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Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Facebook, random thoughts

31 Jan

Facebook, love to hate it, enjoy it’s benefits, be annoyed by it’s faults, but mostly realize, it’s the people damit, not the software.

> Remember, privacy settings are limited and will not always work in your favor, so remember when posting, everything is public. EVERYTHING!

> Knowing what you had for breakfast, lunch or dinner is really mean. Think about it, if you just finished a PB&J and saw a post about some gourmet dinner a friend just had, you’d think, now that’s just plain mean.

> Praising a higher power is really just vain piety rearing it’s ugly head. Sincerity is lost in such public displays.

> Posting photos showing you chugging beer through a tube with a funnel in the air is probably not going to get you a job.

> Telling everyone about your buggers, farts, burps or any other bodily function is just plain gross, that is unless you’re ten years old, then post away, but don’t expect anyone older than twelve to care.

> Secretly, everyone is a voyuer, but we hate to admit it. So, just admit it and get on with it.

> Sending your latest virtual game post to your entire friend list is really not cool. NOT COOL!

> Cute photos with dogs, cats, puppies, kittens or babies is completely acceptable any time. Really. There are no rules here.

> More than ten posts in a 24 hour period is indicative of someone needing therapy. Seriously, talk to someone about this ridiculous addiction before it gets you whacked from all friend lists.

> When you think everyone cares, remember, most do not.

> Think! To what end? Why?

Sincerely, a Facebook user who’s as guilty as the next voyeur at breaking the rules. Get over it. I did.

 
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Posted in Personal, Rants

 

Edit, rewrite and other activities

10 Jan

President Kennedy stated in his famous speech in Houston about going to the moon, we choose to go, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

Well, let me say, editing, rewriting and fixing plot holes in a draft novel is anything but easy. While it’s fun, challenging and downright time consuming, it’s not an easy task. In fact, I’m beginning to understand, it’s much harder than the original writing process. Sitting down with a blank sheet and banging out a scene is fun. A lot of fun. Making up action, peoples reaction, dialog and plot thrills is one of the reasons I like to write. I like to tell a story.

Editing grammar errors and technical sentence structure is the easy part. So, when I say edit, I’m referring to content. Reworking specific word meaning, emphasis and trying to work through showing scene, not just telling about it, is probably the most difficult part. Restating things, using the same words and over use of phrases is a challenge for sure.

Plot holes, another major concern, is another major time consuming effort. When changes to a scene greatly affect the over all plot direction, authors have to go through every referencing scene to insure consistency and accuracy. When I’ve made serious changes to a name, new knowledge or some kind of reveal, cycling back through the previous sections is tedious. Seriously, it’s extremely time consuming, and I’m a huge software user with search and replace features.

Rewriting, while fun, is also difficult to restrain. After reading a rough draft, authors have to practice self-restraint from completely rewriting the entire manuscript. While some scenes need some major attention, the entire manuscript is not necessarily up for grabs. Several scenes are “Okay” in their original form. However, since I’ve slept a bit and have had lots of time to think about the action in a scene, I find myself wiping the entire scene and completely rewriting it from scratch. While I could just rewrite paragraphs and sentences, sometimes it’s just easier to redo the whole thing. Not for every chapter, but for some, it’s the way to go.

Bottom line, rewriting and rereading ad nausea can drive a writer to the brink of chucking the whole thing, start over or just walk away from the project completely. When in the middle of it all, it’s easy to just switch off the computer, drink some tea and watch TV.

I choose to write a novel, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard, the goal will serve to organize and measure skills and energies within myself.

 
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Posted in Personal, Writing

 

NaNoWriMo

21 Oct

National Novel Writers MOnth

National Novel Writers Month – aka: NaNoWriMo, is in November. Anyone who’s ever wanted to write a novel can participate. The core requirements are to start from scratch, write as fast as you can and finish 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Sounds easy huh? We’ll see.

Currently, in between my day job demands, family demands and pending trip to Texas, (for two, yes TWO, turkey dinners) I’m also preparing for November by planning out characters, plot(s) and premise ahead of time. I’ve read about this endeavor over the past few years, but have been reluctant in the past to participate. Just wasn’t ready.

This year, I’m going to be ready and hopefully bang out a decent novel. While not polished in any form, here’s the synopsis:

“Burned out FBI Agent, Anna Duvrayne, after loosing her partner, getting shot and nearly loosing her job, looks for solace at her inherited mountain home in southern Colorado left by her estranged, now deceased, father. She discovers secrets he kept journaled, learns about his past and gets entangled with sinister activities in the quant mountain town of Lake City Colorado. Tourist are going missing, often unnoticed and undetected, until the son of a retired couple comes looking. Anna helps put the pieces together uncovering more than she bargains as her father speaks from the grave.”

