I’ve been neglecting the blog for too long, so I decided to give it a facial (minus the cucumbers—I don’t think they’d have a positive effect on my laptop’s keyboard). I just updated the features a little bit, trying to make it look and feel pretty… I don’t think any of the changes I made will cause the world to erupt in a ball of flames, but if it does, at least I didn’t waste any money buying cucumbers.
Is “bloggeryness” a word?
If it’s not, then I’m making it one.
Yesterday, I went to the main page and started scrolling down, looking at aaaaaaaall the months that I’ve written blog entries. I got to the bottom of the list and realized that the first month I wrote anything online was February, 2003. It’s now May of 2013.
The reason it’s not “my blog’s 10th anniversary” is that I’ve had to do some site-hopping. My first page was shawnbakken.com, but one day, the web service jacked up their fees, my registration lapsed and some other person or group jumped in and snatched it from me. I had to relocate. I opted to use Blogspot for a while and called it “(almost) shawnbakken.com,” but it just didn’t feel right. It never felt like it was “mine.”
I was eventually encouraged to use a new web service and found out that shawnbakken.net was available. Well, that seemed like a damn fine option. I filled out the necessary forms, paid a much lower price and got this site up and running in April of 2007. However, there was still one big problem: I’d neglected to save a lot of stuff from the old site onto my hard drive.
By copying and pasting entries from someone’s web feed and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I only lost a few things from mid-2005, back when Beauty and the Geek was on the air and I was at my most prolific. Dammit… I also lost hundreds of comments from people, but those weren’t nearly as important (no offense to anyone who left comments back then).
Thus, this site by itself has been around for about six years, but back in February—just a couple months ago—I hit my 10th anniversary of bloggeryness. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. And if you haven’t, I hope it hasn’t made you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat too often.
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Why redesign the website?
Apparently, my blog design’s creator decided to make a new version of the old program—the one I was using will stop working the next time WordPress gets updated—so I installed Version II and decided to play with some of the features. Sure, I could have been sleeping for the last two hours instead of choosing what color I should use for the background, but sleep is overrated. Way overrazzzzzzzzzz…
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Going on strike against #SOPA and #PIPA
I’m sure that some/most/all of you have heard about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect IP, bills that Congress will be voting on coming up on January 24th. I’ve posted some opinions about the subject on various websites that aren’t this one—no, I don’t know why I haven’t put them on here—but suffice it to say that I think the bills are bad. Very bad for many, many reasons.
I haven’t gathered a lot of in-depth information or done a whole lot of analysis about the subject and thus can’t share it with you, but tomorrow, the 18th, will be the perfect time for you to find out more. That’s because on the 18th, the Internet is going on strike, my blog included.
shawnbakken.net will send you to a SOPA STRIKE website (thus, your opportunity to learn more), but it’s only for a day and it’s a minor effort compared to other sites that will be shutting down as well: Google, Wikipedia, reddit, Twitpic, Minecraft, etc. (Consequently, if you need to look up something on the Internet tomorrow, you’re fucked.) Still, it’s my own little way of saying that the bills are bad. Very bad for many, many reasons.
After tomorrow, I’ll try to write a little more a little more often… writing a blog entry every day in November was only a temporary habit, it seems. Nevertheless, first things first—show Congress and the Senate that once again, they’re completely out of the loop and are listening to lobbyists more than the people they’re representing. (If we’re lucky, some of the bills’ supporters will try looking up something on the Internet tomorrow and be fucked, too.) Hope everyone has a pleasant January 18th and I’ll see you on the other side.
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#madwriting
The title comes from a couple of female scientists on Twitter who… I’m not sure if they had writer’s block or needed inspiration to sit down and write or what—all I know is that they came up with the idea of “#madwriting”, which basically consists of a bunch of people sitting down and writing as much as they can in 30-minute bursts (and they’re very forgiving if you run past that time). In the past, I’d been okay just watching the Twitter updates, seeing the “And….. write!” tweets, etc. This time, I decided to join in, if for no other reason than to say I did it.
There are actually a few good reasons for me to participate. Given that a lot of the people doing this are trying to write papers or theses, I could have used the burst of speed and energy to work on a paper for school. Unfortunately, I don’t have a topic to write about—there was a long list and we were supposed to send the prof a note with our top three choices (plus an alternate or two… as many as we wanted, really). I made my list and sent it to him on Tuesday night. The problem is that I sent it to the wrong e-mail address.
Consequently, he never got the message and I still don’t know what the topic of my paper is. Shit.
But like I said, I wanted to participate. Plus this is a good way for me to not do the reading that’s sitting next to me. What’s one or two hundred pages between friends? A lot to do before Tuesday night, really, but who’s counting?
