Tag Archives: time

Blogger or Writer? Not Both?

Posted on by
Comment

An article and podcast from a former blogger.

I listened to the podcast first. It was in my iPod after updating yesterday, among the other Slate Magazine Podcasts. Its title sent a chill down my spine, “Stop Blogging, Start Writing.”

But the interview with the author left me with the sneaking suspicion that her “last entry” was just an attempt to get some publicity. She sounded like a giggly airhead. She admitted that she had trouble “following up” with potential assignments. Hell, she claims she’d been contacted by “several” New York publishers interested in books, yet she’d managed to come away without a single contract. Not much of a professional writer, if you ask me. Any unknown who sits around waiting for a publisher to play the ball for her doesn’t deserve to succeed as a writer.

Good things may come to those who wait, but book contracts don’t.

Still, the idea of blogging taking up too much creative juice, leaving nothing for other writing, remains with me. I looked up the article that led to the podcast interview:

“Why I shut down my blog” by Sarah Hepola. She seems to echo many of my sentiments, but spoils the piece with her last sentence:

Now, if I could just turn off the TV, I think I could finally get started.

Blogging and television? No wonder she doesn’t have any time to write! Or maybe that was some kind of joke? Ha-ha?

I don’t think that author will stay away from blogging for long. It’s rather addictive — at least I think so. Something interesting happens to you and you want to write it up in your blog, partially to remember it and partially to share it with others. You learn something new, something that could help others and you want to share it in your blog. You have a deep thought or a revelation of major importance and you want to shout it out in your blog pages to see if anyone else agrees or wants to argue with you about it.

But I do agree that blogging sucks something out of a person. That something isn’t lost, though. It’s just stored away for the future.

New York City from the Whitestone Bridge

Posted on by
Comment

A photo taken from a moving vehicle.

New York City from the Whitestone BridgeOne of the great things about digital cameras is that you can snap as many stupid pictures as you like. You can then just delete them all without any money or film or paper wasted. But once in a while, one of those stupid pictures is a keeper. That’s what I think about this photo I took while Mike was driving us across the Whitestone Bridge, from the Bronx to Queens, the day after Thanksgiving, 2005.

Thanksgiving Day had been cold, rainy, and relatively miserable. Of course, we didn’t really see it that way. Living in Arizona, you get to really appreciate rain. So experiencing it firsthand is a nice thing, even if you had to travel 2,400 miles for the privilege.

The next day dawned clear, with blue skies. The kind of day that’s common in Arizona but rather precious in New York. We were scheduled to have our second Thanksgiving dinner in Queens with Mike’s family. Although Mike’s mom lives a stone’s throw away from the Throgs Neck Bridge in Queens, you need to take the Whitestone to get to her. As Mike drove over, I was enjoying the view of New York. I snapped a bunch of pictures and this one actually came out okay.

What I like about this picture is the ship and the airplane. I don’t know why. The plane had just departed from La Guardia Airport, which is to the left, just out of the photo.

What I don’t like about this picture is what’s missing. Since September 11, 2001, I’ve only been back to New York about five times. Seeing the skyline without the World Trade Center is still difficult for me. It was such a fixture in the minds of anyone who knew the skyline — especially people who regularly saw it from a distance in New Jersey or Queens or Brooklyn. New York seems somehow older and smaller without those two towers. Probably because the tallest building in the city is, once again, the Empire State Building, completed way back in 1934.

Anyway, I know this isn’t a great picture. The color is a bit weird and the focus is kind of fuzzy. But it’s a reminder of my roots, of life in the big city, where things are busy and vibrant and everything is moving very fast all of the time.

Respect

Posted on by
Comment

You have to earn it.

It has been suggested to me that I sometimes exhibit a certain lack of respect for some authoritative figures. I certainly can’t argue with that observation.

But the way I see it, someone has to earn my respect to get it.

I’m not some little pissant who blindly follows the leadership of decision makers just because someone picked them to make decisions. I have a brain and I know how to use it.

I have no respect for decision makers who lack the intelligence to see the the long-term consequences of their decisions. I also have no respect for people who abuse their political power for their own ends. I’m seeing entirely too much of that in Wickenburg these days.

Come on guys, get a life. Your domain of power is an insigificant spot on the map: the Town of Wickenburg, AZ. Stop milking it for your own benefit and think of the people who have to live here — the people who voted for or appointed you. Do what’s best for the community — not for yourself or your friends.

Until you do, don’t expect any respect from me.

Gravatars Update

Posted on by
1

I’m having second thoughts about that gravatar feature.

