Tag Archives: Blogging

Blogging, Personal

Weird Or Unique Habits?

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Is there anything that’s known as “normal” anymore? I tend to believe that the answer to that is “no”. Having said that, I’m sure that all of us see habits and things that others do that make us question their sanity. Our friend Charles of Mostly Bright Ideas comes up with a lot of stuff that makes many of us think that maybe his parents were saying about him as a child “that boy ain’t right”, but I’m thinking that we’re probably not all that much different.

I figured that after my last video and rank that I’d lighten things up a bit and fess up to a few things. I laugh at myself often but I don’t often do it in public. Still, I’ll admit that I have some quirks that maybe others do or don’t; let me share some of mine.

I can’t go to sleep unless I’m covered by some kind of blanket. Luckily, I have the blanket my wife made for me that fits the bill. I also run the fan every night, mainly for sound. When it’s cold I run the heat and the fan, which seems odd but I need the noise. When it’s hot I aim the fan at me, but I don’t like air blowing on me so I cover up with the blanket, which gets a slight bit of air to my body, but it’s more my face I’m concerned with. I also have a second fan that just blows on my face, but it’s small so it does the job without getting on my nerves. But if I don’t use the blanket, and the equivalent of 5 pillows (in a hotel it’s 5 pillows; at home it’s a body length pillow, an extra “hugging” pillow, one for my head and a booster that goes against the headboard to help the first pillow sit in the proper place.

When I eat cake with frosting, which is most of the time, the frosting must be on the left side. That’s because I’m right handed, and I always want to finish with the best part of the cake, which is the frosting. I also have to eat it in a pattern, to make sure the cake stays even all around until I reach the ultimate frosting and slight bit of cake finish.

Whenever I eat food that has to be cut, I cut it all up before I start eating. I cut everything in precise patterns so that almost all pieces of meat or whatever else I’m eating are the same size. And when I eat more than one thing at a time, such as meat, potatoes and nasty vegetables (I hate vegetables), I eat everything such that my last bite will have one of each in it. My meal has to end that way, otherwise I’ve jinxed myself.

I also have periods where I won’t touch food. I don’t mean I won’t eat; I mean I’m just not touching it, whether raw or cooked. It limits where I’ll go out to eat because if I’m not touching food, I’m not eating sandwiches or many other things. Funny, but that never seems to prevent me from touching cookies. lol

Anything that needs butter on it I need to see the butter, otherwise I’m putting more on. The same goes for salad; if I can’t see it, it’s not there.

Toilet paper must go over the top instead of underneath. I don’t know a single male that does it underneath, though I’m betting there’s one out there. I think my wife does it the other way sometimes to mess with my head.

When I encounter stairs, whether I’m going up or down, I count them ahead if possible so that I always end on my right foot. If there are a lot of them and I miscounted by my quick review, I will stop 3 steps before the end and alter my steps to make sure I end on my right foot.

I count letters and words in sentences. It’s probably why I’m good at spelling and math. I don’t count every sentence, but I count a lot of them. I see how many letters there are and then divide everything by 3, which is my lucky number. If it ends up divisible by 3 I move on; if not, I have to create alternate ways of saying the phrase and recount until it divides by 3. I’ve been doing this since I was 8 years old; no idea why.

When I eat ice cream with chocolate sauce, I always eat the first half or quarter the regular way, then I have to mix everything together to finish. After everything is mixed, I eat using the back of the spoon instead of the regular way.

Finally, if I eat a sandwich and it’s meat, it must have mayonnaise or Miracle Whip on it. If there’s cheese on the sandwich, which is rare, it can only be Miracle Whip, not even mayonnaise. If I eat hotdogs at home, I start with Miracle Whip on the bread, then a thin stream of mustard and then ketchup. The only deviations are if I decide to add barbecue sauce, in which case I don’t use mustard or ketchup, or chili, in which case I don’t add ketchup.

