Lately I have been struggling to find inspiration. There are a lot of things I want to write about but I have problems getting started and not enough time to sit and think about what I’d really like to say. I think that I also need to develop more patience for sitting around and thinking about what I want to write. I have a tendency to get sucked into other things like TV and reading the bajillion articles aggregated into Google Reader every hour or so during the day (darn you bloggers for having so much to say). I know that I need to spend some time with no outside interruptions each day. Lifehacker mentioned an application called Darkroom for Windows which allows you to write without interruption from other programs. i am going to give it a shot and see if it improves my productivity.

This is yet another post about my pathetic posting frequency as of late. I have been busy here in Raleigh for a while and I’m still trying to get all of my proverbial ducks in a row. The holiday season also brought a visit from the parents and the cats who are all doing well.

Raleigh is a really cool town. The people are really friendly and will approach you and strike up a conversation. Having grown up in Queens and lived in Florida, I am not used to this. It’s peculiar to me but it’s also one of the things that makes me feel comfortable here. When I moved to Pennsylvania it took me months to find decent people to hang out with. Aside from neighbors and friends of my family I never really found anyone to hang out with when I was in Florida. Being in a place where people reach out to you is a blessing.

This area of North Carolina is also really socially aware and is populated with many well-educated people. There is a great deal of political activism and people donate a great deal to charities. I haven’t seen this much political and social awareness since I left NYC. We all know how politically aware Floridians are by now, and the school systems there are some of the worst in the United States, therefore you can draw your own conclusions about awareness there. Pennsylvanians are more politically aware and there are some small pockets of activists throughout the state that do good things. There are even several communities in Pennsylvania that are fighting the invasion of Wal-Mart tooth and nail. I wish they would fight racism with such vigor. I’d have to say that the people in this area are more well-rounded than the denizens of my previous areas of residence with the exception of NYC.

Of course I have a lot more to say about Raleigh and its surrounding areas, but I need the time to put it all into coherent sentences.

I’ve been delinquent in wishing everyone a happy holiday so I figure now is as good a time as any to say Happy Holidays. Enjoy your New Year’s celebrations and remember to drink and act responsibly!

So I’m back. Did you miss me? It’s been a couple of years since I really worked on my blog (or any blog at all). At this point if I don’t continue to use my skills I will start to lose them, thus I’m blogging again. Of course everything is in flux and this is most definitely a work in progress but you have to start somewhere.

Ideally I would like to go through my old archives and see if I can resurrect some of my classic rants and raves from any of my old blogs, but I don’t know how much of that material survived. Anyway tell me what you think. If you have any suggestions for additional content, feel free to share them.

It’s been a very long time since I have had the chance to blog. Life has been very hard but exciting lately. I started a new job with a phenomenal company about 6 weeks ago, and I’m already on my first business trip in McLean, VA. I’m working on a disaster releif team to help emergency and rescue services with their communication needs in the midst of Hurricane Frances. That’s a mouthful, eh? It has been rough in Florida this hurricane season, first Charley, now Frances, and possibly Ivan in a week and a half. It almost makes no sense to fly back down if we have to help out during Ivan too, so I do not know when I will be returning to Orlando, which is almost a blessing. I am nearing the end of my Masters too and am heavily considering starting my PhD soon afterwards. I just want people to call me “Doc” but that’s a completely different story.

Anyway, I’m at another crossroads in my life which I was trying to ignore and put off for several weeks. I have to face it now. As I work and live I meet new friends and invite new people into my life. The old friends who don’t seem to be accepting it will have to or be left behind because I was never the type to cater to the insecurities of others. I am not in the business of dropping people out of my life when it gets too difficult be their friend, but I cannot force people to accept change. I am rolling with the punches like everyone else and I expect the people I love to do the same. So for now, I refocus my life on myself and my goals and aspirations.

Everybody is blogging and making an attempt, however lame, to write the living web (I include myself in the lame attempts crowd). Anyway, I’ve noticed that there are a lot of terrible blogs out there, and I don’t mean content. I’m not a great artist by any means, but I’d like to think that it’s easy to read my content. I ran across a blog that was almost entirely in italics today, and after my eyes stopped bleeding, only one question came to mind. Why? Italics and bold type were created to emphasize material.
So does that mean your ego is enormous if you feel compelled to emphasize your entire blog from header to footer and everything in between? Probably not, but there has to be some reasoning behind it, and I would love to hear it.

