Just a quick note - I'm switching my domain name (matt-cook.com) from one web service to another, and I'll also be switching from Blogger to Wordpress with all the fun that entails. Just so everybody knows, the site may be down or messed up in the next week or so.
Cheers!
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Monday, February 1, 2010
Go ahead, live a little
I'm starting to think of my blog as a side project that I don't have time for. Thanks to the advent of Twitter, my thoughts can be put out faster, in shorter snippets, to a larger audience. Three or four years ago my thoughts would have been put out into a LiveJournal blog but that was kind of boring.
Ok, really boring. I was not a great blogger in high school...but what has changed, eh? Ha!
Then, of course, came Facebook status updates (did I join in 2005 or 2006?), but until about 2007 or so, Facebook didn't do a great job of parsing those out for other users to read. Users had to go to each others' pages to see what was up (gasp, I know!) Thanks, Facebook, for feeding our inner stalkers by adding the News Feed and Live Feed. They make it so easy to find out what's going on with friends (not that it's always useful). Plenty of people had problems with the ease-of-stalking Facebook has enabled, but I for one have it to thank for helping my mindless drivel find its way into the "cloud." Also, kudos to Facebook and Twitter both for working seamlessly together.
Thinking of side projects that I don't have/make time for anymore, aside from neglecting the blog: photography and reading.
As far as photography goes, I'm in that rut where I keep taking photos (several hundred in fact) but I lack the time, and often interest, to go through marathon processing and uploading (and then naming, describing, tagging, etc.) sessions to get the final product on Flickr. I'm doing well if I get up 2-3 photos a month here lately, so needless to say, I'm falling behind. I've already mentally checked off some photo shoots that I'm not likely to ever touch again from 2009, but there is still about half a year of photos piling up in Adobe Lightroom.
And then on the reading front, suffice it to say that I've had four geography texts checked out from the UTM library and I've renewed them four times already. That doesn't sound like a lot, but when you consider that one of the renewals included the Christmas break so it was about a month long... You see where this is going. Fortunately, I think faculty/staff can renew books indefinitely, instead of the three time max limit for students. Mostly, I read Twitter and the news. I even get the news from Twitter (CNN, BBC).
I hate to end this in a circle, but going back to blog subject, I've been thinking of switching over to Wordpress. Problem is, I don't know if I want to have them host it and just migrate my matt-cook.com domain over, or pay for cheap hosting and run their content management system (CMS) from the host. Then there's the whole issue of having to migrate the content from this blog over, which shouldn't be a big nightmare, but is still a few extra steps.
I didn't make any resolutions for 2010, so I'm not going to promise that I'll blog more or post photos more, etc. ...
But I'll try, on occasion. You know, before I get to grad school and have no life for 5-7 years.
Ok, really boring. I was not a great blogger in high school...but what has changed, eh? Ha!
Then, of course, came Facebook status updates (did I join in 2005 or 2006?), but until about 2007 or so, Facebook didn't do a great job of parsing those out for other users to read. Users had to go to each others' pages to see what was up (gasp, I know!) Thanks, Facebook, for feeding our inner stalkers by adding the News Feed and Live Feed. They make it so easy to find out what's going on with friends (not that it's always useful). Plenty of people had problems with the ease-of-stalking Facebook has enabled, but I for one have it to thank for helping my mindless drivel find its way into the "cloud." Also, kudos to Facebook and Twitter both for working seamlessly together.
Thinking of side projects that I don't have/make time for anymore, aside from neglecting the blog: photography and reading.
As far as photography goes, I'm in that rut where I keep taking photos (several hundred in fact) but I lack the time, and often interest, to go through marathon processing and uploading (and then naming, describing, tagging, etc.) sessions to get the final product on Flickr. I'm doing well if I get up 2-3 photos a month here lately, so needless to say, I'm falling behind. I've already mentally checked off some photo shoots that I'm not likely to ever touch again from 2009, but there is still about half a year of photos piling up in Adobe Lightroom.
And then on the reading front, suffice it to say that I've had four geography texts checked out from the UTM library and I've renewed them four times already. That doesn't sound like a lot, but when you consider that one of the renewals included the Christmas break so it was about a month long... You see where this is going. Fortunately, I think faculty/staff can renew books indefinitely, instead of the three time max limit for students. Mostly, I read Twitter and the news. I even get the news from Twitter (CNN, BBC).
I hate to end this in a circle, but going back to blog subject, I've been thinking of switching over to Wordpress. Problem is, I don't know if I want to have them host it and just migrate my matt-cook.com domain over, or pay for cheap hosting and run their content management system (CMS) from the host. Then there's the whole issue of having to migrate the content from this blog over, which shouldn't be a big nightmare, but is still a few extra steps.
