Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

Photo Blogging.

Well my Gallery site I was originally using to post photo’s suddenly decided it wanted to upgrade itself – and apparently it upgraded itself in to some sort of permissions nightmare.  As I’ve always felt gallery was a little over-complicated for my needs I decided to look around at other options.

Flickr, is of course, the most obvious and tempting option.  Lots of people use it.  Lots of people seem really happy with it.  However it has one flaw that keeps me from using it.  It’s all run and controlled by someone else.  That someone else being the Yahoo! collective and I’m not sure I want them asserting whatever rights they feel, or selling the entire site to whomever they want at the drop of a hat.  I’m not as worried about losing photos if they ever went away (I doubt Flickr will just close its doors overnight at some point), nor am I worried about what happens if their servers fall apart, or are hacked, or what have you.  I back things up.  I have local copies of everything as well as offsite copies.  I just don’t like giving too much control over my words or pictures to others.  It’s why I maintain this blog (more or less) in addition to my LiveJournal one.  It’s also why I post more important (to me anyway) posts here and use LiveJournal for announcements and random thought type posts.  So at the end of the day I decided to use Yet Another Photo Blog plugin with WordPress.

Right now I haven’t added all the photo’s that I had posted before, but I will slowly be adding my favorites along with new ones that I find.  So feel free to explore my new PhotoBlog!

A Method to the Madness.

One would assume now that I have more free time on my hands it would be easier to get back in to writing – even if only something as simple as more frequent updates to this site.  The truth is its actually been a bit harder to get back in to the writing habit on any level.  Part of it probably stems from the fact that I haven’t written regularly in quite awhile so I’m still a bit rusty about getting the things out of my head and on to “paper”.  The other reason is right now faced with so much free time my brain has scattered to the four corners.  I try to do too much all at once, and that just gets terribly exhausting.  This is even more apparent when I’ve tried to sit down and actually write something.  I’ve become too rushed with it, especially when attempting a blog post of any substance.  It’s like playing a game of speed chess, I have this ticking clock and I have to get the next sentence out before the time buzzes.  There’s no time to think, only type, I’ve got to do it right now!  This runs contrary to what I would have thought it would be like when presented with all this extra time.  The end result is that I end up with writing that feels very forced and in several instances doesn’t even convey what I had intended.

The way to combat this is organization.  Simply sitting down and saying, I’m going to write something, is not a productive endeavor.  It leads to the rushed, forced feeling.  In the end it makes the writing feel almost like a chore.  I’ve always looked at various ways to become more organized, but generally never implemented much in the way of a system.  I never gave it enough time for that system to take hold and become so routine that it was just another of the many processes I go through on any given day.  Now, with a lot of time available to me, it seems to be the perfect opportunity to begin finding a system of organization, research, and writing that helps everything come together; something to make the process flow and seem more natural rather than a chore.  This search for a system is also a wonderful writing opportunity.

As I research and test out different ways in which to better organize my writing life (and perhaps other aspects of my life as well) I’ll share them here.  There are many methodologies, and each person has to find the one that works best for them, but perhaps for other people looking to get a better grasp on things some of what I chronicle might be a spring board to discovering your own method for gaining control of the spiraling chaos that life can sometimes become.

Is Livejournal on its way out?

Well there have now been reports of significant layoffs of Livejournal staff that came with no notice, and apparently no severance either.  Apparently the Russian company that purchased Livejournal last year has come to realize that the social networking bubble was already beginning to burst when they bought it – and with a wide reaching economic downturn it looks as if these layoffs are just the first round in what may be the death knell for Livejournal.  Perhaps myself and others are being a little negative on the future of the long lasting blog service, but at the moment the signs aren’t favorable ones.  Personally I wouldn’t be overly upset if Livejournal went belly-up.  While I’m not cheering for them to do so as it is a fairly easy way to keep up-to-date with several friends, I also wouldn’t be upset over the loss.  I’ve had a warm/cold relationship with Livejournal for awhile, so their demise would certainly mean I’d stop waffling over whether I was going to continue to post there, or just use my account to keep tabs on other friends journals while shifting all my focus over here to the Travesty.  

My only real fear over Livejournal going away is that more of my friends, the ones who decide to keep being active on some service anyway, will shift over to something such as Facebook, which, while I check it on occasion, I am not at all fond of.  It is a service set up to fritter away any privacy you may still hope to cling to.  Along with its cluttered, horrid interface (no, I don’t want to play your stupid facebook games or take your facebook quizzes), the signal to noise ratio on it is incredibly unfavorable.

Fortunately, for those of my friends who make a shift over to a private journal, or other journaling service, I already make use of Newsfire, an excellent RSS aggregator.  It’s available on the Mac and I’ve been using it for years to follow a bunch of websites I read.  It feeds in to my addiction of merely skimming headlines.  For those who aren’t on a Mac, or not inclined to pay for software, I understand that Google Reader is pretty easy to use.

All of this, of course, assumes that Livejournal is actually circling the drain.  In the online world you just never know where things may end up.  So for now I’ll keep making the occasional post in my Livejournal, and checking up on my friends there, not worrying about what to do next until the day I click on the link and find nothing there.

100th Post!

It’s taken a stupid long time to get to this point since I started the new blog, but I have now hit the very uninspiring 100th post milestone!  I’m not sure if its irony, or some sort of sign that this milestone comes right at one of my pushes to get back in to my writing habit.  I’m not setting any particular goals such as daily posting or some such, but I would like to at least do four or five posts a week throughout the year.  For most posts I’ll at least try and find some particular topic to post on – most likely I’ll browse the web for inspiration, there’s always plenty of wacky shit out there I can use to post about.  But for this one (in part because I’m both tired and lazy), I’ll just ramble on a bit.  In fact I have rambled on a bit thanks to the fact that this is the 100th post so it gave me something perfectly inane to babble about.

The happy holidays.

It’s the time of the year when I start to reflect on things I wanted to do, didn’t do, and go over all the things I actually did do.  One of the things I always think about is actually keeping this blog updated.  While I make no promises in that regard, I have updated some things on the site, most notably the complete theme change.  I’ve also added a widget for linking articles to Digg, Facebook, and other social networking type things that some people may be using.  Most of the other updates are on the back-end so are transparent to the reader (if there are any).

I’m sure I’ll manage at least a few more post before my mind wanders elsewhere, but I’ll give it all a good try.