Category: blogging

The New 30 Day (or so) Challenge

The timing is fortuitous. I have two (count ’em 2) conferences, pretty much back-to-back events, this month, so blogging time will be limited. AND I want to tidy things up here.

At the (general) urging of Cal and following also in the footsteps of Jaquandor, I’m starting a new Challenge this month. Do it with me. Or don’t.

The timing is fortuitous. I have two (count ’em 2) conferences, pretty much back-to-back events, this month, so blogging time will be limited. AND I want to tidy things up here.

Now I promise this WILL take longer than 30 days: May has Mother’s Day, our wedding anniversary, plus ABC Wednesday, Lydia day, and anything else I decide to write instead. It’ll probably take me 45 to 60 days. So be it. Indeed, I probably won’t even start until next week.

•Day One: Favourite Actor
•Day Two: Favourite Movie
•Day Three: Favourite Musician
•Day Four: Favourite Book
•Day Five: Favourite Food
•Day Six: Favourite Song
•Day Seven: Favourite TV Show
•Day Eight: Pictures Of Your Room
•Day Nine: Favourite Flower
•Day Ten: Favourite Outfit
•Day Eleven: Recent Picture Of Yourself
•Day Twelve: Where Your Family Is From
•Day Thirteen: Favourite Memory
•Day Fourteen: Favourite Purchase Ever Made
•Day Fifteen: Current Grades
•Day Sixteen: Future Tattoos
•Day Seventeen: A Childhood Picture
•Day Eighteen: Favourite Board Game
•Day Nineteen: Something That Made You Smile Today
•Day Twenty: A 10+ Year Old Picture
•Day Twenty-One: Favourite Movie Quote
•Day Twenty-Two: Picture Of You On This Day
•Day Twenty-Three: Favourite Music Video
•Day Twenty-Four: Something Embarrassing In Your Room
•Day Twenty-Five: One Of Your Most Prized Possessions
•Day Twenty-Six: A Picture From One Of The Greatest Days Of Your Life
•Day Twenty-Seven: A Picture Of Where You’re From
•Day Twenty-Eight: A Drawing
•Day Twenty-Nine: Somewhere You Want To Visit
•Day Thirty: Whomever You Find Most Attractive In This World

I may get rid of some of those excessive letter U’s in the titles. Darn Canadians!

And though I promised these before, this time for sure:
*A list of all the Beatles songs, in desert island order.
*Movie year in review.
*Underplayed vinyl – this is helped out tremendously by the painting of the attic, which allows the ACCESS to and reorganization of said LPs.

Quite possibly none of these before June, but these will be my summer projects.

Yes, I am blogging about blogging; this too shall pass.

And while I’m prattling on, I highly recommend that if you happen to have my AOL e-mail address, don’t send me any messages there if you actually reply more often than once a month.

Oh, I was Googling my name, and I came across this:
What was roger green’s early life?
he was a a canable who perferd eating tiny people with dwarfism

I was SHOCKED! That’s some of the worst spelling I’ve ever seen.

ROG

The Giveaway

So this is how it works. For every non-spam comment of at least – let’s pick a number at random – FIVE words left on this blog between May 3 and July 3, you get a ticket. No more than one comment per post will be counted, but you can comment on any post in the past five years. Every ticket represents a chance for a prize.

I decided, in honor of the new blog, or the old blog with the new URL, or whatever it is that I’m doing, to have a giveaway here, based on aspects of my life.

There will be five winners. Among the prizes are:


*Top Pop Albums, 1955-2009 from Record Research, a list of every album that charted on the Billboard charts in the past 55 years.

*Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith by Frederick Buechner. A compilation of 366 brief essays of faith.

FGH


*THE NEARLY COMPLETE ESSENTIAL HEMBECK ARCHIVES OMNIBUS. 900 pages of Fred Hembeck goodness. If you don’t know Fred’s work, it is tricky to describe. It is largely a series of stories about a character named Fred Hembeck and his interaction with comic book characters, which I fell in love with long before I even met my friend. Donated and signed by the artist.

And a fourth and fifth item I haven’t decided upon yet; behold I bring you a mystery. And in each case, I reserve the right to throw in additional stuff.

Comments

So this is how it works. For every non-spam comment of at least – let’s pick a number at random – FIVE words left on this blog between May 3 and July 3, you get a ticket. No more than one comment per post will be counted, but you can comment on any post in the past five years. Every ticket represents a chance for a prize.

