Roger O Green

The Pretentious Blogging Meme

Apparently, I’m in a blogging about blogging mode: From Sunday Stealing.

1. How long have you been blogging?

4 years, 10 months yesterday. Or the day before, if you count the time I wrote it.

2. What made you start?

Discussed here, but what MADE me start ultimately is being very opinionated with no venue.

3. Who inspired you?

Fred Hembeck and the late Steve Gerber.

4. About how many hours a week would you estimate you spend on your blog?

You mean THIS one? Well, probably eight hours writing it, then another five checking out other blogs, getting rid of spam comments, responding to questions, etc.

5. What kind of experience or background do you have with writing?

I wrote for my high school newspaper; in my senior year, had a column called Pa Central (I went to Binghamton Central); snarky before I knew the word.
I co-edited a newsletter in college and edited one in grad school. I edited, for six years, a monthly work newsletter. Wrote some press releases for the Schenectady Arts Council and a little for FantaCo. Edited three and a half issues of FantaCo’s Chronicles Series. Inevitably, anything I edited involved a degree of writing as well.

6. Talk about how you come up with blog topics. Where do you get your ideas?

Steal ’em. Well, sometimes, but finding topics is not the problem; the problem is a lack of time to write coherently about certain topics. I have three topics I could write about tomorrow, but will I have time to compose ANY of them?

7. What or who inspires you and your blog?

Life. Politics. Sports. TV. Music. The newspaper. Really, inspiration I get easily; time, not so much.

8. Where and/or how do your brainstorming for your blog?

Anywhere – riding the bus, taking a shower, occasionally, my dreams.

9. Do you have any blogging rules or guidelines you follow?

Probably. I tend not to use language that’s likely to offend a segment of my vast readership. I try not to write about the same topic too often in a row. Not only might it be tedious for the reader, more importantly it’d likely be boring for me. Or maybe my approach is ADHD-driven.

10. Is there anything you will not blog about?

Yes. And if I told you what those topics were, that’d kind of defeat the purpose of not blogging about it. “I’m not going to tell you about…”; yeah, right.

11. Do you have any sort of a publishing schedule in terms of day of week or topic?

Well, Tuesday is ABC Wednesday. The 26th of the month is Lydia day. Mondays are memes, sometimes (not this week, apparently). Saturdays are questions, often but not always. The rest I fake.
***
More in re: blogging. I entered Rose’s blog hosting contest. Guess what? I WON! I got a confirming e-mail yesterday afternoon, and I have some ideas for a URL, but if you have some thoughts before, say, 1 pm Eastern Time today when I go to lunch and contact the provider, have at it.
***
I noted only a couple days ago that I had appeared in the Trouble with Comics blog. Then Mr. Doane wrote to comment: “My apologies, but Guest Reviewer Month has now been pushed back to April due to some technical problems. Your piece should go up 4/1, Roger. Sorry!” The trouble with this was that I thought he was making a joke; the piece should go up on April Fools Day? Les & Trudy didn’t raise someone THAT gullible.

Except that my friend Rocco noted that the piece that had been posted had disappeared. This probably has something to do with Trouble with Comics changing its URL because of changers with Blogger re: FTPs.

In other words, I have outwitted myself. Expect the piece on – April 1? Really, ADD?

ROG

G is for Green

The flag of Brazil
There was an answer on the game show JEOPARDY! recently (2010, Jan 27)- IT’S NO WHITE $1000: According to Webster’s, the serpentine shade of this color is “paler than citrine”.
The question was “What is green”? I had no idea. (I guessed yellow.)

I’m a Roy G. Biv kind of guy, that, of course, representing the main colors of rainbow. You know, yellow and blue equals green; the basic stuff.

But in fact, I do there are lots of gradations of green. I’m also aware in the color spectrum as used in HTML, that colors are “defined using a hexadecimal (hex) notation for the combination of Red, Green, and Blue color values (RGB)”.

Flag of Norfolk Island, “tax free haven of Australia”
I’ve always been fascinated by flags. For flags, green can symbolize the Earth, agriculture, fertility, and/or the Muslim religion.

Before our child was born – and we never knew the gender until she was born – we categorically eliminated some names from consideration:
Olive Green
Kelly Green
Forest Green

And since my last name IS Green, I get to list some of my favorite green things:

Vermont: the nearby Green Mountain state

M&Ms and, specifically, Tegan’s continuing green M&M challenge.

Monopoly: one of my favorite board games features little green houses

Green Goblin: favorite villain in my favorite comic book, Spider-Man

The Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics of the mid-1970s.

Going green: the 3 Rs of reduce, reuse & recycle

Greenwich Mean Time: longitude and time are reckoned by the prime meridian

Green Eggs and Ham: An editor bet that Dr. Seuss could not write a book using 50 words or less; he lost. It’s Dr. Seuss’ birthday today!

