Cat Sticks Head in Cookie Jar
I am so sick of my Top 379
That being said, I will soldier on and post my entry for #379 tomorrow, #378 the following day, and so on and so forth. #1 will be posted on January 13, 2013.
I finished my four-month process of rating songs yesterday. The list is done. Really, I could just dump the list on here and be done with it and move on. Since most of the list are pointers to the past, it might be best to just be done with this project.
But the whole point of the project, initially, was to have something else to blog about. This aim was derailed, though, as I spent all this time listening to music and almost no time planning the blog. I’ve had a bunch of ideas of what I’d want on the site but haven’t implemented anything.
Fortunately, I don’t really care about the first 100 or so songs, so if I do little more than dump a post with a video once a day for the first three months, I won’t feel like I’ve failed. I may eventually regain some enthusiasm for the project. However, I’ve really got more important projects to focus on, that are more relevant to bettering myself.
I still can’t decide if I go with a bare bones WordPress theme that I can build on or use a pre-fab theme isn’t ideal for what I’m doing but I can tweak as I go.
So the site is top379.com if you want to visit it, and I hope that you will. Subscribe to the feed in your reader of choice. I won’t mention it on here every single day. Maybe I’ll do weekly summaries.
Oh, so when I say I’m sick of the Top 379, I’m most sick of the music itself. Four months of listening to music that I like but that is, for the most part, critically maligned and that conjures up bad memories.
Maybe this project is a way of gradually weaning myself off of the stuff I’ve liked since I was 14.
Goal for 2012: Discover good music.
I hear Durham has this live music scene. What’s that all about? And are any of them Air Supply tribute bands?
Metablogging 2011.12.30
16 days without a post. I used to go five or six and declare I was on hiatus. I thought I would have something to say about this, but I don’t. I’ll try anyway. That’s what I used to do and suppose still do on rare occasions…just do some stream-of-consciousness writing and see where it goes, not worry about where it goes, and post it as-is.
I used to write about politics every other day. Or, rather, I’d post about politics. I’d typically just post a link to or an excerpt from something I had read, or a video. I don’t typically trust the integrity of my own arguments to write any extended commentary. But it was something. I’m not going to look it up, but I must have had dozens of posts with the tag ‘election 2008′. Actually, it’s easy enough to look up. 90. I had 90 posts related to the 2008 election. The 2012 election? One post. I haven’t lost interest in politics. I’m reading about politics every day. I’m done with cable, so I don’t hear the sound-bytes 40 times a day. I don’t hear Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann’s commentaries. But I’m still very much attuned to what’s going on and have strong opinions. But I’m not sharing them. I don’t have a good reason for not doing so. I just haven’t.
I used to post about lots of random things. I suppose all those random things wind up as Facebook posts. Maybe 90% of my blog posts from several years ago would’ve simply been Facebook posts in 2011. The reality is that if your goal is share thoughts and information with people, you’ll reach more people on Facebook than with a blog…well, if your blog has an insignificant readership in the first place.
Still, I like that I own my blog. Mark Zuckerberg owns whatever I or anyone else posts on Facebook. As long as I pay for my domain and web hosting, this is mine. If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, this would all be gone in a couple of months when my hosting provider shut off my delinquent account. I suppose I could figure out how to automatically mirror this site on wordpress.com. But now I’m being morbid.
Back to the State of My Blog. So I post pictures…of a vacation…of the pets. I post music I like, which I know is of no interest to anyone. Still, I’ve persisted with this Top 379 project, which I’ll have a post about later on.
There were the kidney posts. Those get a bit old. I’ve stil got ongoing issues, but I don’t know if they warrant posts. Then again, since I avoid any type of support groups or forums, venting about these ongoing issues would probably be therapeutic.