Why am I talking about weird things I do? First, trust me, I only scratched the surface, though I’m saying now that if my friend Scott stops here and says anything, he’s lying! lol Second, I mention these things because I just want to show that overall I’m a regular guy with some habits that others might think are a bit different, but that everyone has differences and things we do that might or might not be embarrassing. Trust me, I’m not embarrassed by any of the things I’ve shared because they’re my hard rules; anyone who’s ever eaten out with me can attest to this. My wife will attest to the rest of it.

See, when I talk about blogging I talk both about their being rules and no rules. For instance, the main non-rule is that people should just write and worry about other things after they’ve figured out if they can write things on a consistent basis. Until you find your voice, it doesn’t matter whether you follow any certain patterns or not.

The main rule after that is to be yourself and not to be afraid to show people who or what you really might be. I tend to believe that people love to read whatever you’re writing about if they can relate to the writer in some fashion. Giving one’s writing personality is a big deal; revealing something about yourself that others can read, take in and even potentially laugh at is cathartic, but it’s also a way of making yourself more real to your readers.

So this is me; well, a small part of me. I’m not even going to tell you about Rice Krispies treats.
 

Internet

June 12th, The Internet, And A Video

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Today’s date is June 12th. There were a lot of historical things that occurred on this day that my mind feels are important, or at least interesting, in some fashion. Let’s take a look at some of them, shall we?

Events

1898 – Philippine Declaration of Independence: General Emilio Aguinaldo declares the Philippines’ independence from Spain.

1939 – The Baseball Hall of Fame opens in Cooperstown, New York.

1963 – Civil rights leader Medgar Evers is murdered in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi

1964 – Anti-apartheid activist and ANC leader Nelson Mandela is sentenced to life in prison for sabotage in South Africa.

1967 – The United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia declares all U.S. state laws which prohibit interracial marriage to be unconstitutional.

1978 – David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” killer in New York City, is sentenced to 365 years in prison for six killings.

1994 – Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman are murdered outside her home in Los Angeles, California.

Born

1916 – Irwin Allen, American film producer

1924 – George H. W. Bush, 41st President of the United States

1929 – Anne Frank, German-born Dutch Jewish diarist and Holocaust victim

1930 – Jim Nabors, American actor

1941 – Marv Albert, American sportscaster

1941 – Chick Corea, American musician

1971 – Mark Henry, American professional wrestler and World’s Strongest Man winner

Died

1957 – Jimmy Dorsey, American musician

2003 – Gregory Peck, American actor

Holiday

World Day Against Child Labour

Something else happened on this day as well, and that’s the subject of my video. I include this post of mine now on blogging responsibly, modesty, free speech and consequences as further reference.

Blogging

Talking Blog Content Strategies… Boring!

25 Comments

I really don’t mean to beat up on the post I’m about to link to. However, after reading this guest post on Marco Saric’s blog titled Why You Need A Content Strategy For Your Blog and having it be the 4th article I’d come upon on the night on the same topic, I decided I’d had enough and had to write something on it.


by Stefan Erschwendner
via Flickr

It’s not that the content I keep reading is bad. It’s that its, well, boring. Everyone pretty much keeps saying the same thing in the same way and the explanations seem to be the same and the output seems to be the same and there doesn’t seem to be any real passion or sense of any of it.

Yeah, I know, someone’s going to say “Hey, you wrote two posts on better blogging and probably touched upon the subject as well.” Okay, so I did; but there are some things I’m reading that I didn’t touch upon, or touched upon that I said in a much different way. Let’s look at some of these concepts.

1. The concept of blogging strategies; ugh! Every person who wrote about this said that you had to decide what your ultimate goal was for your blog and that you needed to think about it before you started.

I said think about what you want to write about before you start blogging because you want to make sure you’ll have a topic you can write on for a long time. In my mind, you’ve probable already thought about the reasons you want to have a blog; to show expertise, to make money, to communicate your thoughts, to rant, to pray, to be a jerk, etc.

