blogging Archives - Page 15 of 23

21 reasons not to write, but an unsharpened pencil isn’t one

I’m ALWAYS planning to blog . At any given time I might have three or four blogposts in mind. If I DON’T, THEN I worry.

Jaquandor, that budding novelist from the Buffalo area, responded to some meme, presumably as it applied to book or short story or poetry writing. Much of it, though, also applies to blogging, IMHO. And you KNOW my opinion is humble.

1. You are letting people tell you that you should be doing other things with your time.

When I first started blogging, people said, “How do you have TIME for that?” A lot. And I used to try to reply, “How do you have time for…” whatever they did, as though that were useful. Now that I’ve blogged for a while, it’s MUCH less common. They realize, “It’s just what Roger does.”

2. You can’t live with the level of cleanliness that your family accepts as normal. You should see the chaos in the office. Better still, please don’t.

3. You haven’t decided to treat your writing seriously and so no one around you treats it seriously, either.

Serious as in, “I need to do this, I’m compelled to do this” I got to fairly early on.

4. You haven’t made yourself a writing space.

There is no writing space. Work at lunchtime, the library, the dining room table with the daughter’s laptop, the office. If I’m away, some public computer; doesn’t matter.

5. You haven’t realized that you need help.

Lots of people think I need help…

6. You do what is urgent rather than what is necessary.

I try to balance; don’t always succeed.

7. You don’t let your kids and other people solve their own problems.

Well, my daughter is nine, and if she needs help finding her homework, I’ll still help her, even if it cuts into writing time.

8. You think that someday you will have more time for writing.

I now know, barring retirement, that AIN’T gonna happen.

9. You are spending time doing things you actually don’t care about.

Don’t we all, to some degree? Mine is lawn work. If we had a goat, I wouldn’t do it at all.

10. You are actually using distractions as an excuse not to write.

Nah, the distractions are real. Usually, the Daughter being sick or needing something.

11. You are terrified of writing, of actually sitting down and putting yourself on the page.

Not an issue. Actually, he said immodestly, if there’s one thing about Roger’s blog, it is that his voice is, for better and worse, on the page.

12. You are too busy criticizing the best-selling books that you are reading to write something better.

I hardly read best-selling books; no problem.

13. You don’t know what to do with a blank page.

Well, that’s true, but reading and following newsfeeds, that’s seldom an issue for long.

14. You don’t know how to turn off your internal editor.

Definitely correct. But I write anyway.

15. You talk a good game, but you don’t play it.

Actually, no.

16. You need to do a little planning and research before you start.

I’m ALWAYS planning. At any given time I might have three or four blog posts in mind. If I DON’T, THEN I worry.

17. You don’t actually like writing. You like having written. (Join the club.)

Oddly enough, no. I find that in the act of writing, it always changes, which I find to be quite informative. It hones my thought process. I mean, it’s not that I LIKE to write, but rather I NEED to.

18. You need to write the first line of the next chapter before leaving for the day.

That is true, and I usually do.

19. You need to spend time remembering what it is you love about writing.
No.

20. You have convinced yourself that you need 2 hours to write and don’t know how to use the 20-minute chunks you actually have.

I don’t need two hours. But I really like 30 minutes. Otherwise, I end up doing memes like this!

21. You don’t have notebooks scattered through the house, including in the bathroom, to jot down inspiration.

Actually, my process involves lots of e-mail, to myself. I think of something, or I see something on TV or read something in an e-mail, I send it to myself, and mark it, USE IT! Sometimes I actually do.
***
The title came in part from me doing some math problem Arthur posted on Facebook (my age X 7 X 1443) with the product repeating my age thrice (606060).

Roger: Did the math with a pencil. FWIW.
Jason: Pencil? What’s a pencil?
Arthur: It’s similar to a stylus for a tablet or smartphone. Only without electricity.
Roger: It’s this graphite stick encased in wood.

Not to be replaced by Facebook

Facebook is really good for snark.

When I noted that I’ll be doing less blogging someday, I should have made it clear that I won’t be filling up that time using Facebook. I mention this specifically because many of my original blogging buddies from 2005 and 2006 have done just that.

I suppose if one is just posting cartoons and videos, then Facebook might be the right venue. I know columnists from my local newspaper and reporters from TV stations and indeed TV networks use it to pose questions to get a sense of the “pulse of the people.” Said content often shows up in their newscasts/broadcasts.

But if one wants to say something more, I still am a fan of the blog. Of course, I realize I’m an old-fashioned guy who STILL hates the designated hitter rule in baseball.

