Tag: blogging

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?

Blogging Platform Options

What is it about December that makes me start thinking about switching blogging platforms? Actually, I am not really thinking about switching anything, just curious about what’s out there.

I posted this to ello today:

I have a blog on wordpress.com. I post to it multiple times a day. I used to use blogger, but I made the switch about two years ago. I use tumblr too, a little, but not really.

I don’t want to go to the full wordpress.org, at least not yet. I played with Medium a little bit, but it seems like a pain to use it for multimedia (I post tons of pictures as well as the odd video and some audio).

I’m not really looking to change platforms, but if I were… where should I go? What other free blogging platforms are worth trying out?

Note, ello won’t be an option until I can use images from Flickr and audio via direct links from alonetone.com, and video from either Vimeo or Youtube.

What do you think?

Granted, I wrote that on ello so I don’t think I’ll get any responses. Just curious what services are out there that I haven’t heard about yet. Let me clarify, what free services are out there that I haven’t heard about yet. Blogging is a hobby that I really don’t want to have to pay for. That’s one of the reasons I don’t use the full wordpress. I don’t want to pay for hosting. I don’t actually want to even have to spare one single thought ever to hosting.

Anyway, I might pose this question to Twitter and Quora too. That will make four online communities that I ask that result in zero responses.

Cool.

Oh No!

It started on November 18, 2008. That was the day I started a new blog using Blogger. In all the years since then, there had been exactly one day where I did not submit a post. Sure, the Blogger site was split into two at some point early on, and later the public blog was moved over to WordPress.com, but through all of that there was only one day that I missed completely. It was pretty recently too, if I remember correctly.

Well, now there have been two days that I missed. I was bouncing around between buildings yesterday so I didn’t have a chance in the morning. In the evening…

Last Friday, my beloved bride Jen came home from work feeling sick. On Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, she was barely able to get out of bed. She still feels crummy, but at least she managed to go to work yesterday.

As for me, I was feeling really tired on Monday but otherwise all right. Yesterday I just felt blah. Really run down. Little to no energy. Then around 2:00ish I had to cave in and get some caffeine to keep myself going. On the way to the 3rd floor kitchenette I thought to myself, “hmmm, self, your throat is feeling a little sore.”

Yes, yes it was. It still is. I officially am in the early stages of the mega-cold that kicked my beautiful wife’s butt this weekend. Oh good. I went to bed early, hence no post in the evening, and slept pretty well, but I’m still getting worse. I’d say I’m down to about 70% on my health meter, but it was closer to 75% when I got out of bed an hour and a half ago.

Hoo…ray…

Yip…pee.