Birth month

I was out at dinner with B the other night, celebrating my birthday, and I mentioned how I wasn’t following my old tradition of posting a note about the birthday of my blog (because I started breathing room on my 33rd birthday and briefly considered calling it “Outliving Christ”) because, as with so many things in this past year, I had no time for the grace notes of life and have had to take my satisfaction from the things I can do.

To take some of the anxious pressure off of birthdays and their proper celebration in our family, we’ve adopted the notion of a “birth month,” loosely defined as the month containing the birthday (especially for dates early in the month), or about a month starting on the day of the birthday (especially for dates late in the month).

The birth month is full of win. I recommend it. If I were technical about it, mine will stretch till November 29 this year, coincidentally the proposed birth date of another project of mine.

So here I am, posting not on the (fifteenth!) anniversary of my now somewhat anemic blogging career, which was two days ago (Tuesday), but somewhere in the midst of my blog’s birth month, and mine, and – as it happens – on the one-year anniversary of my father’s death.

It hasn’t been an easy year. It has been a year of wrenching changes, of transformation, and of sorrow, fear, grief, and worry. Thank goodness it’s also been a year of creation, renewal, opportunity, and bold adventure. I wish I could tell Dad all about it. I miss him so.

Death Don’t Have No Mercy

The above link should play my brother, “xourmas,” and I – aka The Power & Mighty – doing an impromptu rendition of the Rev. Gary Davis (?) spiritual blues, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” from a few days after Dad’s death last year.

Farewell to my gmail address

I never liked the minimum character requirement for a gmail username. My first . lastname is long. A while back I set up google apps for my primary domain (mediajunkie.com), which also hosts this blog, etc.

I maintained two separate in boxes for far too long, and I have a future-proof address via the Pobox service that I give out, it really doesn’t matter what address I’m using on the back end. Occasionally the reply comes from the back-end return address, and in those cases I’d rather be giving out me at my domain instead of longfirstname . longlastname @ bigbrand . com.

Switching was easy when I realized I was happy not migrating the archive. It’s a searchable epoch. Let’s keep it that way. (If you want to do something similar but maintain a complete master archive, see this helpful Lifehacker article.)

I set up forwarding from gmail to my domain. Easy peasy. Then I told pobox to stop forwarding to gmail and start forwarding to my domain (with the backup copies still going to a yahoo and an aol account).

No effect on people sending to me. Clean slate in my google apps for my domain inbox.

I also didn’t reproduce all the filters. I’m going to watch what comes in for a while and do a bunch of unsubscribing. I’ll remake the filters as I go.

Since I have a work email inbox at CloudOn I’m glad to get the total down to two at least (not counting Facebook, ugh, and everything else, but still…).

 

Ukulele for Geeks, live in Tokyo

(A few snaps of my talk from the Tokyo 2.0 PechaKucha night the other evening.)

Happy blog day to me

Boy was I smart to start my first real blog on my birthday (in ’97). It sure helps keep things straight around here. Somehow along the way I turned 45. What. The. Fuck?

Now, in honor of the kind of manic blogging I used to do before the twitter and the employment, I will actually make two blog posts in one day thank you thank you.

Smile! You're on candid skitch

Not a manga or mad man among them.

Briefest annual birthday blogging yet

Started blogging on birfday in 1997 (called it “doing an online journal then”).
11 years later I’m still (sorta) at it.
Happy birthday to us!

I'm retiring the links for today thingy

I’m trying to do more “real” blogging here these days and I feel like my Delicious links just drown everything else out. (Also a twitter follower mentioned being interested in people’s blog posts but not their bookmarks – I am now having my blog posts send notices to twitter – and that kinda made sense to me.)
I am putting a delicious link badge in my sidebar, though, so people interested in my daily (or nearly) bookmarking habits can still find those links there, complete with tags and notes, when I add them.

word concept of the moment

“eternity”
also
“forever”
seen in IM status, and in the sentence i am reading right now in a story just as it is sung on the randomly selected song from my jukebox.

Burning Laundry

Saturday I paid the bills, and sent a contributor (at long last) his signed copy of my last book.
Monday I made an appointment for the car’s 57-month checkup and updated the contributors to my new book about the cancellation of the contract by the publisher.
Tuesday I got groceries, talked to an editor about a possible book project from about January to about May of next year. Also saw Beck with Flaming Lips at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland.
Today I took the car in for its checkup, talked to my agent about the cancellation negotation and five new book-deal leads of various likelihood and appeal.
Also, I finally called the gutter guys to come and do the annual clearing of our downspouts as the rainy season kicks in (once this Santa Ana thing blows over, I hope).

Catsup

I’m doing myself a disservice, in this exercise, but not logging what I’m getting done daily. The whole idea is to counter the negative-sum to-do list view of life and actually log accomplishments. If they don’t measure up to the time spent, so be it, but let it be a record at least of some of the things that gained top priority enough to happen, over all the other wishful things.