Actually, I broke it into 3 concepts: what to write about; what’s your passion; niche or non-niche.

2. Publishing calendar; really? What is a publishing calendar anyway? It seems to depend on who you ask.

Some will say it’s a way of planning what types of posts you’re going to write and when you’re going to post them. Some will say that it’s a way of telling people what’s coming so they can look forward to the next post. Some people say it’s what’s necessary to make sure you keep writing and know what topic you want to address each time. They say you should have a schedule that goes out weekly, monthly, even yearly.

Posh! If you’re someone writing for yourself, I will say that I believe it’s important to be as consistent as you can with your posts so that if you find people that like to follow you, they get some kind of idea of what to expect from you. I’ve yet to meet the individual that can actually stick to some kind of schedule forever.

Heck, I’ve tried writing a post every single day and I find that every once in awhile I can’t do it; I might even be backing that up some. Yet I write about what I want to write about whenever I want to write about it.

I tend to believe it’s much more important to get content out on your topic, whatever it might be, than to have to back yourself into a publishing corner to try to force yourself to do something. You’ll get bored, your writing will be boring, and people reading will get bored and leave.


by FindYourSearch via Flickr

3. Write good content, be precise, and always have a call to action; duh! When I wrote a post on high quality content, I stated that one of the problems with phrases like that was that very few people ever stated what it was supposed to be. Well, the same about good content and calls to action. I tried to address it in that post and on one of my Better Blogging posts, and yet while I was doing it I was thinking “do I really have to tell people what good content is?”

Call to action is something totally different, though. I tend to believe that not every post written has to have a call to action. Some internet marketers have exactly that in every post; how many people will continue to read something that’s selling to them every day?

However, writing thought provoking posts, or asking questions, is its own form of “call to action” writing, although its purpose wouldn’t fit a marketer. I like to think of a blog writer like my friend Charles, who used to write very entertaining posts that made us smile and laugh, but what couldn’t necessarily be categorized as “call to action” posts.

Is there such a thing as a blog content strategy? Yes and no.

For my finance blog, even post must be about finances in some fashion, otherwise it doesn’t get on there. But there’s no particular style for it; other than finance there’s no particular niche either. I sometimes have a post a day, and sometimes a post a week. So, it’s got a strategy of sorts, yet not a strategy that’s so finite that I’m compelled to try to make it more than it is.

Same with this blog. My only strategy is to keep new content on it; yup, that’s it. To a lesser degree that’s my strategy with my local blog; it’s not much of a strategy.

My business blog… well, I’ve been thinking about that one a lot lately, and I’m starting to realize that maybe the categories I’ve been using for all these years don’t always fit what I’m writing about. All posts are somewhat related to my business, but I’ve been wondering if I’m stifling myself by trying to fit within the categories I’ve established. If that’s the case then the strategy needs to be changed, but even so, it’s a fairly loose strategy. It has a goal of course, but that goal is more broad than what most people might think it should be.

So be it; I’ve stated a lot of stuff here so now it’s your turn. Hot air, boring, on point, what the hey? Your thoughts please (see, that’s “call to action lol).
 

Blogging

When Lack Of Time Gets In The Way

27 Comments

Some of you have probably noticed that I’ve been off my normal schedule the last couple of weeks. This is proof that even with one of the better imaginations and with having lots of things to write about at a moment’s notice that things aren’t always under your control.

I don’t offer these things as excuses, but I figure I might as well mention what’s been going on, some of which you may already know.

1. My grandmother is still in the hospital. There’s the possibility that she’s going to be moved to a nursing home tomorrow, but I’m holding my breath on this one. That’s because we’ve already had two false alarms, which has distressed my mother and which caused me to, in my own way, castigate the social worker who allowed it to occur, in my opinion. There have also been many other issues that have shown me how the medical field is either really lacking or that they just treated my grandmother with less than proper care; believe it or not I don’t see them as just picking on her, which means things are worse than I can imagine.

