MyThoughts

Foggy Monday

Woke up today and when I looked out our cabin window, I had this strange feeling as if we were floating in the sky. As it turns out, it was just very foggy within the valleys and we could see the top of the lower cloud deck. However, the forecast for today has us under a flood watch with a 90% chance of heavy rain. We experienced a good bit of rain yesterday so with the heavy rain today, shouldn’t be hard to cause flash flooding. Here is a snapshot of what it looked like this morning.

Fog Rolling In On A Monday Morning

Fog Rolling In On A Monday Morning

I think today we’ll be doing inside stuff such as Ripleys Aquarium and some other shops.

Beach Photos With iPhone 3GS

Last Monday, the girl and I decided to hit up the beach despite it being a crisp 75 degrees outside to view the sunset. It was a relaxing time to say the least. The only camera I had on hand with me was the one inside of my iPhone 3GS and I must say, I think it takes pictures equal or slightly above the quality that is provided by my Kodak EasyShare. Both the iPhone and my stand alone digital camera have a 3 megapixel sensor in it but while the maximum size of the iPhone photos is 600X800, my digital camera takes pictures at much higher resolutions. But this photoset at the beach proves to me that while I may not have my digital camera on hand, the one provided in the iPhone does a pretty good job in its place.

Sunset 3

Check out the full photoset here.

Need Your Pigeon Forge, TN Tourist Attractions

pigeonforgeI can’t begin to tell you how much I’m looking forward to my four night extravaganza to Pigeon Forge, TN as the girlfriend and I will be staying in a cabin near the city. Thanks to a suggestion from someone I work with, we decided to go ahead and rent a cabin through YourCabin.com This is an organization that takes over someones cabin and rents it out to people. I’m not telling you which we chose, but it sure will be relaxing.

I’ve been to the Pigeon Forge area once a number of years ago. I remember telling my dad about the clouds in the sky only to hear him tell me they were mountains. The Smokey Mountains to be exact. The strip of road through Pigeon Forge was clogged with traffic but I entertained myself by looking at all the places where I could spend my pops money.

We’ll be an hour or so north of Gatlinburg which we plan on visiting while we’re down there. If you have visited the area and could provide some suggestions on places to see or visit, please chime in with a comment. I’m aiming for a visit to Smokey Mountain National Park as well as checking out the big aquarium place.

I Can't Stands No More

Those of you who have been following my progress as a writer know that at about this time last year, I had a great opportunity come my way thanks to a referral from a friend where I was offered to write for Performancing.com. The pay was great compared to anything I’ve ever seen before. However, it didn’t take long to realize what I had stepped into. After working with Performancing for two to three months, I started to come up with ideas and ways to reinvigorate the brand/community/site. What I proposed was a radical change to the way things were done. I was filled with ideas and motivation to turn things around. My ideas were noted and passed around but progress was slow. While a redesign for Performancing has taken place on a platform that at some point the site will be migrated to, the site is where it was a year ago.

I wish I could just publish the email I sent this morning which clearly illustrates my frustration with the site but I don’t feel that would be in my best interest. However, I feel I can post a quote from it.

Ultimately, Performancing.com in its current iteration is a bottomless pit. Or an empty auditorium. I’ve been waiting for someone to bust my ass for lack of production or lack of enthusiasm but I’d pay to see anyone get enthused about this site now adays. Then I’d have to wonder what kind of shrooms they ate.

In my mind, Performancing would turn into an awesome site if there was a team of people writing for the domain. Each one of these people were so called experts are at least, in the know for a particular CMS/publishing platform of their choice. So, I’d fit the bill with WordPress, someone could do MovableType, someone could do Joomla, etc. Sure, it sounds like CMS Wire, but they do newsy posts. Our goal would be to help bloggers succeed using these publishing systems and doing this as a team. Think about the mini competitions we could have with one platform versus another. I think their would be endless content creation opportunities and the audience I think would love it. Top it with a forum, a podcast, maybe some screencasts, and wow, what a helluva resource for bloggers of all types. That’s what I would turn Performancing into if I had the cash and know how.