Facebook is really good for snark, some pithy comments in response to a cartoon someone has posted. I’ve been known to engage in it from time to time myself; once I did it on the wrong person’s timeline, and it turned out better than I would have expected. And I do make use of the reminders about people’s birthdays.

Moreover, Facebook can be a useful tool for research. “Does anybody know” where something can be purchased or when some event took place; something to be said for collective wisdom.

For some people, such as my nieces, it’s the only way I know what’s going on in their lives. For others, it’s the only way I can get ahold of them; if they have e-mail, they don’t check it, and I can only reach them if I instant message them when they are online.

However, I get more spam that gets posted onto my timeline. Actually, it’s the same one: “Hey, check this out!” I don’t know how to stop it, and I’m unaware it’s there until/unless someone points it out to me.

Facebook: useful tool which I will not use to replace blogging, in case you were wondering.

Eight years of blogging

Boy, that summer of 2005, when I probably had no one READING my blog, I sure seemed to have had a LOT to say.

I started blogging eight years ago today, apparently without much forethought. because, in the lyrics of that Rufus featuring Chaka Khan song, “Once you get started, it’s so hard to stop.” I’ve managed to blog every single day here.

To be sure, occasionally it was just a single YouTube video, but even then, it almost always had a soupçon of contextual verbiage. (Here’s a question for you all – how does one type a ç from a standard US typewriter? The one in the previous sentence I cut and pasted.)

One of the ways I have maintained whatever level of sanity I have is that I don’t blog here nearly as often as I used to. Some days early on, I would blog here more than once a day. I’ve tried very hard not to do that anymore.

The table below shows how many times each month I wrote posts numbering greater than the number of days in that month. I didn’t start until May 2 of 2005; thus those Xs for January-April.
2005 X, X, X, X, 3, 10, 18, 28, 22, 17, 14, 8 = 120
2006 10, 5, 9, 4, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1 = 31
2007 0, 0, 3, 1, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, 3, 1, 1 = 15
2008 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 3, 3, 0, 1, 0, 0 = 9
2009 0, 0, 1, 3, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 = 5
2010 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 = 2
2011 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 2, 1 = 8
2012 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 = 0
Zeros for 2013 thus far.

Boy, that summer of 2005, when I probably had no one READING my blog except my friend Fred and his wife Lynn, I sure seemed to have had a LOT to say.

Of course, what I’ve done, when I ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY had to write something else, when I have something set in this blog, is to try to post it elsewhere, perhaps my Times Union blog, especially if it was something specific to the Albany area, e.g., or the New York State Data Center blog if it involved geeky stats.

Since not writing at all has taken place now and then – life DOES get in the way – having a reserve of posts is a good strategy. I had eight fewer completed blog posts in the queue on the last Monday in February of this year than I did on the last Monday in January, whittling down my reserve from 31 to 23, and it’s pretty much stayed there. Now you might think 23 is good, but it’s not the stuff that I can, or want, to post in the next 23 days. It’ll be a post I’d rather put up on a particular day (Flag Day, the anniversary of my father’s death, ABC Wednesday, or the like).

What I wrote last year seems more likely now than ever. After I hit 10 years as a daily blog, a goodly run, it will become…not a daily blog. (Probably. Maybe. Who knows?) Certainly, I’ll write three or four or five times a week at least. Heck, in October of 2015, I might make it seven days a week for a couple of weeks, because the info contained therein will be of interest for only a few college friends I knew 40 years earlier. Yes, I know what I’m going to blog about in October of 2015. I don’t always know what I’m going to blog about in May 2013, but two and a half years from now…

One other thing: I used to timestamp my blog posts between 4:30 and 5:30 a.m., Eastern standard time, for no other reason than it gave the impression that I got up every morning to craft these words of wisdom. Now that I’m in my 60s, I’ve decided to post between 6:00 and 6:59; the minute part is determined by the minute when I publish. Since this is fed to my Twitter feed and my Facebook page, I theorize, correctly or not, that more people will see it. Of course, if I REALLY wanted more people in North America to see it, I’d post at noon, but obviously, this is not based on REAL rational thought.

Disappearing text, and pictures in blogs

I may be a technophobe, but necessity can be a real mother.

wordpress-logo — My text can go here. Yahoo! This is so easy.

This is in response, not so much to a question, but to a comment. Chris said, in response to this post, “That ‘highlight the text to avoid an accidental spoiler’ is absolutely brilliant.”

How did I do that? Well, some years ago, I saw it done on someone’s blog (Mike Sterling? Greg Burgas? I don’t remember) and asked, “How do you do that?”

