Monthly Archives: April 2008

Frustrations with my Limitations. Blogging Pains III

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Liz Strauss, that amazing lady of , recently asked a question of her readers as to How Do You Balance the Insecurity and Confidence to Write on the Internet? And of course I had to be driving by when the title caught my eye and I got to thinking about that very question and how it applied to my latest conundrum with my own effort here. Did I let the blogger in me get out of balance?

Well obviously. Otherwise I wouldn’t be experiencing a conundrum now would I? But is it insecurity in my writing that’s causing the problem here? I had to look into this and what I saw surprised me just a bit. Where blogging is concerned, I found that I’m not insecure about writing. In fact, as I dug down deeper, I realized I never was. Go figure.

You see, I never had a problem with idea that I’d be publishing my ideas, thoughts and meanderings for all the world to see (and comment upon) when I first thought of joining the Blogosphere. It was an exciting thought to be truthful about it and besides…I knew who I was so I figured I didn’t have to try and fool anybody with some false persona, not that I ever could. For some reason, I find I can’t be anyone but me. And that seemed to be one of the great things about blogging; I could be myself. A unique among the unique.

The problem, I found out, is not insecurity so much as frustration. Frustration with my limitations. My mind, the amazing thing that it is, is constantly coming up with all these wonderful subjects and prose and concepts one right after another and if that was all I needed to run my blog then my Adsense earnings would be a heck of lot higher than they are now. The problem here is that the rest of me is stupid. I have stupid fingers that refuse to get the hang of touch typing so by the time I’ve typed out the first paragraph of a post, my mind has already come up with a half a dozen more, became extremely exasperated with my lack of output and went off for a couple beers somewhere leaving me to wallow in a fugue of forgetfulness.

I’m an inline spell checker’s nightmare with two fingers and the worst part about it is I’m a absolutely obsessed with correct spelling. If there’s one thing that turns a great piece of content right on it’s ear (IMHO), it’s misspellings. I remember reading an excerpt once from Stephen King’s that you should never use an inline spell checker while writing since all it does is distract you from the job at hand. You’re job is to write! Not chase little red snakes all over the word processor. Once a section is finished, then you can run a spell checker over the thing. Unfortunately, I’ve never seemed to master the ability to ignore that little red line from hell that resides under words such as jist, gaurd, or cumudgeon nor have I ever managed to turn the inline spell checker off…on purpose that is.

Punctuation is another shortfall of mine. If it ain’t a period, comma, question mark or exclamation point, I’m lost. Simple as that. I suppose I could go and take a quick course on what punctuation actually is and how to properly apply it within a paragraph but that would take time away from my writing.

It’s the Catch 22 of blogging. I can’t take time off from blogging to learn how to write, can’t people understand this?

Hmmm.

I guess I just proved Liz’s point, huh?

Okay, so I’m out of balance, I admit it. I refuse to publish something that looks like some poor mind blown ex-air traffic controller partially wrote during a period of momentary lucidity. It could very well be that I’m making the classic mistake of scrutinizing myself a little too closely these days instead of going with the flow of the thing. It could very well be that I’ve picked myself completely apart a half hour before I even start is more like it so the obvious solution here is to…

Knock it right the hell off! Scrutinizing that is.

Don’t you think?

So here’s to you Liz, you did it again. Whether I like it or not, you made me take a long look at myself and instead of the easy going blogging lad that I once was, I found an uptight, stressed out hard case that let life past and present get to him. Of course finding a way to balance things out again is going to be a whole new adventure in itself.

I suppose I’ll have to blog about it.

Here’s Your Pizza. That’ll be 2.6 Million Please.

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Somebody shoot me. Just hit my head with a hammer nice and hard and put me out of my misery:

Fourteen years ago, Chris Clark shelled out 20 bucks to register the domain name "pizza.com." This afternoon, he sold it for $2.6 million.
"It’s crazy, it’s just crazy," he said somewhat giddily yesterday morning from his home in North Potomac.

Source for all quotes: Baltimore Sun: Marylander gets big slice of Web pie

Yeah…sure it’s crazy…I agree. Now where’s a blindfold and that bullet ridden wall at? And sure, give me a last smoke before you take me out. I’m done with all this exercise in frustration. Here I’m wondering where the next set of groceries are going to come from and this guy sells "Pizza.com" for 2.6 million. On a whim no less.

Then they heard about the Vodka.com sale, and wheels began to turn.
"I thought, ‘Why don’t I just try to see what the level of interest is?’" Clark said. "If someone’s willing to pay that much for Vodka.com, maybe there’s more interest in pizza.com."

