The problem I got in to with blogging, and many many other things, I guess, is I get in this state where I feel like I’m too busy to put anything down. I mean, I don’t feel like I can do a new post justice. So I don’t bother. Or I’ll create a number of new posts, all drafts. Or, I will keep up with it, but end up giving it up because it becomes too much of a timesink.

Anyhow, my twitter account has been filling the gap. It allows me to put down random thoughts, links, etc without all that editing or worry about composing. That’s not strictly right: sometimes I go through a couple of edit cycles to fit things in the 140 character limit. Then again, brevity is not a bad thing.

Since it’s been a while since I created a full fledged post, I figured I could put down what I’ve been up to over the past month or so.

Starting on August 25th, Heather, her sister, Beatrix, and I flew to New York for the US Open. (Before we left, Heather’s sister moved her stuff out of our spare bedroom, getting ready to stay at her own place when we got back.)

Since Bea was too young, really, to watch tennis (and stay quiet), I babysat while Heather went to the tennis matches. (I like tennis, but not enough to sit through as much as she did.) I spent a lot of time with Bea, often in Flushing Meadows – Corona park, which was fun. We all got to see a lot of world class tennis (plus quite a few celebrities). We were pretty much booked the whole time, although Heather & Holly went to the Today show on Labor Day. I went in to work one morning as well.

Our friends Jackie & Paul were visiting, and arrived the day before we got back. The day we got back, one of our AC units failed. We got that all fixed, and the next weekend we traveled to Austin to attend the Austin City Limits Music Festival. I really enjoyed it, but sitting in the Texas heat for 3 days (with 60,000 friends) was quite draining.

When we got back, Heather, Beatrix, and I all came down with colds. We’ve finally shaken them.

Now you’ll have to pardon me while I go curl up in a ball and take a nice long nap.

So, I just got back from the grocery store a little bit ago.  I went to pick up some odds & ends – milk, cat litter, baby food, soda.  You know, the kinds of things that, in retrospect, you should have bought more of last time you really “went to the grocery store”.  But you didn’t, so you have to go back 2 days later.

Anyway, I had too much to go to the single express checkout line, so I go to the single normal checkout line.  The woman ahead of me and her male companion (husband? boyfriend?) had 2 carts stuffed with hair care products, diapers, and other miscellaneous things. The cashier was on the second cart, so I went ahead and got in line. The cashier was finishing up, and then the woman dropped a stack of coupons in front of the cashier, who started scanning them.

After a few coupons, I started counting, as it was clear this was going to take a while, and I had nowhere else to go.  Kind of like what I used to do as a kid when, in my parents car, we were stuck at a railroad crossing, and I started counting the railcars, just to see how long the train really was.

Anyhow, I kept counting.  I know I missed a few, and the cashier’s scanning stalled a few times (excess coupons, ones that had to be entered manually, etc), but finally, after a second pile, the cashier was done.  175+ coupons.  Seriously.  I missed at least a dozen, so the total might have actually been 200.  According to the woman, she had bought 50 packages of diapers.  I saw maybe half a dozen or dozen large containers of laundry detergent.  And lots, lots more.  There must have been a coupon for every item, except, maybe, the 4 cookies the woman purchased, probably to eat while she was stuffing the carts. (And to finish, perhaps, while loading the car, which I saw them still doing as I walked to my car.)

I don’t know about this whole shopping thing.  It seems like every time I venture out, some incredibly long transaction happens right in front of me.  (Like the time at Target when a woman bought a ton of stuff, including a window air conditioner, only to be denied a new Target card.  And then her existing credit card got denied, too.  But that’s another story…)

So… I used to have a blog… years ago. Actually 2 blogs… Maybe 3… They all eventually fell in to disrepair, since they were all self-hosted, and I’d have server failures, OS upgrades, and home network changes, and my day job and/or life kept me too busy to get it running again. (And it’s not like I had a ton of people reading it.)

Fast forward a year or three. I decided I was going to go the hosted route… outsource it, ya know. No more self inflicted server outages. Since a lot of what I do, or wanted to do, was post photos, I got a Flickr account (plus I liked that they had external tools). Once Beatrix was born, or there abouts, I upgraded to a pro account. I also used a LinkedIn account for tracking people I went to school with or worked with over the years.

Now, when I had a blog, I’d also post various links I had found that I thought were interesting, maybe with a snippet of text. However, that was usually too tedious for a full fledged blog post. (Even with blogging tools, like Ecto.) All I needed was the link and the title or a short description. del.icio.us fit the bill, but I don’t use my account that much. I need to integrate it better with my web browser, and maybe I’ll use it more.

I started using last.fm because of Imelda, but the standard Mac client appeared to be too much of a resource hog.

I had gotten a few Twitter invites, but sat on them. Until a bit over a week ago. And then I got a Pownce invite. Again, from Imelda. And that’s where it all started falling apart.

In addition to Pownce and Twitter, I created a Facebook account, created a WordPress.com blog (which you’re now reading), and started tying it all together. I twitter, and receive tweets, via IM in Adium, and sometimes on my cell phone. Facebook pulls in my Flickr photos. I created a YouTube account, am starting to look at Vimeo, and even Zooomr. (Although for the latter, I think I have too much invested in Flickr to change.) Maybe I should look at Tumblr? And I manage it all using the Flock browser.

I have links in the sidebar of my blog to my different accounts. del.icio.us links appear on my blog, too. But maybe I just want to aggregate it all, so I can, for example, drop the same external info in to both Facebook & my blog. So Imelda comes through again, with a timely invite to Natuba. So I’ll be using that to aggregate everything I can. And, when I’m done, you should be able get to everything from everywhere. Hopefully.

And I blame Imelda completely…

P.S. She’s even to blame for this post. I was chatting with her about my accounts, Natuba came up, and she suggested I blog about it. But instead, I went on a tangent. Maybe next post… 🙂

The local cable company used to be a joint venture between Time Warner & Comcast. I guess Comcast bought out Time Warner, or there was otherwise a change of ownership. Anyhow, that reminded me that, in addition to his main site, my dad had put down a single page on his free Road Runner site. I hadn’t looked at it in years. (Since it was just a placeholder.) I have to say… I laughed when I saw it this past week. It had the following photo, with a caption below:

“If you get bored staring at this blue page or me on a horse check out my web sites” and then the links.

I miss my dad. He would have been 65 today…

In the beginning, my “blog” was just an edited HTML file. (I’ve been looking at some old copies of my web site via the Wayback Machine at archive.org.) Actually, initially it was just a photo diary.

Then I went to Moveable Type in 2002, then self-hosted WordPress. After dabbling with a few sites, and keeping my journal off-line in an Emacs-maintained text file, I decided to finally get back online. I have too many things going on, so I decided (for now) to go with a hosted solution. I’m using WordPress.com, since I used WordPress previously. And this gives me a chance to tie together my various, accumulating web 2.0, social-thingie web sites. We’ll see how I keep it up this time.