Naturally, the music:

Al Green-Take Me To The River
Creedence Clearwater Revival-Green River
The Lemon Pipers-Green Tambourine
And finally, the song that’s been sung by Frank Sinatra, Audra McDonald, Van Morrison and countless others, but never better than by the amphibian: Being Green-Kermit the Frog.

ABC Wednesday

ROG

A Couple Links In Lieu of Actual Content

Maybe it’s because I’ve tried cutting back on caffeine. Surely it has to do with Black History Month at church and a presentation I did at the Underground Railroad conference this past weekend. But I am FRIED.

Fried means going to bed when the child goes to bed, between 8 and 9 pm. Going to bed BEFORE my wife, and if you know her sleep patterns, you’d find that astonishing.
So I’m not going to force it. I’ll give you a couple links. The good news, I suppose, is that I wrote them:

EDIT: POSTPONED UNTIL APRIL (paragraph below)
Over at Trouble with Comics, the esteemed comics blogger Alan David Doane is having Guest Reviewer Month. And guess who his first contributor is? (And yes, ADD, I DO laugh your claim to my “fame”.)

On my Times Union blog, I note how lucky Albany has been with the weather this winter. Those of you from across the country or the world might read that NYC schools and Syracuse University were closed on Friday; Albany got about an inch of slush. Oh, and I dedicate the post to Jason at 2political, who’s in the Washington, DC area and gotten far more snow in 2010 than I have.

Finally, I want to point you to the NYS Data Center blog where I highlight the Modern Mechanix blog.

More content tomorrow, I hope.

ROG

Media Maven

Thursday, I got a ride from my isolating Corporate Woods office with lousy bus service to the neighborhood-imbedded College of Saint Rose, using up most of my lunch break, to film what will probably be a 15-second segment of a promotion for what appears below. It’s too bad that I had to go back to work, because my ride took us right past my house.

I was supposed to say something profound about why I blog, on cue. Yeesh. Ultimately, I rambled on about something to do with being a librarian and wanting to share information. (I think.) I know they’ll be showing the compiled video at the event, but if it’s otherwise available, I’ll make a point to share it with you.

The guy who picked me up I hadn’t seen in four or five years. I’ve talked with him regularly and e-mailed with even more frequently. But when he picked me up, he didn’t recognize me, because of the vitiligo. Heck, sometimes I literally don’t recognize myself.

Oh, one other thing: with the sheer number of participants, and the time frame, I can’t imagine just how this thing is going to work.

The upcoming Media 2010 event to be held Wednesday, March 3, at The College of Saint Rose, has sold out. We currently are accepting names on a waiting list.

Event: Media 2010: How blogs shape the new conversation
Date: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 from 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM (ET)

Location:
College of Saint Rose
Touhey Forum, Lally Building
1009 Madison Avenue
Albany, NY 12203

***
Speaking of blogging, I seem to be spending more time deleting spam from my blogs. Except for this one, the messages don’t actually GET to the blogs; I use comment moderation. On this blog, though, I don’t, but I get an e-mail copy of whatever gets posted; I click on the link and delete the rubbish forever.

There seems to be particular recurring themes with these of late:
*the guy whose girlfriend, he’s just discovered, has been sleeping with his roommate/brother/uncle/father, and so, of COURSE, he’s inviting you to see nude pictures of her
*various schemes touting particular software
*the couple touting Louisville, KY
Plus the usual scams and stuff written in Russian and Chinese.
But the ones I don’t get are the ones that say something vaguely complimentary that are signed by Anonymous and DON’T have a link to an e-mail or website. What’s the point, exactly?

ROG

Win 6 free months of blog/web hosting, own domain name

I’m a guy who likes to blog. I’m the guy who HATES having to deal with the technobabble that the task entails. I noticed that the backside of my blog was running slowly. Sometimes when I tried to schedule a post, I’d get an error message.

WordPress specific utilities such as WP-CLI, LiteSpeed’s LSCache, and Imunify360 all contribute to an ecosystem enabling different types of wordpress hosting services to be used to its full potential. You don’t have to worry about WordPress updates, keeping the server updated, or PHP versions – we handle all of that for you, while keeping your site fully optimized for WordPress. KnownHost is a quality-guaranteed hosting provider that offers the best managed WordPress hosting solution.

My provider wrote:

“Our monitoring systems show that one (or some) of your user accounts may be making your web hosting account operate inefficiently. We noticed you’ve frequently hit the memory limits of your shared hosting plan over the last couple weeks. When this happens, our system automatically stops web processes which could be negatively impacting your server’s performance. This means your visitors may see errors or be unable to access your website at all for brief periods of time.”

I’m sure I tweeted about this before – back in the days when I used to actually use my Twitter account – but Rose DesRochers – World outside my Window has been having this contest where if you comment to one of her posts – or a whole bunch of other stuff such as tweeting about said contest, one gets points towards winning a WordPress blog hosting package from VisionThisHosting.com.

Unfortunately, tomorrow the 28th is the deadline.

ROG