It is not the case that the person making the most comments wins. It IS the case that the more comments you make, the more CHANCES you get. So someone commenting five times gets five tickets, thus five times more chances to win. Once I get the total number of entries, I will do the random number generator thing. The first person chosen gets his or her choice of the first pick of the prizes, the second person gets the second pick, etc. All winners will also receive a Millard Filmore $1 piece; the coin of one of the worst US Presidents coin was current when this new blog started, so there it is.

Now if I don’t know who you are, it will be pretty difficult to assign you a ticket, so if you want to comment anonymously and don’t leave your name, it’ll be impossible to assign you a ticket.

Decision of the judge (moi) is final. Winners will be announced sometime before Bastille Day 2010.

Speaking of giveaways, a Coke commercial

Tubes

A visual representation of What do you want from life? (The Tubes)

Well, you can’t have that,
but if you’re an American citizen you are entitled to:
a heated kidney shaped pool,
a microwave oven–don’t watch the food cook,
a Dyna-Gym–I’ll personally demonstrate it in the privacy of your own home,
a king-size Titanic unsinkable Molly Brown waterbed with polybendum,
a foolproof plan and an airtight alibi,
real simulated Indian jewelry,
a Gucci shoetree,
a year’s supply of antibiotics,
a personally autographed picture of Randy Mantooth
and Bob Dylan’s new unlisted phone number,
a beautifully restored Third Reich swizzle stick,
Rosemary’s baby,
a dream date in kneepads with Paul Williams,
a new Matador, a new mastodon,
a Maverick, a Mustang, a Montego,
a Merc Montclair, a Mark IV, a meteor,
a Mercedes, an MG, or a Malibu,
a Mort Moriarty, a Maserati, a Mac truck,
a Mazda, a new Monza, or a moped,
a Winnebago–Hell, a herd of Winnebagos we’re giving ’em away,
or how about a McCulloch chainsaw,
a Las Vegas wedding,
a Mexican divorce,
a solid gold Kama Sutra coffee pot,
or a baby’s arm holding an apple?

Welcome Back, My Friends, To The Show That Never Ends

Because time is not fungible, and because there’s a bit of a learning curve for me – WordPress may arguably better than Blogger, but I know Blogger much better – please be patient here.

So: if you have been blogging for five years, some people are of the opinion that you should either 1) quit or 2) get your own URL. Evidently, I have chosen the latter.

When this URL – www.rogerogreen.com – was available, and I got it two months ago, I did almost nothing with it. Then, pretty much in the past two weeks, I said, “Oh, crap, my blog anniversary’s coming up. Wouldn’t it be really cool if I switched at that point?”

But of course, life gets in the way. This site isn’t really ready yet. If it weren’t considered so déclassé, I’d have a great big construction sign sitting smack dab in the middle of the page. Among other things, I haven’t gone through my blogroll on the old site to bring them to the new site. If you were on my old list, and you are blogging regularly (once a week or more) or if you’ve blogged recently or if I’ve met you personally, you’ll stay. I suspect this will take the better part of the month.

Because time is not fungible, and because there’s a bit of a learning curve for me – WordPress may arguably better than Blogger, but I know Blogger much better – please be patient here. I should be settled in by June. Well, I HOPE so. All advice accepted, though not necessarily acted upon.

Also, if you would be so kind:
1) if I am on your blogroll, please change it to www.rogerogreen.com; I know it’s a pain, but I don’t expect to alter it EVER again
2) if you get a chance to mention in your blog or Facebook or Twitter that I’ve changed my URL, that would be swelligant, elegant.

Here’s an odd thing: this blog, with virtually zero content, was in the 120s for my name last week in Google, whereas my old Blogger blog, with five years of content, was invisible. One of the factors, I’m sure, in actually making the move.

Karn Evil 9 – Emerson, Lake & Palmer
LIVE
on LP.

Any observations or questions are appreciated.

Five Years

Stealing the idea from Bacardi, here’s Five Years by David Bowie.


Printed on April 29, 2010 at 2:30 p.m.

Frankly, I’m surprised I made it here. Five years of blogging every day, at least once a day. I have to work REALLY hard NOT to blog MORE than once a day, but I was reasonably successful; only 367 blogposts in the last 365 days, and I’m sure one of those was a prominent death that JUST COULDN’T WAIT.

But the other reason I’m surprised I made it is that last summer, I got REALLY discouraged.

I’m not one of those people who care about having hundreds of hits a day. When my monthly numbers dropped from 4109 in May 2009 to 3041 in June, it didn’t bother me over much. But when it sank to 1575 in July, THAT was really bothersome. What did I do wrong? I started posting notices of my blog posts on Twitter and Facebook, which actually did help a little, but I am not great at doing that regularly.