2. I’ve been on the road. I’ve got a consulting gig, which has had me out of town here and there, including the last couple of days; actually, I was out of town today as well, but I just got home about an hour ago and wanted to get something out. Most of the project I’ll be working on will be at home, which means I should be able to keep to my normal schedule most of the time. I had expected that I’d be able to write from Connecticut, where I was, but it seems that the higher you are in a hotel, the worse the internet connection is. I was on the 16th floor, which offered a great view but my connection was so slow, whether I was wireless or not, but I lost interest in being on the computer at all. How funny things are; less than 20 years ago I’d have killed for the speed I was getting in the hotel, but these days with 15 MBPS as my standard, a slow connection is irritating as sin.

3. Because of this consulting gig, I’ve been inundated with paper. You wouldn’t believe how much paper, or electronic file information, I’ve been receiving. All of this is just prep work, believe it or not. I have tons more coming, which could be somewhat overwhelming. And yet, I believe the information I’ll be getting will be much easier to digest than all the information I’ve been getting. Because I’ve been traveling for work and traveling for my grandmother I’ve had to try to catch up with all that reading when I got home; that’s been tough. And that’s not all.

4. Because of the other two things, I’d fallen way behind on my other work. I do have some regular clients, and normally I get all my work done for the month within the first week of each month, so I can concentrate on other things. This time around, it just didn’t happen. So, I’ve been filling some of my other time with work, time I normally put to blogging.

All that and I get home to learn that there’s a bear running around town that no one seems to know how to find, but someone got a picture of it; sheesh! lol Anyway, I hope that I’ll be able to get back on a normal schedule tomorrow; man, so I have a lot to say!

Blogging

Subscribing To Comments… Not Me!

23 Comments

I seem to be seeing two things occurring more often these days to try to get around spam; at least I assume it’s trying to get around spam. One is that more people are moderating their comments; the second is that more people are having you double opt-in to comments by sending you an email asking you to subscribe to comments.

Since I’ve talked often enough about why I don’t like comment moderation, I’ll move onto the second one, which I’ve mentioned here and there but I’m unsure if it’s something I’ve ever addressed on its own.

I hate the double opt-in system. I’m betting some of you are saying “it’s not double, since I’m only sending an email once.” That’s what double opt-in; remember the days when everyone that had a newsletter required you to confirm that it was actually you requesting it by sending you an email asking if it was you? Remember how, instead of consistently doing it, you just stopped subscribing to any newsletters because you didn’t want to be bothered, especially if there wasn’t any notification that you were going to have to do it?

I do. I had a newsletter, and I did the double opt-in thing for a couple of months many years ago after I got a rash of emails saying that they hadn’t subscribed to my newsletter, even though I had their email address. So I went to the double opt-in system, only to find that more than half the people who got it decided they didn’t want to play the game and never finished subscribing.

I really wasn’t all that surprised since I had already started doing that myself. However, I had put it on my newsletter page that I was going to do it, which make me think that I at least had given some kind of warning about it so people should have been expecting it.

Frankly, I see it as another way the internet gets cluttered with lots of digital garbage that never quite goes away because it’s somewhat unnecessary. There aren’t all that many people that are sneakily subscribing someone to someone else’s newsletter, although there are definitely a lot of people who will add you to theirs without your asking, just because they met you somewhere. The same goes for spam.

My blog does pretty well, and if I’m not all that bothered by the relatively low amount of spam I get because of the plugins I use, I can’t figure out why anyone else would be. Yeah, I know about the sneaky spam like the type I wrote about, but it’s like when you were in school and the teacher punished everyone in class because of that one kid that always acted stupid; remember how no one liked that?

I’m just saying that it’s not quite logical in today’s age to punish everyone for the sins of the few. At least I’m not doing it and you can bet I’m not playing either. There are always other ways folks, and they’re easier to deal with.