Last Saturday, I added a gravatar feature to this site. As I discussed in this article, the gravatar image for anyone who had one would automatically appear when they wrote a comment on this site. Just a kind of cool and funky way to add more personality to the site. Not that we get so many comments here.

On Saturday, I also submitted my own gravatar for rating and approval. And I’m still waiting for it to be approved.

Now in this day and age, we’re all pretty accustomed to immediate gratification. You apply for something online — a new account to access a Web site, etc. — and you get an e-mail message with approval within minutes. This is commonplace. So the fact that I’ve been waiting five days for a perfectly acceptable photo (G rated, I assure you) to get approved makes me wonder how serious the folks at gravatar.com are about this system they set up.

I was over on the site and it appears to be the work of a single very talented but very busy person. He’s working on Gravatar 2.0 (whatever that is) and asked for volunteers to help him rate and approve new submissions. Over 100 people volunteered, including me. I offered up to an hour a week until he was caught up. I didn’t get any reply.

The forums are a mess of extremely frustrated new users (like me) who have been waiting to use the feature. Some of them claim they’re embarrassed because they set up the feature on their sites and they’re one of the few people who don’t yet have a gravatar. I don’t feel that way. I don’t expect most of the visitors here to have one. But I am anxious to see if I implemented it correctly and the only way to do that is to see a comment from someone — like me — who has a gravatar.

Part of me urges those of you who are interested to go to gravatar.com, apply for a free account, and submit an image. Then kindly remind the management there, in the forums, that you’re waiting. Maybe that’ll put a fire under their butts and they’ll use some of those volunteers to rate and approve all the gravatars in the queue.

The other part of me says forget about it. Maybe it was just a bad idea.

I’ve always had a problem with patience. Maybe this is a test.

In any case, I’ll let you know when my gravatar appears so you can see how it’s implemented on this site. I’ll probably write an article about it for WordPress users, too. But first I need to make sure I got it right.

Time, apparently, may tell.

Podcasting Stats

Posted on by
Comment

Stats can tell you a lot of interesting things.

I spent most of this morning updating the daily podcasts for KBSZ-AM, the local radio station.

KBSZ‘s Around the Town broadcast was my first foray into the world of podcasting. I wanted to experiment with the new technology but didn’t have any content available to experiment with. KBSZ was already doing a daily radio show. Why not podcast that?

Well, what started out as a fun and education project has become a bit of a chore. It isn’t difficult to turn their broadcasts into podcasts — especially since I also do streaming audio for them and my computer automatically records each show for me — but it is time consuming. You see, I can be a bit of a perfectionist at times. KBSZ’s show never starts exactly on time and never ends exactly on time. So there’s stuff at the beginning and end that needs to be edited out. Then I need to upload the podcasts files, create the podcast entries on their Blogger account, link the podcasts files, and publish. It takes about 15 minutes per episode. If I were smart, I’d just do it every day. But I’m not smart. I wait until there’s about 2 weeks worth and knock them all of at once. It took two hours this morning. Two hours that I should have been working on my WordPress book.

I do plan, however, to get very smart. I’ll skip the editing and fully automate the process. More on that when I find time to do it. Hopefully soon.

While I’m messing around with the podcasts, I often check the download stats for all podcasts and other files on my server. I serve all files from a GoDaddy.com hosting space. They give you a good amount of disk space and bandwidth for only $3.95/month — and even cheaper if you pay a year up front. So all podcasts and book support files live there. No need to bog down my limited bandwidth with visitor downloads.

Due to a server glitch, all stats prior to November 18, 2005 were lost. No big deal. I just started using that server seriously in August 2005. But it’s good to know the start date for the stats.

By looking at the stats, KBSZ can see who their most popular guests are. For a while, I was number 2 (behind the high school football coach — hey, sports are important here in Wickenburg). Now the top slots are held by the folks who make sure all their friends know about the podcasts. Some of the really smart ones link to the podcast from their own Web sites, further increasing the number of downloads.

While I was checking stats, I checked the stats for my own podcasts. I found that my video podcasts are among the most popular I do. That doens’t make me terribly happy, mostly because they’re a royal pain in the butt to create. Recording my voice reading a script is one thing, but inserting a bunch of screen shots at key points is another. Still, I’ll try to make folks happy by delivering a few more audio podcasts.

The excerpt from my Mac OS X Tiger book is by far the most downloaded file on my server. The Panther excerpt isn’t far behind. You can find both of those in the Mac OS QuickStart support area.

All this, of course, reminds me that I haven’t done a podcast in about two weeks. I’m behind already. Maybe I’ll throw something together on the plane to Austin on Wednesday.