NaBloPoMo 07

I signed up for NaBloPoMo again this year, so if nothing else you get to look forward to me writing something nonsensical and irrelevant every night at 11:30… for a whole month. Outside of November I think I'm going to attempt a regular posting schedule of Monday, Wednesday, and Friday – if such a thing is possible. It seems to jive with my schedule and give me a little extra time to do or find something interesting to write about, if I need it; and I often do. I've found a little inspiration here and there for photography, so I'm going to attempt to post one interesting picture every day, too. I'm trying to move from interesting snapshots to real photography: concept, composition, post-processing… the whole package. Not just taking pictures of things that I come across that are picture-worthy; but rather making something picture-worthy and then capturing it. This is going to take incredible discipline on my part, either to make it home and make use of the sunlight while it's still available, or to shoot enough on the weekends to last a whole week. That means thinking ahead… preparing… things that I haven't generally associated with blogging — at least not my own blog. Still, if you don't set goals, there's no way to measure success.

All over the place…

I feel bad that since we've gotten back from Ireland I've barely had free time to say hi to my mom. I feel bad that we've not even seen our closest friends. (Though we sure did enjoy the Penn State tickets!) I feel bad that I haven't been on top of the blog as I'd like to be. The truth is that I'm still trying to find my niche here. One day I'm sure I'll be obsessed with my kids and posting pictures and quotes and stories about poop and/or boogies. But I don't qualify for that yet. Is there a niche for "I'm excited to be kind of near the stage of life where I might become a daddy soon … ish" bloggers? If so, would you kindly point me in that direction? A community to latch on to and leech off of would be spectacular. I could easily wax rhetorical on video games and/or computer programming, but I know that a majority of you don't want to read that. I don't even want to read it. I think maybe my biggest problem finding my blogging niche is that I don't limit my hobbies enough. I like photography, video games, movies, traveling, geek stuff, and occasionally some light reading. I feel kind of like the people in those new AT&T commercials. Like I'm writing a photo-trava-game-a-book-er-geek blog. How's that working out for me? What would you like to see more of? Besides the obvious: pictures and stories from Ireland. Something I would like to see more of on the site is pictures. I know I am kind of tooting my own horn here, but I feel like I have a knack for photography. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it before (hence the tooting my own horn thing) but I aced all of my photography classes and get lots of compliments on my pictures. But when you're working from 7am until 6pm, there's not much time to find inspiration and shoot it. (Excuses, excuses…) And then post-processing? Ha! The only reason I continue to shoot in raw is for archival purposes. I haven't edited a picture before posting it in months. But if I could find the motivation to take pictures every day, and to force myself to leave the house to do so, I think I might actually find that inspiration every once in a while. Maybe that would make a good New Year's Resolution — if a little planning ahead isn't too presumptuous — to leave the house and do something that deserves being photographed every day.

Analytics

I recently added Google Analytics to the site so that I can get an idea of what's popular on the site, and it also won't hurt to have hard evidence for when we have that intervention for my mom. I've noticed that the top search string that brings people here is indeed chocolate rain ringtone (and… hey! I get to be the first result for something on Google! Cool!) – which, I can understand why. For anyone else who comes along looking for your very own chocolate rain ringtone: I can only help some of you… sorry. I have a Palm Treo 650, which makes recording your own ringtones rather easy (as sort of detailed toward the end of this article). I simply watched the Chocolate Rain YouTube video and set my phone next to the speaker, recording the first minute of audio. Hope that helps some of you. We're leaving in a few hours to go camping for the weekend… so now I'm officially 2 weeks and 1 camping trip late posting the pictures from the last camping trip. I'll try to get them all up once we get back, promise! Have a good weekend!