Recently, I participated in an interview with Jade Craven for JadeCraven.com. You can check out the interview here which contains juicy information as to why I quit writing for Performancing.com. Jade also did a great job putting together a post called 25 Lessons you can learn from Jeff Chandler which compiles tips, tricks, suggestions based on my previous two years of writing about blogging and related subjects.
Roomba Meets Long Exposure Photography
This is out of the infographic files. What do you get when you take a long exposure photograph of a Roomba doing it’s thing? A really cool image that looks like a flight plan out of LaGuardia.
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.
Check out the full photoset here.
Come Get Some
This is the Duke Nukem Theme song version by Megadeth taken to the next level. Freaking awesome!
A Tooth For An Eye
This is one of those WTF, cool stories I discovered on Twitter. This man after being blind for 12 years due to a tub of white hot aluminum exploding in his face finally regained sight thanks to a unique operation which involved one of his teeth.
The procedure began when one of Mr Jones’ canine teeth was removed and converted into a holder for a special optical lens by drilling a hole in it. The tooth was then inserted into his cheek for three months to enable it to grow new tissue and blood vessels. Then finally came the delicate operation to insert the tooth, complete with the fitted lens into Mr Jones’ right eyeball. Within two weeks of the final operation to implant the tooth in his eyeball his sight returned and he was told he had almost perfect vision in his right eye.
It was pretty funny to read that when the guy saw a smart car, he thought it was a normal car chopped in half. Check out the article simply to see the picture of this guys eye which is a tooth with a lens in it. Reminds me a little bit of the Terminator.
12:34:56 7/8/9
Mark your calendars for July 8th and try as best you can to stay alive to live through a moment in time that only happens once a millennium. However, in about 80 or so years folks will have a chance to live through 12:34:56 7/8/90 .
One other weird bit of numerology is that in 2011 we will be able to live through 11:11:11 11/11/11 which is wicked.
Need Your Pigeon Forge, TN Tourist Attractions
I 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.
Thunderstorm As Seen From TopThrillDragster
On Friday evening, a line of thunderstorms moving South East across Lake Erie managed to hit Cedar Point before they came my way. Knowing that Cedar Point has come cool webcams at the park, I decided to check out the view from the Top Thrillside Dragster and sure enough, I got a great view of a thunderstorm pouring down rain over the lake.
Click to see a bigger version
On the right side of the picture, you can see heavy rain falling from the sky. An ultimate web cam shot would be to see a waterspout over the lake from this view. I’m still waiting!
Almost Too Close
On May 13th 2009, a tornado was bearing down on Kirksville, MO. Bart Comstock who is a storm chaser for SevereStudios.com almost became a victim when he looks to his left and sees the Twister moving right towards him. Thankfully, he was on the outskirts of the circulation. Make sure you listen to the noise this thing makes when his driver side window is down. This thing is producing the classic ‘freight train‘ noise which is most commonly reported from witnesses.
Here is one with a little more emotion:
And here is footage of the same tornado by a chasing tour. This could have turned into a storm chasing disaster.
Personally, I would have been scared to death but I can almost guarantee that in the video, you would hear me say “this is $%#%^$# awesome”.
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?
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 