If everyone is going to blog, and everyone is going to voice their opinions, spin their own news, and write the web, why can’t it be done in a legible manner? If I were a HS (or college) English teacher, I would require daily blogging, and I would encourage the knowledge of web standards. Start teaching these kids xhtml/css and how to roll their own blog and to write for the web while they’re still young and will listen to you (even if its only for a grade). It will help raise the bar for blogging content.

So I finally jumped ship. After all those years of using Movable Type I have finally jumped ship. Yes I did it because of the licensing, but not because I wasn’t willing to pay. I just wasn’t willing to pay what they were asking for the four blogs and three authors that were running on my install. Furthermore, as far as I can tell the changes in MT3 were minimal and did nothing to quell the problems with the comment spam. By employing a centralized login system, the only
thing that Typekey did was drive visitors and comments away. Not all of the people who refuse to log in are comment spammers. Some people just don’t like creating accounts on every damned website and they’re entitled to that, as I should be entitled to quell comment spam with a reasonable level of ease without requiring logins. MT3 did not provide that solution for me, so why would I pay for something that didn’t fix the problems I had with the previous version? Furthermore, there is no guarantee that I won’t have to pay through the nose for the next version when its released. I just didn’t feel secure paying that amount of money to not solve my blog problems so thus I am here. Wordpress is a learning experience, and I’m excited because it’s PHP based and I’m all about learning some PHP. Maybe I will be compelled to produce some plugins. We’ll see. Anyway, tell me what you think of the WP setup here, and I’ll try to accommodate any issues you guys find with my site.

Have you ever been to a site and seen links to every webring on earth? A certain site I bumped into today reminded me how much I hate webring abuse. Why is it not enough to just join two or three webrings that your blog or site relates to? Why do bloggers have to have 10 or 20 of these cut and pasted linklet monstrosities on their pages? I understand the urge to try to drive traffic to your site. I run textads for that. I’m sure there are also other outlets for bringing in traffic like finding yourself on the top of a Google search for a moderately popular topic - which might I add is not hard to do, i’ve done it twice. At any rate, let’s not abuse the webring code, people.

I’m a lazy blogger. Look how long it’s been since I blogged. A week! Anyway, nothing much has been going on I s’pose. I’m settling into school. The online thing will throw you for a loop at first but it’s not half bad once you get used to it. I’m sick. I’ve gotten myself a sore throat and some sinus issues. I’m thinking that it’s viral though. Nothing’s in the back of my throat (as usual.. haven’t had strep since I went to a pediatrician).

Anyway, I’ve talked to some interesting people online lately. This one gentleman I talk to suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a close relative of Autism but doesn’t have all of the hard signs of autism. It’s a spectrum disorder, which means you have a grab bag of symptoms and everyone has different ones. If you’re thinking it’s confusing, you’re right. This is one of those things that’s very hard to assess correctly and usually takes years of therapy and time with the guys in the white coats to figure it out. The funny thing is he’s a geek, and a couple of years ago I read a few studies about Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome in Silicon Valley. Seems like geeks who marry geeks end up with children with both of these disorders somewhat regularly. I’ll see if I can find any research and I’ll sum it up here for those who are interested in reading it. So a word to the wise: If you’re an engineer and your honey is an engineer, I’d consider adoption.

I’ve become blogsloppy. I neglected to post anything of interest for multiple days in a row. I am not happy with myself, but I’ve been preoccupied. A little bit of administrative crap stretched out over the course of four days made me almost blow a gasket. I’ve also been frittering away my hours in an offhand way chatting with geeks of the male sort.

This morning for the first time I tried out iChatAV and even though I found out that there is something wrong with the mic port on my Mac, I have to say that iChatAV is better in beta than NetMeeting could’ve ever hoped to be. I know there’s been a proverbial generation gap between the origins of these two programs, but you can tell the people at Apple are deadly serious about sound and picture quality. The sound quality, even coming from a modem connection, was excellent. There was a little bit of gobbeldygook but not much. I am obviously impressed.. so much so I went out an bought a spiffy new stereo headset with noise canceling mic. I’m itching to try it out. That’s not a cue to bombard me with voice requests on iChat, btw.

If you’re planning on posting to my silly journal thing, please create an account with LiveJournal. It’s easy to use and free (and no I’m not getting paid to say that). If you don’t wanna do that, just leave an email address or a name so I can get back to you. I appreciate it.