If I cut and pasted the code, then you wouldn’t see it because it would be invisible. So I’m going to write it out descriptively; you’d type the symbols indicated with no gaps.

The left arrow (comma uppercase)
The words span style
The equal sign
Back slash
Quotes
The word color:#ffff
Semicolon
Back slash
Quotes
Right arrow (period uppercase)
Whatever text you want to hide
Left arrow
Back slash
The word span
Right arrow
(And if this is unclear, send your e-mail to rogerogreen (AT) gmail (DOT) com, and I’ll send it to you.)

(UPDATE: as Jaquandor indicated, the ffff only works if your background is white. If your background is another color, you need to pick THAT color; check here, for instance.)

While I’m in this geek mood – it won’t last, believe me – let me talk about photos on this blog. On my original Blogger blog, it took me a while to figure out how to add graphics to my Blogger blog, but eventually, pretty much by accident, I did. When I started with my Times Union blog in 2008, on WordPress, I couldn’t figure out how to put in pictures. More correctly, I couldn’t SIZE the picture. I tried to put in a picture of Dudley Do-Right – former NYS governor Eliot Spitzer looked VERY MUCH like the cartoon character – but it was SO huge, it took up the entire screen. So I continued to compose in Blogger, then pasted it into the TU WP. Then when I got this blog in WP in 2010, I stayed drafting it all in Blogger.

Then recently, my Blogger interface changed so that I couldn’t insert the pictures the way I wanted to. They’d sit on the top of the page – see this post, e.g., and it just wasn’t what I wanted.

I decided to look at WP again, and in the last six years, they made it easier. Not only that but now I can put CAPTIONS in the pictures. Sizing is also more instinctive than it used to be. At the same time, I learned how to post an MP3 file of music successfully onto this blog; I had tried as recently as a year ago, without success.

I may be a technophobe, but necessity can be a real mother.

Speaking of Blogger: Prevent Blogger Blog from Redirecting to a country-specific domain. “The main reason behind the redirection is the selective censorship so that they can easily block a blog or selected pages on a blog in one country while serving the content to other countries… Reports suggest that your blog SEO will be affected which is bad for your blog health.”

I see this in e-mails, and elsewhere: someone is citing a specific webpage from some RSS feed. It’ll look like http://mindhuntersinc.com/doing-what-we-can/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=doing-what-we-can – but it can generally be cut down at the ? – try it and you’ll find that http://mindhuntersinc.com/doing-what-we-can/ works just as well.

Recycling my gay marriage/SCOTUS post

The post was featured on the TU’s online Best of the Blogs, and it generated quite a few comments to boot.

I have a blog at the Times Union newspaper, the local Hearst-owned daily, where I write far less frequently, and generally have a difficult coming up with topics there. I KNOW what I want to do here in THIS blog, but after over ~~three~~ FIVE years there, not so much.

It’s the week in late March of the Supreme Court hearing two cases about gay marriage, or same-sex marriage, or marriage equality. The latter term may be preferred by advocates – of which I am one – but the former two are more descriptive. It’s like talking about interracial marriage, which was a marriage equality issue in the US in my lifetime. Most people these days don’t say, “Hey, there’s an interracial couple,” do they? Well, generally not to their faces.

In any case, I thought I should write something, but my time was limited, and I needed something while the issue was still hot. So I went to this blog, found a piece I had written in December 2012, changed maybe a half dozen words, and reposted it on my TU blog.

This turned out to have been a great decision. The post was featured on the TU’s online Best of the Blogs, and it generated quite a few comments to boot. Some of it was about how opponents are always dragging bestiality into the discussion.

One guy, Steve, who was self-described as a gay man, was particularly perturbed by it, and I understood this, possibly in a different way. Some let’s say less-than-enlightened folks have made comparisons between black people, especially black men, and lower primates.

In any case, though I think it ought not to need to be said, I oppose bestiality because there’s no free will on the part of the beast. Indeed, that why there have been rules concerning the age of consent about humans, that one wants to protect a child from being exploited.

Related: there was some argument by Justice Scalia in one of the SCOTUS cases, that if you allow gay marriage, you have to allow gay adoption, and that the science is unclear about the efficacy of that. Except I don’t believe that to be true. The issue of gay adoption was addressed in the amicus curie brief that the American Sociological Association filed in the very case Scalia was commenting on.

Here are some interesting figures from the American Consumers Newsletter about support for gay marriage. And, according to his younger daughter, Ronald Reagan would have supported marriage equality.