I have some twisted ideas cooking with this one and no, it’s not a ghost story. 8-)

 
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Posted in Personal, Writing

 

Short Stories; it’s a twisted start.

30 Sep

Alfred Hitchcock

I’ve been a busy beaver the past three weeks during my free time. While I have more to go, I’ve put the finishing touches on the first three stories of an anthology I’m working.

Twisted mini-thrillers:

The Jump: Twins with a sorted past who do not like each other learn about their inheritance and celebrate their twenty fifth birthday in style. Fait hands them more than they bargain while freindships prevail in this short story about how brothers treat each other when money, power and sex is involved.

Just Noise: Ever wonder about the lonely cry of a trains whistle in the middle of the night and the engineers behind the scenes? When multiple train engineers disappear suddenly, a local sheriff and his deputies rush against time following strange clues to their where abouts before the FBI swoops in and steals their thunder only to discover, they are all lost as ever.

Invaded: When a wealthy families home is invaded in the middle of dinner, things take a turn for the worse as the intruders play ruthless games with family members, questioning everyones loyalty and family differences.

Next; I have “The Jump” being critiqued this weekend at the Boulder Fiction Writers meetup. Next, I plan on submitting each them for publication in one of several magazines. Wish me luck.

 
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Posted in Personal, Writing

 

Writing Goal

29 Sep

I’ve not posted in quit some time, but I’m sure my fan base of ten (Mom, Dad and who ever else happens to stumble upon my blog) weren’t too worried.

I’m working an IT contract at a local Natural Gas company in Downtown Denver and have had zero time to really focus on posting anything on my blog. Yeah, I know, what, does it take like 10 minutes to bang something out? Yeah, but really I’ve just not felt like it, so there.

Once I got settled into the commute things changed. Hey it was a major switch from two flights of stairs, stop in the kitchen, grab a cup of coffee, head to basement office – to now, catching RTD Express to downtown. Major lifestyle change. So, my typical day just to focus on work is around 12 hours leaving little time for family and writing.

Due to my limited time, I started reading a lot of short stories and decided to put my own “spin” and/or “twist” on a set of short stories myself. I banged out a few in the 6,000 word range and showed them to Jodi. With a little coaxing, she finally read them for critique and I think may have been surprised that I’m not that bad.

Stories with a twist is my focus. I’ve really enjoyed reading several books of short stories by Jeffrey Deaver, Twisted: The Collected Short Stories of Jeffery Deaver and More Twisted: Collected Stories. I’ve also been reading a compilation of multiple authors short stories called Thriller: Stories to keep you up all night and I plan to read Thriller2: Stories you just can’t put down.

With renewed focus, I’ve started a regimin of writing a new story a week for the past three weeks. So far, I’m keeping up with the pace and hope to have enough short stories to start submitting to various magazines and short story sites.

I hope to post excerpts soon. If interested in reading a few of my samples, please shoot me an email. Google-Mail works best.

 
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Posted in Personal

 

Like camping, but without the rules!

26 Jun
Noise, the movie

A movie, —really!

Air-conditioning, wherefore art thou? Ours is a big grey lump sitting stoically on the side of the house, silently waiting to spread it’s goodness throughout our interior. However, the truth is, having the house cooled down is NOT the real reason it should be on. Colorado summers aren’t that bad, A/C is for wimps. Noise abatement is my one argument for turning the beast on.

Sleeping with the windows open is a challenge, even for small town living. Longmont is only about 80,000 folks, give or take. For such a family oriented, small metropolis, you’d think with all those kids and retired folks, everyone would be settled in for the evening early, but nooooo, they sure don’t follow the rules of the campground. Settle down after 9pm. Instead, it “seeeeems” the general population likes to crank up to a roar by testing their varied street vehicles, motorcycles, thumping boom boxes or sports car. If they are home, sitting on decks yammering until the wee hours of the morning must be the other memo I didn’t get. Our towns “cruising” laws don’t seem to really work and miss manors book on common courtesy must not have made it’s way around our neighborhood.

Lying with warm skin on top of cool sheets really isn’t that bad. Colorado nights cool off quickly making it bearable, usually down right chilly the next morning. So the real issue is the noise. Unfortunately, we know every dog in our neighborhood by name, though we’ve never seen them personally. Our little slice of town seems to be made up of home bodies who like to sit on their deck until late talking in low murmurs like Charlie Browns teacher or those Sims from the popular game just loud enough for sleepus, interuptus.

Some emergency provider didn’t discover his GPS last night, or it must have been on the fritz as sirens wailed endlessly tapering off into the distance, then seemingly headed back into our audible circle, turned into yet another direction bouncing around town trying to find their mark. After multiple attempts, they must have stumbled upon the emergency.

