This blog post was created on a Mac using Ulysses. Ulysses is one of those zen writing programs, sort of halfway between Scrivener and a text editor. It’s Mac-only, which is a bit of a bummer.
It’s also expensive in Canadian dollars, but this trial version is enabled until December 7th, to allow people to use it for NaNoWriMo, which I may or may not do.
Anyway, I posted, hooray.
The WordPress dashboard is surprisingly complete on my iPhone 6 but I can’t say that pecking out a post on the tiny onscreen keyboard is exactly fun.
Consider this then just another in my ongoing efforts to post to my blog on every conceivable type of device.
Next up: posting from a television!
When the jogging updates dried up in the second half of the month my general writing inspiration also withered away and so here I am well short of my post-a-day ratio on the final day of May. There’s a little under two hours left in the month as I write this and I could bang out ten lame haikus, one per post, in order to meet the goal of 31 posts for the month but that would be dirty cheating.
Instead, I will admit defeat and resolve to do better in June. On the plus side there is one fewer day in June than May, so that’s already aces, as the kids say.
Here’s a writing haiku I should probably print out poster-size and slap on the wall above my monitor and everywhere else:
Writing is easy
All you do is start writing
Remember, don’t stop
In order to meet the minimum of one-post-per-day (on a monthly basis) I need to write twelve more posts after this one by the end of tomorrow.
It’s not inconceivable I could do this.
Could I do it without spamming a lot of one-liner nonsense? Quite possibly.
Could I do it without posting any cat images? Probably.
Could I do it with a dozen sober, substantive messages? Let’s not get crazy here.
Let me start by singing the praises of spring, which truly arrived today with sunny skies and unseasonably warm temperatures. I almost expected delightful cartoon birds to alight on my shoulders while fluffy cartoon bunnies hopped around my feet. I mean while outside. It would be kind of weird if that happened at my cubicle and if I’m going to have weird things happen I’ll take winning the Lotto 6/49 jackpot over the appearance of cartoon animals at my work desk.
Speaking of the 6/49, I actually matched four out of six numbers last week. That sounds impressive until you realize it’s only 66%, which in school is a mediocre grade. I won $43.70. I have not, as a result, taken early retirement.
On that still-not-rich note, here’s to 12 more posts in the next 25.5 hours. That’s less than one post every two hours. Easy peasy.
I’ve finally added a few more posts to the little “Posts I Like” thing over to the right (or at the bottom if you’re on a mobile device). These are posts that I find amusing/terrifying or somehow worth noting. Of note is the brief, tragic “Learning to Swim” saga.
Enjoy!
You may be asking yourself, “What happened on January 23rd that was so utterly unremarkable that it ironically merits mentioning?” More likely you are asking yourself something like, “What should I have for lunch?” or “What’s the deal with the Canadian dollar?” but I can only answer one of these questions.
On January 23rd this website had zero visits. Think about that for a moment. With over seven billion people on the planet, with over 1.5 billion people on Facebook, not a single one visited this site on January 23rd (I did, but the site analytics don’t count me. It’s kind of like using your mom as a job reference.)
I’m not really bothered by this. It’s kind of liberating in a way. I can ramble on about anything I like without the bother of attracting attention. Or maybe I’m actually shattered by the impressively obscure nature of creolened.com and despair over the pointlessness of waxing philosophical about various topics while no one listens. Well, reads.
Except the only waxing I do is of my chest.
(I don’t really wax my chest; the very thought makes my toes reflexively curl up in horror.)
As a bonus, here are the answers to the two other questions:
Coming up next: More rambling.
I’ve removed the ol’ tag cloud that I’ve had on the site for the past hundred years or so as tag clouds are becoming passe, like parachute pants and a stable global climate. Instead I’m using a widget that now groups the tags into a dropdown menu so you can easily (assuming you have a robust scroll wheel on your mouse or energetic finger for your mobile device) peruse all 463 of them.
My post-to-tag ratio is clearly out of whack as making random tags I’ll only ever use once (364 of 463) is almost as fun as making lists. And I love making lists so much people do indeed ask me, “Why don’t you marry them?”