There are plenty of lessons to be learned from Performancing.com, especially regarding managing a site. Because the site has exchanged hands at points in the past, has cared more about content generation versus all other aspects of the domain, and no continuous maintenance, we now have a site with a huge six year archive, a bunch of spam user accounts, comments, and blog posts, not to mention stuff on the built in forums all of which make it difficult to do anything with the site. It’s one of those situations where I’d like to just reformat and start over but you can’t because the archive is the only saving grace of the domain.

I know they are currently in the migration phases to move from Drupal to WordPress and that will most likely solve half or more of the problems associated with the site, just as long as most of the crap is not migrated over as well.

It doesn’t matter how much you pay me to write on your site. If 90% of comments are junk, I have no idea if someone links to the post or not, I’m stuck with a platform that sucks, there is little to no way to build community or loyalty around the site, eventually the writer is going to burn out and wonder what the hell is he doing wasting his time going upstream rather than with the flow. I’ll no doubt miss the $1,000.00 a month in pay but being able to bust my ass and reap the rewards which is more than just cash coming in is worth more to me in the long run.

Now can someone point me to the soup line?

I Can’t Stands No More

Those of you who have been following my progress as a writer know that at about this time last year, I had a great opportunity come my way thanks to a referral from a friend where I was offered to write for Performancing.com. The pay was great compared to anything I’ve ever seen before. However, it didn’t take long to realize what I had stepped into. After working with Performancing for two to three months, I started to come up with ideas and ways to reinvigorate the brand/community/site. What I proposed was a radical change to the way things were done. I was filled with ideas and motivation to turn things around. My ideas were noted and passed around but progress was slow. While a redesign for Performancing has taken place on a platform that at some point the site will be migrated to, the site is where it was a year ago.

I wish I could just publish the email I sent this morning which clearly illustrates my frustration with the site but I don’t feel that would be in my best interest. However, I feel I can post a quote from it.

Ultimately, Performancing.com in its current iteration is a bottomless pit. Or an empty auditorium. I’ve been waiting for someone to bust my ass for lack of production or lack of enthusiasm but I’d pay to see anyone get enthused about this site now adays. Then I’d have to wonder what kind of shrooms they ate.

In my mind, Performancing would turn into an awesome site if there was a team of people writing for the domain. Each one of these people were so called experts are at least, in the know for a particular CMS/publishing platform of their choice. So, I’d fit the bill with WordPress, someone could do MovableType, someone could do Joomla, etc. Sure, it sounds like CMS Wire, but they do newsy posts. Our goal would be to help bloggers succeed using these publishing systems and doing this as a team. Think about the mini competitions we could have with one platform versus another. I think their would be endless content creation opportunities and the audience I think would love it. Top it with a forum, a podcast, maybe some screencasts, and wow, what a helluva resource for bloggers of all types. That’s what I would turn Performancing into if I had the cash and know how.

There are plenty of lessons to be learned from Performancing.com, especially regarding managing a site. Because the site has exchanged hands at points in the past, has cared more about content generation versus all other aspects of the domain, and no continuous maintenance, we now have a site with a huge six year archive, a bunch of spam user accounts, comments, and blog posts, not to mention stuff on the built in forums all of which make it difficult to do anything with the site. It’s one of those situations where I’d like to just reformat and start over but you can’t because the archive is the only saving grace of the domain.

I know they are currently in the migration phases to move from Drupal to WordPress and that will most likely solve half or more of the problems associated with the site, just as long as most of the crap is not migrated over as well.

It doesn’t matter how much you pay me to write on your site. If 90% of comments are junk, I have no idea if someone links to the post or not, I’m stuck with a platform that sucks, there is little to no way to build community or loyalty around the site, eventually the writer is going to burn out and wonder what the hell is he doing wasting his time going upstream rather than with the flow. I’ll no doubt miss the $1,000.00 a month in pay but being able to bust my ass and reap the rewards which is more than just cash coming in is worth more to me in the long run.