Town officials at some council meeting way back in the stone age voted a law into action that requires train engineers to announce their embedding approach even if blinking lights flash or long red and white arms are spread across the road. Engineers who wonder into Longmont seem to take the timing literally, blasting their warning horns for hours on end as they meander through town. Five crossings later, they’ve made their point.

Cost be damn, I’m lobbying for the A/C to be ramped up, not because it’s hot, but because our town doesn’t follow the campground rules. Settle down after 9pm.

 
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Posted in Personal, Rants

 

Underemployed

23 Jun

Job hunting is almost a full time job, but the tasks are tedious and frankly boring. I mean, if you were asked by your current employer to search through a myriad of job sites, poke through every company web site you’d like to work with looking for that perfect job description hoping that they magically posted a new option, writing compelling, relevant cover letters and going through every variation of a job application, you’d tell your boss you were nuts, right? Well, that pretty much sums up my mornings, among other things.

When people ask how it’s going or what’s your status, I tell them I’m still “underemployed”, meaning, I work, but not enough to pay the bills. Besides reaching out to my network, following up on leads and the dreaded seek and apply work, I also do other things to stay busy. While it’s not a stigma anymore to be “underemployed” for a period of time, it does look good that you’re busy filling in your time with related work rather than catching up on the latest soap-opera or catching all those “new career” commercials. (Okay, I watch a little daytime TV, but not much.)

Besides the job hunt, I find myself writing a lot more than before. I bang out more blog posts, like this, and I pump out a number of articles for various online venues like Examiner, eHow and several others. Elance also has some freelance optional work, but it’s hard to land projects with all the “off-shore” contractors. Along side the article freelancing, I’ve been really catching up on those two novel projects I’ve worked on and off the past few years. In fact, I’m finished with one, High Lies, it’s now on the back burner, I’m letting it settle out of my brain. I’ll pick it up in a few weeks to review my handy work and decide if it’s worth selling to an agent or not. Jodi says that being a novelist is my retirement plan, we’ll see.

In my spare time, I also come up with every business idea I can think, Pro-Services company, news website, IT Project Management company, several software ideas for the iPad, to name a few. I hearken back to the early days of Jeff Bezos and J.K. Rowling thinking that if something pops into my mind for a good business plan or a great book, maybe that will work out. Pipe dreams to be sure, but I’m busy, underemployed really.

 
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Posted in Blogging, Music, Personal, Rants, Reading & Writing

 

15 is the new 5…

21 Jun
Pumping Gas

Pumping Gas

When I was back in college and beyond, my monthly gas budget for my car was always up in the air. At college, I spent most of my time between classes, walking. So, my old clunker sat near my dorm parking lot, for the most part.

Ah, the old red Ford, I fondly remember it well. It was a “hand-me-down” to be sure, but it ran great. In fact, it was so reliable, I took it on a long road trip from Texas to Florida one fall (Big Sandy to Pensacola, to be exact). With over 150-thousands miles on the engine, it made the trip with little excitement, except for the Porsche 911 we followed to make good time, but other than that, it was rock-solid. Graeme, my good friend, and I pushed it to the limit a few times, but by and large, it was a strong running car.

So, way-back-when, I was on that tight gas budget, I would only put about five-bucks worth of gas in the car at any given time. Today, as I look for a new job and/or work from home I rarely drive my cars (yeah, surprise, surprise considering my recent past with cars). Stopping at the local Connoco or Shamrock, depending on which side of Target I find myself, I’ve dug up memories from those, oh-so-frugal college days of putting gas in the car I hardly drive.

Even though it’s been, (clearing throat), over twenty years since I attended college, keeping gas in the older SUV today requires a slight adjustment in gas price thinking. With regular income, my MO was to just keep the tank topped off all the time. Now, not so much.

Today, I only throw in about $15 bucks worth of gas in the old tank, so I call it, “15 is the new 5″.

 
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Posted in Cars, Personal

 

TV, The Simpler Life

11 Jun

No more Dish

No, not talking about the stupid reality TV Show with Paris Hilton or Nichole Richie, I’m talking about going back to simpler way of watching TV without all the costs.

We’ve killed our TV! That’s right, we no longer have a TV entertainment system like we did last week. No, I didn’t smash, destroy or burn, them (We have four in the house). Instead, we turned off the Dish Network service, the Satellite Dish is gone, literally. I took it off the roof and it’s being stored in the garage, just in case.

We made the switch to Over The Air (OTA) service, good old fashion free television. Of course, the first order of business was to buy a digital antenna, which was about as expensive as one month of Satellite service. Here’s the kicker, the HD signal we get directly from the local stations kicks satellite and cable to the curb. I mean, sure, we only have 26 channels, (most of them in spanish) but the main 5 channels (NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, CW) are crystal clear and “real” HD. The draw back, we’re seeing some skin blemishes we really don’t need to see, but hey, it’s like the newscasters are right there in our living room.