Because I used the “l” word, here’s a list of my five most-used tags:
Summary: I like talking about my legs a lot (ie. jogging), I regularly complain about the heat (see above, re: stable global climate), I have a lot of thoughts just drift into my head, and finally, I review most of the books I read. Who knew?
I spent some time thinking–several long minutes–over what to write for the one-thousandth post of this blog.
Should it be something deeply profound and insightful? Haha, no. I’m not about to take the blog in some bold, new direction.
How about a list? I love lists. This was very tempting but collating a list about the blog, such as links to “the best my brain could come up with” posts felt too much like work and a random list didn’t seem worthy.
A haiku? They’re fun and simple. But lazy, really. Doesn’t this milestone deserve something that takes more than a few seconds to dash off? Probably not, but I can pretend it does.
After mulling these three ideas my several minutes of thinking was over and here I am.
I now present all three below. What tremendous blogging value I give to the several people accidentally stumbling across the site because I wrote “Zachary Quinto naked” into this post.
Something deeply profound and insightful
I don’t actually have anything for this but take a look at this Wikipedia article on the Observable Universe and try wrapping your mind about how big it is, how small we are and just what the heck is out past the part we can’t observe, anyway? I say space monsters.
[box title=”A list of the 10 most-used tags on this blog in a fancy box” box_color=”#329242″] 59 he’s got legsThis list demonstrates several things, leading to a bonus list (but not in a fancy box):
A haiku about my blog
What to write each time
A never ending challenge
No naked Quinto
One of the plugins I use on this blog is Better WP Security. Among its features it records any bad login entries. These are people and/or bots trying to enter the admin area of the blog by trying out various username/password combos, hoping to get lucky so they can do all manner of nefarious deeds once allowed in.
As you might guess, the most common username used in these attempts is “admin” and it’s why basic security has you change it from “admin” to anything else (I’ve done this, in case any bots are reading).
Sometimes the username entered is more curious than “admin”. For example:
Bernardo1133
Did Bernardo get misdirected or confused? Did he think he was signing into his own blog? What are the other 1132 Bernardos up to, anyway?
BroderickCrook
Oh, I just bet you are a crook, Broderick! Nice try, buddy.
creolened
Clever bot. But not clever enough.
DebWordenrfai
This one may have been trying to login to World of Warcraft.
What’s sad is the number of legitimate visits to the site is usually in the range of less than 10 per day, meaning the blog on average is more than ten times as popular as a potential hacking target than as something to read. On the plus side that less-than-ten number is still more people than ever read my paper journal.
It seems that one of the updates of the NextGen Photo Gallery plugin I use on the blog reworked things to the point where most of my gallery pages were nothing but a spectacular mess of exposed, broken code. While interesting in an abstract sort of way it was not very practical for the viewing of photos.
I finally went through and cleaned up most of the pages and broke off Hiking into its own separate category. Still to come are better descriptions for each page and improved old photos, as I realized a lot of them were scanned with particularly poor brightness/contrast. But it’s a start.
The general Photo Galleries and Hiking may be found by clicking on the words you just read.
I’ve trimmed away a few links from the My Links section of the sidebar. Gone are:
Fitocracy. I simply never use this site anymore.
LinkedIn. For now I have decided to keep the more business side of things off this website, since it is more focused on personal ramblings.
Nike+. I still use this site regularly but the revamp bafflingly requires an account to view anyone’s profile. So much for sharing!
Facebook and Google+ remain once-every-six-months affairs for me and Smashwords should have more to it soon™. I may start using Twitter more. Or not. MyFitnessPal I login to everyday and today is my 165th day in a row. Woo for consistency.
Also it is very warm sitting here today. I miss my fan.
And it’s not even an April Fool’s joke! (I am fond of the 8-bit Google Maps, myself)
After several false starts in March I am boldly planning on posting something to the blog every day for the rest of the year. That would be nine months in all or 274 posts, assuming I meet the bare minimum.
Some of the posts will be fluff but I shall endeavor to say something worthwhile as much as possible.
Excelsior!