So since I can’t write about school, what have I got? I dunno, but along with the paper and thesis writers, there are bloggers out there who manage to come up with material for their 30-minute #madwriting session, so I damn well better be able to come up with something.
Hmmm… I suppose I could write about soccer today, but I imagine people are bored with reading about my epic struggles with playing and playing through injuries. I’m not sure why my shoulder is continuing to hurt, but I’ll be seeing a doctor or chiropractor or someone soon. I sent in a form to the insurance company indicating that I would have future expenses, so I imagine my body will be ready for treatment as soon as the insurance is.
But the weird part is that the shoulder bothering me isn’t the one I went to the doctor about—I strained the muscles in my neck and my left rotator cuff. You’d think that was the problem area. All the physical therapy has helped that side heal pretty well; the problem has been my right shoulder. There’s a thick muscle fiber in there that’s just a giant lump and doesn’t want to go away. Consequently, when I try to take long throw-ins, it protests. Loudly.
I made one or two that were fairly short during the game, which wasn’t a big deal. The first and the last… I put a lot of distance on those and came out right away. My shoulder was not pleased. After standing on the sideline for a couple minutes, it felt okay again, but I don’t want that to be a chronic issue. It’s bad enough that I occasionally twist my knee the wrong way and have to step off the field for a bit—I can’t have more parts of me breaking down.
Thankfully, my fingers are still doing okay, so I can sit here in bed with my feet propped up and laptop in my lap, typing away for no good reason with no specific goal in mind. Man, that pisses me off… I wish I’d gotten in touch with the prof earlier so I could be working on a paper.
Then again, this is kind of typical for me. Back at Kenyon as an undergrad, I’d get close to deadlines on papers and find any excuse I could to write someone other than my paper for class. Hell, that’s when I’d be most productive. “I’ve got a 10-page paper due tomorrow afternoon—time to write another essay about absolutely nothing!” Dunno why that’s the case. Maybe it’s because I didn’t like the work very much, didn’t have the focus needed to work on something that took brain power… riiiiight.
But right now, I have reading that I should be doing, so this isn’t that much of a transition. I suppose nowadays, I’d be more likely to surf around on YouTube or Facebook instead of writing—less brainpower required, more entertainment. I suppose that could be part of the issue. More immediate returns for writing fun stuff (it’s fun), whereas doing actual work isn’t as much fun. I don’t enjoy it as much. Especially when the book I’m reading is boring and putting me to sleep.
Why didn’t I get to bed until 5:00 in the morning? Paradigms. It could be intriguing at times, but when the author started making predictions about the future, that’s when I started to fade. When I’m lying down comfortably while trying to read, it becomes less of a “tired head bob” and more of a “tired book flop”. Eventually, I had to give up and start doing some work on here.
Yes, that’s right, I’m still working on the blog. Not so much anymore (see: this entry), but I still have plenty of entries that could use tags, especially in the “Beauty and the Geek” category. I want to break things up into seasons as opposed to just “Beauty and the Geek” and make the readers sift through everything to find stuff. That’s right, I’m doing it all for you.
So I spent time tagging as well as copying and pasting entries into Word files on my laptop. I started doing that many years ago, which came in handy when shawnbakken.com went down and I lost everything. I still had all the entries backed up on my hard drive, so while it took me a long time to finally get everything reposted (see: earlier this month), it got done. Same thing last night/this morning: copy and paste the content so I’d have it available offline. Tag, then write down the entry dates in a Notebook file (which stretches back to 2003). It doesn’t sound that bad until you consider I had to start midway through PerBloWriMo. Half of December plus all of this year… I think I went through 70 entries. Took a couple hours, fried a couple brain cells, didn’t require any reading from Paradigms. Awesome.
And that’s time. 30 minutes of… I might call it blatherings, but I thought “Musings” sounded like a better category title. Regardless, I haven’t the slightest idea of everything I wrote in here. Hopefully, at least some of it makes sense. If not… I could be in trouble for that paper due Tuesday night.
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Blog under construction, Part II
I finally got all the old entries posted (I hope) from back in 2006-07. Thusly and therefore, if you want to read some “new” material over the next couple hours/days/weeks, flashing back to that period of time will be a good place to look. (Some of them may have dead links—they try to send you to websites that no longer exist—but I didn’t want to mess with the original material too much.)
Alas, my work is not done. I’m trying to trim down the list of categories, then add tags to a bunch of the entries so it’s easier to find specific things (e.g., labeling Beauty and the Geek entries by season instead of just keeping them clumped together). It feels like I’m making good progress, so I’m hoping I’ll have good results when I’m done, too.