So, what prompted this? Two things. Um, well, no income (err job) and we’re tying to par down all expenses for the foreseeable future (No, I don’t think the end is here or an apocalypse is eminent, can you say COLLEGE TUITION), even if a steady stream of income starts back up, it’s just ridiculous the amount of money we have spent on things in the past, including TV entertainment.

We’re two days in, so far, so good. We’re having DVR withdrawals, but on the bright side, we’re watching commercials we didn’t know existed. Some funny, some not so funny and pausing TV is non-existant. Next order of business will be to build a DVR with our old PC, but there’s costs involved, so that’ll be a while.

In the mean time, we watch “LIVE” TV, (what a concept) and if there’s nothing on, then we have NetFlix online (Ok, we kept one thing), there’s the Xbox360 with loads of games and of course, (clearing throat) there’s always books to read, bikes to ride and outdoor activities to do.

Now, I have the old “Green Acres” theme song running in my head. Dunt-dunt, dunt-dunt-dunt, DUNT-DUNT… Greeeeen Acres is the place for me! (Wait, that should be Dylan with his summer job. – For those that are lost, Green Acres was a sixties sit-com and Dylan is working at a local organic farm (9-News piece coming soon, will update when schedule of Dylan on News is released.)

So, that’s it, we’ve gone back to free TV, no DVR, using NetFlix, the Internet, games, books and outdoor activities for our entertainment. What next? Cooking over an open fire, oh, wait, we do that with the grill nearly every night.

Stay Tuned!!! (Pun intended)

 
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I want an iPad!

29 Apr

My morning pretty much starts with a set of common rituals I’ve done for years. During the week, I like to catch up on news, read about new technology and get ready for the day. Right now, that ritual includes my iPhone, but… the screen is too small.

In the old days —well about two years ago — after pouring my morning coffee, I’d plod out to the driveway, rain, snow, shine or cold and retrieve the paper. After grabbing the paper, I’d make some breakfast, update my coffee, sit at the table and read through my favorite sections. Of course, to be honest, I started with the comics, THEN went to the real news, or what ever the local paper had decided to pick up from AP and local happenings. After finishing the paper and breakfast, I’d track down my laptop and fire up my email, check through the evenings spam, then move to the important stuff.

That was then, this is now. First, I bought an iPhone last year. Second, we canceled the paper. I had to go looking for other ways to get my morning news. That was one thing about the paper, it didn’t cover all the things I like. Today, I read a lot more about subjects I’m interested, feeling that I’m more informed than before.

Today, I start my day with that cup of coffee, that wont ever change, then I pick up my iPhone, first thing. Starting with the AP application, I sift through their top reports reading what looks interesting. I also like USA Today. Same thing, I sift through their top reports, sports and then tech sections to hit the highlights. All the while, I’m making breakfast, but I’m not as compelled to sit at the table anymore. Now I sit at the bar or in the family room. Kind of anywhere I plop. My last stop on my iPhone is All Things Digital, which is extremely focused on the tech industry with such articles about who’s buying who, new gadgets, what Apple employee left a new iPhone at a bar, new startup interviews, plus they have videos at current conferences and more. I then pop open an aggregate news tool called Fluent News. It pulls in feeds from CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX and others, which I use to fill in any gaps missed by my favorites.

More… so, once the world news and technical news is up-to-date, I’ll check the weather, even though I can see what it looks like outside, it’s still good to know what’s going to happen. Next, I switch to email, usually quickly review due to the screen size. Final stop is Facebook and LinkedIn to see if anything interesting is going on there. Finally, I end my morning with OmniFocus. Since I try to adhere to the GTD strategies, OmniFocus is for planning my daily todo and projects.

That’s pretty much my morning most days. I rarely fire up my laptop until I’m ready to get going with projects and other activities. So, why did I title this blog “I want an iPad!” — well, I do a lot on the iPhone and since I use it more of a mini-computer than a cell phone, an iPad would do all of this better, I think. In fact, since I hardly fire up my laptop until later in the morning, I could probably do just about everything on the iPad. I primarily use Pages, Numbers and Keynote, so since those are available on the iPad, I’m nearly there. I also use OmniGraffle, OmniFocus, a web browser, a writing tool (Scrivener) and dictionary most days. So, looking at what I primarily do, an iPad would just about do it all for me.

My problem is: I just purchased a new laptop last fall, like most, I just can’t justify an iPad no matter how much I’d like to have and use one. While I’m not advocating ditching a laptop or desktop (yet), I’m advocating that 80% of what I do on a daily (morning) basis could be done on an iPad. I still use Fireworks, Photoshop on occasion and many other activities that crank on this laptop, but my morning would be easier if I had an iPad. I WANT AN IPAD!!

 
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Posted in Gadgets, iPad, iPhone, Personal, Technology

 
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