Spring more than I do at this moment.

Myspace Posts are Coming

It didn’t take three days. I now have a zip folder full of html files that contain all of my old myspace blog posts from 2006 through 2008. Many of them have kid pics and names and information in them so I have to make those private when I bring them here. I ran a test to see if I could edit the dates and times on a post and have them order correctly. It worked.

It has me thinking that maybe I should import my old private blogger blog as well. I mean if there are going to be private posts from myspace, why not from blogger too. Although I don’t know if I can bulk import posts as private or not. I’ll have to look into that. It would be cool to have all of my stuff in one place, even though it’s been years since I’ve used either of the other two sites.

We’ll see.

Medium

I’ve been using Medium a lot more this week. Mostly I just repost stuff that I write on this page. This is still the #1 blogging home for me, but I just feel the need to dabble elsewhere too. It’s probably just a phase.

Anyway, one thing that Medium allows for is using full sized images that expand to fill the entire browser window. If you full screen the browser, you effectively full screen the image. I haven’t tried it with low res images yet (and probably never will) so I don’t know if it will blow something up bigger than the file can actually handle, but with the few tests I’ve done it looks absolutely smashing.

Hancock Building in Boston

Still Looking at Blogging Platforms

I’m not planning to leave wordpress.com.

I think.

I spent some time digging into Medium today and I have decided that I absolutely love the way it displays images. They just look really good. After using ello for a while, the Medium editor doesn’t piss me off quite as much as it did initially. I still don’t see a way to pull in images from other domains. That means no using Flickr hosted pics. That was completely offensive to me at first, but since I started messing with ello, which like Medium also forces you to upload images you want to display rather than hosting them on other sites, it doesn’t seem quite as insulting.

Still, it doesn’t seem to have a way to display audio files. That’s a deal breaker if the question is using Medium exclusively. Again, ello is the same way. Hell, technically wordpress.com is the same way too, I just found a work around. Maybe I’ll find one for Medium (and ello) as well.

I was also planning on spending some time with Roon and Svbtle, but I guess Medium bought Roon and is about to shut it down. Ghost is the talk of the town right now, but it does not have a service that is both hosted and free. It’s only one or the other. Maybe I’ll look into free hosting (does that even exist?) and see what’s out there. If I were to go that route though, why wouldn’t I just switch over to wordpress.org?

I’m still not even sure why I am suddenly interested in all of this.

While I’m here, let me try something. Earlier tonight I decided that I was going to play around with Gimp. Think of Gimp as an open source alternative to Photoshop. I’ve had it on this machine for quite a while (it’s free) but I have never actually even opened it. Tonight I picked an image from Flickr and pulled it into Gimp to see how big of a mess I could make. I included it in a post on ello. Now that I’m thinking of it, can I pull the image from ello into this post? It should work. I have a valid url. But does ello block hits from within image tags? Let’s see…

Did it work?