Now can someone point me to the soup line?

21st Annual Ohio Bigfoot Conference

On Saturday May 2nd, 2009, I attended the 21st Annual Ohio Bigfoot Conference held at Salt Fork State Park. The event was headed by Don Keating of EOBIC. This is an event I’ve been attending the past few years. I’m always looking forward to getting out and spending time in the park while meeting with a bunch of bigfoot enthusiasts. Unfortunately this year, I didn’t have the funds to stay at the lodge so I had to drive their on the day of the conference.

I got a late start but I arrived 10 minutes before the event started at 4PM EDT. Worthy of noting is that on the way to the Lodge, I passed an area known as Hosacks Cave. As I did, I noticed quite a few emergency vehicles in the parking lot which made me wonder if someone else had fallen off the cave. At the beginning of the conference, a small prayer was conducted for the 20 year old student who had fallen off the top of the cave. You can read about what happened in this story published on the Daily-Jeff.com but she ended up dieing later on due to her injuries which makes her the second person to die from falling off the top of this cave. My sympathies go out to her family and I won’t go into another argument on whether the trail should be closed or not.

As for the conference, I had to stand up in the lobby as ALL of the seats were taken. We’re talking four to five hundred people in a conference room. That is a lot of squatchers! No worries though as after the first few speakers, I managed to grab a seat in the back but because of rude people in the lobby, I was unable to concentrate on the speakers and their presentations. I think next year, the lobby doors will have to be closed to prevent this from happening.

Overall, I just wasn’t into the conference this year as I was last year. The highlight for me though was John Cartwright retelling his sighting/experience. You could literally hear the fear in his voice as he recounted what happened to him. I met some old friends, talked a bit of bigfoot, ate a great buffet dinner which set me back $15.00 and then went home. Don Keating mentioned that he will probably do 4 more conferences and then, perhaps end on the 25th one. So, I have four more conferences to look forward to. Hopefully, I’m in a better financial position and can stay at the lodge.

Click here to visit my photo gallery of the event on Flickr.

Here are some YouTube videos of the event.

Inspired But Reality Kicked In

So last night, I like many Americans stayed up to watch/listen to all of the coverage related to the election. I ended up voting for Obama and as luck would have it, he has become the next president of the United States. However, I must admit that when I listened to John McCain’s concession speech, it touched me and was a bit inspiring. After his speech was over with, I seriously thought if I had made a mistake voting for Obama.

That question was answered once I listened to Obama’s acceptance speech. I was seriously impressed with what Obama had to say. He left no stone unturned and after he left the stage, I had this feeling of wanting to go out and kick some ass as an American to help get things back in order. Obama had one hell of a speech and it really messed with my emotions.

Then, in the back of my head, I reminded myself that there is a good chance that what Obama promised in his speech could be empty handed. After all, that is what most politicians have done, promise this and that and then come up empty handed with no one to hold them accountable for their actions or lack there of. I sincerely hope that Obama delivers on each one of his promises in the next four years.

What A Busy Week

I am pretty excited to know that I am almost finished with my 32 hour work weeks at the grocery store. At least, for the time being and everything continues to go well with freelancing. The grocery store will serve as a crutch in case things in the freelancing world cave in. This past week, I published an interview on BloggerTalks.com with Steve Hodson, published a great post that was welcomely received by the Performancing community called 7 Tips On Building Relationships Through Blogging, produced a fun open mic edition of Perfcast and to top it all off, produced an hour and a half WordPress Weekly with Jane Wells were we covered a ton of ground related to WordPress 2.7.

WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 is out and ready for the publics consumption. November 10th looks like the date for a release candidate while the end of November is aimed for the actual release of 2.7. I am going to bite the bullet and work on getting my content from my Jeffc.me domain and the content on Jeffro2pt0 back into one file and then import that into a new installation of WordPress, that being 2.7 beta 1. Then, I’m going to work on slimming down the theme and installing one plugin at a time and get back to the basics.

One of the subtle changes I am going to make is to remove the FeedBurner graphic. I was having a discussion with Andrew Rickmann on the WordPress Weekly after show and I was talking to him about going back to the basics and how I am getting to the point of doing things my way instead of the popular (what the rest of the blogosphere is doing) way.  So, I’ll remove the graphic because I don’t care to see it everyday. I’ll check in from time to time but it is not a priority for me anymore. My priority is to clean this place up, highlight my freelancing work and then publish content on a regular basis by treating this blog as if it was my Tumblr account. That means, publishing links to articles that interest me, sometimes I’ll write a long form article, opinionated pieces, bits of my personal life, random thoughts, etc.

I just feel that it is time for me to reclaim this blog as my own and no one else’s. While I enjoy writing content for people, I always enjoy writing content for myself and getting my thoughts from my head, out into the open. I want to get back to the point in time of where I can freely express myself without thinking about the boundaries I have placed on this blog by writing for others.

Will I still talk about WordPress and Web 2.0 and all that other stuff? Of course I will, as I see fit, but don’t expect this site to be an authoritative figure in any subject. I want to converse with people and discuss things, concepts, ideas, whatever. So, that will be the focus of the site after I have reformatted it. Along with the reformat, I plan on doing a redesign but it will not be anything drastic. I’m tired of spending 17 hours each time I redesign the site. I’ve always been a fan of forests and so, that is the theme I am going to head towards with the redesign.

For those that will continue to ride the train of life and blogging with me, its time to move on to the next stop. For everyone else, you can get off here. But don’t forget to send me a postcard :)

Steve Hodson FTW

Note: This is an entry to the blogging challenge of the week created by Perfcast. This week, the challenge was to link to your favorite blogger in a post about why you like their blog or the blogger themselves.

This challenge was an easy one for me because the blogger featured in this post is Steve Hodson. The reasons why I like the guy and his work are pretty simple, he keeps it real. Steve describes himself as a cranky old fart that wanders the internet causing mayhem as he goes. The difference between him and other cranks is that, he his hilarious in the way in which he breaks things down. Just listen to a few archived episodes of the L33t tech news podcast which unfortunately, seems to have bit the dust. While most tech bloggers have their heads a mile up silicon valleys ass, Steve keeps a level headed approach with his opinions and rarely does he ever need a reality check.

His content is thought provoking and WinExtra is one of the few blogs that consistently pushes me to the point of wanting to write an article to either combat or agree with his line of thoughts.

While many people participated in BlogActionDay to raise awareness about Poverty, check out this raw post by Steve which in my opinion, truly showcases Steve’s no BS talents.

At any rate, Steve Hodson is someone I admire and I’ll admit, I’m his number 1 fan unless someone else has already claimed that title. Be sure to check out WinExtra.com and read over some of his work. I guarantee you it will at least make you think.

Glogster Reaches Version 2

Glogster, the service that gives people a chance to create posters of themselves which I reviewed here (Glogster – You In A Poster) has announced that they have reached version two.

The new version now gives you a chance to embed YouTube videos, pictures and sounds from websites by URL. Also, not sure if this will be a buzzword that will catch on but you can now live glog. Those of you who have a webcam will be able to turn it on and stream live from your glog. Thus, live glogging. Doesn’t sound as good as live blogging but this is web 2.0, anything is possible.

Glogster has improved the galleries by means of introducing romantic elements. Now you can spice up your Glog if you’re into that sort of thing. Last but not least, Glogster has added a multitude of languages from which to choose from when adding text to your poster. This ends up giving Glogster a shot at an international audience.

To see the new YouTube feature in action, take a look at my latest glog.