Oh, but there’s more:

He kept up the annual $20 registration fees on the pizza.com name, though, and basically sat on the site, selling advertising space here and there. About a year ago, he and a friend turned it into a profitable pizza directory and advertising site that earns more than the $5,000 it costs to maintain.

So let’s see now. Seeing as how we don’t know how much above $5,000 is actual profit or whether that’s a quarterly, bi-annual or annual maintenance cost, let’s concentrate on just the maintenance of the domain name itself. Including the initial purchase price and assuming the worst that he actually had to pay 20 bucks a year for renewing Pizza.com, that would bring the grand total investment into the domain name itself to a whopping $280.00!

I need to find a cliff and jump off it.

Oh well, congratulations Chris on your windfall. You obviously made a smart investment even though you may not have realized it at the time. You’re CPA is going to have a heart attack. :P

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Blogging Pains. Part II

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I figured something else out last night why thing’s have ground to a blogging halt. It’s my setup. It sucks for lack of better term. It’s awful. Not the fault of anyone or anything, it’s the location of the desk and the chair respectively. I’m crammed up against a wall on my left side so I feel like my left arm is pinned to my side (purely psychological on my part but nonetheless) resulting in my not being able to get far enough over to the left to attack my keyboard properly.

If I place my hands in the proper typing position my left hand is laying in the middle of the QWERTY portion of the keyboard and the fingers of my right hand are hovering somewhere between the "Right Click" menu key and the "Enter" key (thumb and forefinger respectively) to the "\", "Delete" and "Up Arrow" (middle, ring and little finger respectively).

It’s all WRONG!

The power strips, surge protectors, power cords, wires and such are crammed under the desk to the point where I don’t dare to move my feet around much for fear of knocking out CPU right in the middle of my finest piece of writing (good safety margin there since I figure that probably won’t  happen in this lifetime–the writing that is). But I’d really hate to bust off any connectors attached to one of the horribly overpriced, common as dirt, computer cables they sell today.

Ya’ wanna buy a 3 ft USB cable? Only $32.95? Onna stick?

I’ve stuffed all the "Save That! It Might Be Needed Later!" type of crap under, inside and outside my highly limited desk space that’s located in my highly limited desk area and since "Later" hasn’t seemed to roll around yet even after 3 years and more, I guess an overhaul of the blogging area is in order.

So that’s the next step in this quest to get things straightened out.

I think I’ll start this now. I just love pulling out wires.

Time for a Change-Blogging Pains

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This blog has turned into the online version of an overloaded blender full of vegetables. There’s too much going on in one place.

Just Thinkin’ started out as a personal type thing about life at home, family, local matters and Vermont in general and now it’s way out of control and, in my opinion, beyond recovery. There’s not enough focus here to even come up with a decent post lately. I’m not sure what the solution is yet but I’ll think of something.

I’ll be back.

Update 04-06-08, 9:14 AM EDT:

Okay, I think I have part of the problem figured out. It’s not the blog that’s not recoverable, it’s me. This realization really bothered me a lot until I remembered that it’s probably been that way for quite some time now, then I felt better. Now I have to start digging into the back end…of the blog, not me…and figure out the rest of it.

I’ll be back again.

A Few New Words

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Another one from the mailbag. It’s from 3 years ago but it’s still funny.

The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to
take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or
changing one letter, and supplying a new definition. Here are this
year’s {2005} winners.

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the
subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

2. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you
realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops
bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows
little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of
getting laid.

7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the
person who doesn’t get it.

9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.

11. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

12. Karmageddon: It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these
really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s
like, a serious bummer.

13. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day
consuming only things that are good for you.

14. Glibido: All talk and no action.!

15. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when
they come at you rapidly.

16. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after
you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

17. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into
your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

18. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in
the fruit you’re eating.

Hope you studied these carefully. There might be a quiz later. :P

Plugin Converts WordPress into MT 4.1.

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Information has it that the developers at have come up with a plugin that automatically converts your install into without losing a single bit of your data. While most info does agree with this there are other sources that indicate the plugin was developed by a small group of current, rather distressed, WordPress users in protest of 2.5′s new Admin UI.

My advice is to steer clear of this plugin until some rather serious testing can be done to ensure it works correctly and an additional plugin can be developed that will enable the user to fall back to their original WP install if they chose to do so.

I’ll be back with an update if there is any additional information to be found before the day is over. If anyone else knows anything of this, please feel free to leave a comment or post that info on your own site. This could be dangerous to all WP bloggers.