BTW, #1: I signed up with some service on the web to automatically post my blog post links to Facebook and Twitter. Instead, it was posting annoying advertising stuff to my Twitter account. So I canceled it, as soon as I saw it on my blog sidebar. Sorry about that.

BTW, #2: two people asked me why I have two Facebook accounts within 30 minutes when I went to the comic book show in Albany last Sunday. It’s easy: I started one, using my work e-mail, then I couldn’t find it. so I started ANOTHER one with my home e-mail. Now I know what both of them are. If I had the time, I’d just cancel one, but since there are people on one who aren’t on the other…well, it’d be work. Someday. When I retire, maybe, or take a long vacation where I actually just play on the computer. That is to say, not any time soon.

Then I noticed something: this blog, which had been on the first page of Google, disappeared from Google. It didn’t just fall off the first page; it seems to have vanished altogether.

Now, I can be found on a Google search. My Twitter and my blog on the Times Union can be found in the top 10. One of my Facebook pages and even my seldom-used Library 2.0 account – check out the vintage of the picture – are in the top 30. Even comments, articles I’ve written for other blogs, and specific pieces from the TU blog show up. But not this one.

This has pretty much forced a momentous decision.

Online/offline life

I attended this blogger conference last week at the College of Saint Rose. If you go to the link, you’ll see what people, including me, thought of the event. The video, which I kvetched about in the article, is also available at the site.

One of the running observations in those comments is that the participants feared that the event would turn out to be a snarkfest, based on some of the online comments that some of these same people had made online to each other. Instead it was, if not a love fest, then at least quite civil. And I got to see my buddy David Brickman, pictured, and not just his head.

I find it all very odd, because, lately, I’m finding people online to be, for the most part, much more civil than in person. There was an incident last month at church – which I won’t get into much except to say this: when someone wants to convince me of the efficacy of a point of view, it’s really important that the topic sentence not be patently, demonstrably false. That transaction, combined with some other circumstances, made going there, especially to choir, a little less of a safe place to be than it had been heretofore. Not occasionally, some of my racquetball partners can be – let’s say unnecessarily irritating lately. Our neighbors, who we are fond of, lost their house for back taxes; verdict is out on the buyer, but early signs are, let’s say, less than encouraging. And the Albany Y is closing at the end of the month; I’ve only been a member since December 1982, so I have no emotional investment.

Meanwhile, online life is pretty darn great. Part of that, admittedly, is the fact that it was my birthday Sunday and I got probably two dozen Facebook well wishers, plus four e-cards, a number of e-mails, a few comments on the blog, and a mention from Gordon. Since I am admittedly LOUSY at Facebook – it just isn’t something I find the time to do regularly – I found the FB responses in particular really gratifying.

But it’s other stuff. My blog was featured on the Times Union page when I happened to be sitting at the library next to a guy looking for a job; I could just give him the link to the Census information. “Hey, is that you?” pictured on top? Why yes, it is.

The mighty comic blogger ADD cited a conversation we had a while back in a recent post. Jaquandor (the guy at Byzantium Shores) and Scott answered my questions; yes, some of them are the same questions. I get good comments from the ABC Wednesday folks.

Sunday Stealing stole my meme (that’s a good thing); and yes, I had admittedly stolen it myself.

Speaking of stealing, I was pleased that the NYS senator Kirsten Gillibrand came out for gay men being able to donate blood. I wanted to write something but didn’t have time, so of course, I stole it. I feel only slightly guilty, because I stole it from me. Repositioning, as I recall ADD and I decided.

Someone joked at the Times Union gig that “almost no one” showed up in pajamas. Sometimes, the folks that I could “talk” with in my PJs are just easier to deal with. Well, except for Glenn Beck attacking me.
***
I’m not much of a believer in astrology, but my friend of 52 years, born two days after I, sent me our chart. I found it oddly soothing:
“This aspect is all about breaking the bonds that held you down in the past.” [Sounds right.] You are about to become liberated from some sort of situation that contained or limited you…Earlier in the month we have an excellent day that you may want to circle on your calendar – March 7…will help you hone your powers of communication. The written and spoken word will become very important to your progress at this time, and if you are born on March 7, or within five days of this date, this will be true for your whole year to come because this is happening on your “solar return” or return of the Sun to your time of birth. (The closer your birthday falls to March 7, the more dramatically you will see this trend.) Travel taken near March 7 should go really well, and all news, including news about home and family, could make you want to sing!”
Since my birthday was March 7 – which turned out to be a pretty good day…

ROG

ROG
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