I didn't make any resolutions for 2010, so I'm not going to promise that I'll blog more or post photos more, etc. ...
But I'll try, on occasion. You know, before I get to grad school and have no life for 5-7 years.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Such a Bum
Man, it's hard to be a blogger.
Well, OK, it's not that difficult if you're someone like a fellow Weakley Countian, newscoma, who worked for the local newspaper and blogs a ton. She could probably pull off making a living just through blogging if she set herself up with the right amount of advertising or paid subscriptions, or whatever. (Hey, it works for Dooce, right? In case you don't know, Dooce makes a living blogging about being a mom and other stuff. I don't read it, but Karen does.)
But I'm not going to go into the monetizing of online content spiel, because I'm not in a mass-comm-discussing mood.
So anyway, I've had my iPhone 3GS for just under two days now. I feel that my productivity has shot up quite a bit, now that I have the Internet in my pocket. There's no way I will ever go back to going without a phone with a data plan ever again. I'd give up cable way before giving up a data plan. Seriously, Karen and I pretty much watch three or four channels in our 70+ cable subscription. Animal Planet, ESPN/ESPN 2, and Fox Sports South (when they carry the Cardinals games). Aside from Animal Planet, following sports is pretty easy with the iPhone, not to mention MLB has an application which lets you watch games on your phone. We've mostly used our TV to watch movies, which is more fun anyway. Before we became obsessive with the iPhones over the last 48 hours (and I'm sure it will subside, at least a bit) we were reading more than watching TV.
Wait, didn't I say that I wasn't in a mass-comm mood? Maybe I was just kidding myself.
Since I'm on an iPhone kick anyway, I may as well post some of the more interesting applications I've downloaded to increase its functionality. Granted, not all of these are really great or anything, but all but one have been free so I'm taking that trade-off.
Well, OK, it's not that difficult if you're someone like a fellow Weakley Countian, newscoma, who worked for the local newspaper and blogs a ton. She could probably pull off making a living just through blogging if she set herself up with the right amount of advertising or paid subscriptions, or whatever. (Hey, it works for Dooce, right? In case you don't know, Dooce makes a living blogging about being a mom and other stuff. I don't read it, but Karen does.)
But I'm not going to go into the monetizing of online content spiel, because I'm not in a mass-comm-discussing mood.
So anyway, I've had my iPhone 3GS for just under two days now. I feel that my productivity has shot up quite a bit, now that I have the Internet in my pocket. There's no way I will ever go back to going without a phone with a data plan ever again. I'd give up cable way before giving up a data plan. Seriously, Karen and I pretty much watch three or four channels in our 70+ cable subscription. Animal Planet, ESPN/ESPN 2, and Fox Sports South (when they carry the Cardinals games). Aside from Animal Planet, following sports is pretty easy with the iPhone, not to mention MLB has an application which lets you watch games on your phone. We've mostly used our TV to watch movies, which is more fun anyway. Before we became obsessive with the iPhones over the last 48 hours (and I'm sure it will subside, at least a bit) we were reading more than watching TV.
Wait, didn't I say that I wasn't in a mass-comm mood? Maybe I was just kidding myself.
Since I'm on an iPhone kick anyway, I may as well post some of the more interesting applications I've downloaded to increase its functionality. Granted, not all of these are really great or anything, but all but one have been free so I'm taking that trade-off.
- Twitterific (For following twitter updates)
- Stanza (eBook reader with several libraries of free books)
- USA Today
- Lose It! (A food/exercise counter similar to NutriMirror)
- AT&T myWireless (account manager and bill pay)
- e*Trades Mobile Pro
- Shazam
- Remote (iTunes remote control)
- Yelp
- Restaurants Nutrition
- 8 (a "glasses of water" counter)
- iFitness (the only paid app, has 100's of exercises demonstrated, plus user workouts)
- Instapaper (Downloads Web pages you don't have time to read so you can come back to them later)
- Bible
- Barnes & Noble Bookstore
- Flixter (movie times, trailers)
- Amazon.com
- WebMD
- Free German Essentials (a trial version with only 130 or so vocabulary words; the full version has 1000's of vocab to learn)
- Currency converter
- Wikipanion (Wikipedia search)
- AP Mobile (though I'm liking USA Today better, might get rid of this one)
- Wi-Fi Finder
- Mancala
- myLite (flashlight plus some other cool things like strobe light)
- Harry Potter 6 (interactive game, haven't looked at it yet)
- iSniper lite (Free trial game, kinda boring)
- iHandgun (Sound emulator)
- Lightsaber (Sound emulator)
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