Blogging has always been therapeutic…except when it hasn’t been…and it’s been a chore to post just for the sake of posting. Once I start being selective about what I post, when I think too hard about what’s worth a post and what’s not, that’s when the blog is a chore. Went I post random stuff on a whim, I think that’s when it’s actually therapeutic. That’s probably also when anyone reading this actually finds the blog more interesting. Though, I shouldn’t really care what anyone reading this finds interesting. It’s not like I make money off of page views.
Ok, so I started off with nothing to say and said a bunch. It may have been a bunch about nothing, but that’s something.
As I’ve said many times before
I love this cat. When he’s good, he’s so good.
I know I’ve taken this same picture what seems like a hundred times. But he’s almost 16. Maybe it used to be overkill, but now, I mean, he’s 16. So any picture I take of him at this point is special, right?
Tulum Part 10 / Beach (sand, ocean, sky, rocks, birds, dogs, etc.)
One walk on the beach, camera in hand. Still only on Day 2 of 4. It’s been over four weeks now, and I’m still milking this for blog posts. Also, I took a ton of pictures. It’s a good thing that I don’t know Photoshop or use anything more advanced than Picasa, and even then, I just crop and occasionally do an “I Feel Lucky”. So I took about 75 pictures, uploaded 28 to Flickr, and I’ll narrow it down to 10 here. No, the woman on the rocks was not aware I was taking a picture with her in the frame. Then again, the dogs were also oblivious to my presence.
[flickr-gallery mode="tag" tags="tulum, beachset" tag_mode="all"]
Note to self
You do need to take a sleep aid from time to time because your medications can cause insomnia. However, you should not blog after you have taken the sleep aid. Unfortunately, this advice may go unheeded, since at the time of publication, you have no idea that you’re blogging something you’ll wish you hadn’t the following day. Seriously, you’ve got dozens, if not hundreds, of unpublished drafts. They remain drafts for a reason.
Top 379 / the countdown begins / hypothetical 32. Phil Collins – Against All Odds
Just messing. Working twenty minutes a day to get this site in great. Or, it started back in July or August or whenever I started this monstrosity of an ego project. But thousands of song ratings later, I’m coalescing around a few hundreds songs that will be THE Top 379, to be unveiled throughout 2012.
I have just started Round 4–The Final Round–of rating songs. What does that mean> It’s like KFC’s secret herba and spices. I can’t tell anyone, especially anyone who knows anything about statistics, since whatever I am doing is likely statistical heresy,
One idea beyond doing that will be that, over a course of a year, I may learn legitimate statistical measures around how lists such as The Top 379 ought to be corrated.
For Now, a rudimentary entry (working on a template far from completion….)
Tulum Part 09 / Cabañas Tulum
Laziness and three weeks of distance make it an ever more difficult task to go through my Tulum photos. I’ve got at least three decent sets left. This is not one of them. Just a few pics to represent where I stayed, which, I think, as I had mentioned, was at the hotel next door to where the main wedding action was taking place (and where everyone else stayed). Cabañas Tulum is a pleasant little place on the beach. Oh, yes, I did already write briefly about where I stayed. I just hadn’t mentioned the name. So now I’m breaking out the tilde and mentioning the name.
So here’s precisely where I stayed:
If I stepped out onto that patio, this is the view I had:
And if I walked down that path, I would see this:
Top 379 preview / Hypothetical Air Supply scenarios
Hypothetically, if one lived in Durham, North Carolina and wanted to see Air Supply in concert in 2012, one would be in luck because Air Supply still tours, and they’ll be performing in the United States. Unfortunately, the closest venue is in Morgantown, West Virginia. Hypothetically, this is problematic. And Thackerville, Oklahoma? Really?
View Air Supply 2012 in a larger map
Oh, and this video is awesome. Any dissenting comments will not be tolerated.
For my friends worried about paying for their kids’ college / For anyone who wants a lucrative new career
No worries, because there’s this, whatever this is (which apparently has been airing for at least two years, but I rarely find myself watching The CW at one in the morning):
