I hate my blog

I really hate my blog. I’ve always struggled with my online identity. Should I be funny? Should I be serious? Who knows. Guess it’s a little bit like real life.

Not that I don’t like blogging. No, on the contrary, one thing I can tell you is that blogging can really help you out.

The best advice I’ve ever heard is to try to take your feelings and put them into words. Whether you share them publicly is your choice or not, but it’s nice to struggle through a complicated thought and come out on the other side with a better sense of clarity. A blog can be your ally in doing that. Depending on your situation, it can really help you solve a difficult issue. I’m a firm believer in the format. It’s good promotion, too, assuming you are careful about what you express.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’d like a real bona fide thing that says, “this is who I am,” that isn’t vulnerable to some opportunistic rant that could show up in the Google cache some years later.

The age of the homepage seems to have died. It used to be you’d get an angelfire or geocities account and build some crappy circa-1994 thing and push it out there and tell people that’s your homepage. Now it’s blog, blog, blog, which is cool, but doesn’t provide that biographical feeling (and can really catch you at an awkward moment without the context of who you are).

After working 11 days in a row (mostly by my own choice), through my somewhat bleary eyes and short-tempered stupor, I feel like maybe this is a good time to give it some thought. What would my ideal online home look like? What would it have?

Would there be a text area? Video? News? Something interactive? What would I want to put there?

I almost feel like my ideal blogging situation would be a bit like Twitter or the Facebook feed … you know, there’s various kinds of activities. There’s the things you’re reading, the things you take pictures of, the things you write in 140 characters or less … oh, hey, there’s Tumblr for that. I think my big gripe with Facebook is it’s kind of ugly. It is, however, highly reliable. No fail whales there, Zuck.

So look for some updates to come as I hash out my thoughts. Chances are, I’ll be putting them into words right here.

Andy Warhol was a bit generous

Rain, rain, rain, there you go again, messin’ up my plans
Ruinin’ my day of fun best as you can
I think it’s fair to say that I’m not your biggest fan
But I always make do in these gray hours, best as I can.

ONE of my favorite new rainy-day activities is 12seconds.tv, a new site that we are using. You get 12 seconds, not 15 minutes, of fame. That is, if the community likes what you do. For me, I feel like if I’m going to ask other people to submit videos, I sure as heck had better be submitting videos, too. So submit I do, and I’ve had a modicum of success. It’s good to know what it feels like to submit your work and be part of an active community. Hopefully this experience will help me do better at my job. Also, hey, the site is lots of fun to use and I really enjoy trying to stretch myself and see if I can respond to the silly and thought-provoking challenges. Good times!

Here are some notable pieces I’ve done so far:

• Expressing my love for Australian accents (with a twist ending)
• Submitted for your approval… see if you can guess this show
• The straight dope on cuss words, right from the rabitz hole
• The REAL easter bunny
• New yoga ball after old one burst
• FEATURED: Rubber Babushka | Follow-up | Response

So check it out. Also, Muse rules. Oh how I love your sweet sounds.

Flickr allows video posts!

And this is what I do with it… it’s not easy to embed, though. The code I grabbed showed up as a white space. I had to just grab the thumbnail and link to the video, which is the old way of doing things…

I like this feature though, in terms of my own personal use. It’s helpful for those times when you have good photos and video but the vids don’t stand on their own. YouTube, it’s not, and it’s not trying to be. (Here’s the other mini-peeps-production)

The story behind this video? It’s an outtake from Monty Peeps and the Holy Grail. I started working on it over my “spring break” in the PHX but didn’t do much with it. I filmed the parts up to approaching the cute bunny, but I haven’t finished filming the elements featuring the bloody battle.

The yellow Peep chick is the bunny, and the purple thing is actually a lavender-colored peep. I stuck a straw in its side to serve as a sword, and the paper stuck through the straw is a “shield.” It’s kind of a hack job, but I thought it was kind of amusing.

I tried to put it together with Windows Movie Maker on my old PC that remains at the parents’ house, but the stop-motion segments combined with the video were too much for it and the whole thing kept freezing up. I’m wondering if iMovie will handle this any better. (I’m now a Mac user; hell hath frozen over. I love my speedy, agile little MacBook. It even runs Second Life. I’ve never seen a PC that could do that, other than a Dell XPS upstairs at work.)