(R)ecreation

What do I do to kill time? Well, I:

• read


• watch TV:




• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip


• The Class


• House


• Brothers & Sisters


• CSI: NY


• Medium


• Two and a Half Men


• CSI: Miami


• CSI


• Numb3rs


• Veronica Mars


• How I Met Your Mother




• go to movies


• blog:




• Back Story


• Love All Books


• Famous Blogs


• Web MaJoR


• Techsploration




• surf the web


• research my family tree (though not recently)


• and?

Or perhaps M is for . . .

Miscellanea.

In the immortal words of the not-so-immortal Stan Lee: 'nuff said!

The Story of O (iteration 1)

As I said, using FORM, the O stands for Occupation.

Occupations I've had:

1. Shoe factory worker


2. Telecommunications specialist (USAF/Post-USAF)


3. IT professional


4. Stay-at-home dad

Technorati

I'm claiming this blog for Technorati (see my Technorati Profile).

Let's try this again

I thought I'd learned from my mistakes, but I guess not. At least this time the problem was an offline error. I had a really nice entry being edited yesterday for this blog, and got my machine hung before I saved a copy (I just saved what I've written in this post so far!)

So, now I'll try to re-invent what I wrote once already, and you can bet I'll be saving this puppy often as I do.

Before we get started with the back story that is the raison d'etre for this blog, I'm going to explain how I'm going to proceed with giving you some idea "what I'm about" in the most useful fashion.

I tend to be someone who likes my route well thought out before beginning a trip, and a plan of action before beginning any venture. As such, I'm going to lay out my plan so that you know what to expect.

My intent is to concurrently implement two techniques that I've been familiar with for many years:

1. The first technique (I was taught this a number of years ago by a salesman) gives you the ability to converse with anyone you'd like to get to know better (and, in the salesman's case, anyone you'd like to sell something to).
   
   This first technique is called FORM.
   
   FORM stands for Family, Occupation, Recreation, and Money (or Message). If you introduce yourself to someone and start a discussion about your families, jobs, recreational interests, and then talk about whatever your message is (or what you're selling) you stand a better chance of investing that person in what you're saying.
   
   And since this blog will be (as I hope all my blogs are) a conversation between myself and my readers, I'm going to be using the FORM method to structure the information you learn about me.


2. But wait, there's MORE!!!
   
   The second technique I'm going to employ is something from my former life in the world of IT (information technology): spiral development. Yes, I'm going to iterate over the FORM areas of my life (mayhap not so much over the M), providing a high-level view of my life at present and how I got here, and then on successive iterations going into more and more detail (but not so much you get sick of me, I hope!)

So, beginning with Family, (iteration 1), I am:

• 50 years old


• a husband (to wife Julie)


• a father (to son Riley)


• a stay-at-home dad (for six years, come January)


• an orphan


• the fourth of my mother's six kids (I have an two older "half sisters" and a "half brother")


• the first of my father's three children (I have a younger sister and a younger brother)

That's enough of the first iteration on family. Next time I'll talk about my occupation (such as it is).

One of my favorite quotes

This has to be one of my favorite quotes ever: Follow your bliss (Joseph Campbell). The fact that it has been run up as the rallying cry for more than one generation by now (not to mention "t-shirtized" out the wazoo!) does nothing to diminish what it stands for.

But, like most of us, I suck at figuring out what my bliss is. I thought I wanted to be a published writer when I grew up, and now, thanks to blogger, I am. This does feel blissful to me, so I'll continue with it for a bit (like for the rest of my life, if I have anything to say about it, which I think I do!)

The Fifth Element

The fifth element in my journey to blog overload was launched on Monday, November 13th. It's a little thing called Love All Books (and I do love all books, for the most part, though I'll admit that I find some books by certain parties of political extremism do induce strong feelings of anxiety!)

If I'm going to provide "back story" on my life, I guess I need to post soon about just what my life is like at the moment. That is my plan for the next post (or the post after, no later than that!)

Great Advice For Project Completion

This may be the best advice I've ever been given:


I have this graphic set up as my wallpaper on my Dell laptop, but I let ImageShack resize it when it was uploaded.

Filed in: Advice Projects ImageShack Wallpaper

A To Do list (from/to "yours truly")

Here are some "blog-related" things to do soon:

• Clean up all my sidebars of "Edit Me" kinda crap


• Make sure I optimize my income opportunities (since I'm donating all the revenue from now until Dec 31 to charity.)


• Make sure all blogs have the following links (right now some do, some don't):
  
  
  
  • My del.icio.us
  
  
  • Blog Explosion
  
  
  • Links to my other blogs
  
  


• Make sure I put a link to WWdN on the Links section of the Famous Blogs blog (and in the future, put up links to any new blogs I focus on)


• Syndicate all blogs

Filed in: Blogging Blogs Back.Story BackStory BlogExplosion Blog.Explosion MyBlogs WWdN Charity

Why do I need another blog?

Yes. Why indeed?

Well, the short answer (Yeah, right! If you know me you know there really isn't such a thing where I'm concerned; if you don't know me, you're about to find out that I'm anything but brief) is that I like for my blogs to have a particular focus, and I thought I might need a place for more unfocussed blather, and perhaps to just tell you a bit about my history.

For right now I'll say that I'm sort of ticked at the person with the blog at backstory.blogspot.com, but only a little bit: so instead of this blog being at that address, I had to use my little grey cells and get creative with the address I wanted, which is how I wound up with baxtory.blogspot.com (say it out loud if you don't get it). What I'm most annoyed about is she's got the address I wanted and isn't doing anything with it (at least not since Guy Fawkes Day 2001).

So now I'm up to, what, four blogs? Bet you don't read'em all. (Kinda reminds me of the bunch of "personalized" pencils my friend Dave ordered many years ago: "Save the whales! Collect the whole set") Hell, I'd be happy if anyone was reading any of them.

My first, Techsploration (techsploration.blogspot.com) deals with my delvings into things techie.

My second, Famous Blogs (famousblogs.blogspot.com) intends to pick apart (and not always in a negative way) what works and what doesn't with some blogs by some famous folks.

The third, Web MaJoR (webmajor.blogspot.com), I wanted as a place to focus on my web programming activities/studies.

And now this one. We'll have to see where it leads.

Perhaps it will fall flat on its face.

Or maybe it will actually get linked to, and perhaps I'll get comments (I'm very open to comments; I'd like my blogs to be a dialog).

So, let me know what you think!

Please.

Filed in: Comments Blogging