I thought I did worse this year than last, but the numbers don’t lie:  105 posts in 2007 vs. 66 in 2006.  Of course, those numbers are much closer if you take away my little experiment in increased frequency back in October.  And they’re both a far cry away from 529 posts I made back in 2002.  Hell, in July of ’02 alone I posted 81 times.  I can’t even fathom having that much to write about these days.

Usually I’m against the tradition of the new years resolution — empty promises that are given up far too easily — but if I have to make one, then I resolve to get back to 2004 levels (about 3 posts a week if you average it out).  Of course, to do that I think I may need to resolve to go out and live a bit more of an interesting life.  Unless you all enjoy reading meta navel-gazing site posts, that is.  ^_^

While it won’t always be outwardly visible, expect me to use this site as a test bed for things I’m doing for the office, and visa versa.

Saw this a few weeks ago, back before I was once again blogging with a vengeance. Just enter in a web site address and get a nice looking DNA rendering of the site. Of course, you knew I just had to get mine analyzed. Oooh, pretty….

Of course, you might also be interested in knowing the hows and whys of this web DNA thing. For that, I direct you to the creator himself.

Of course, in this age of personal financial awareness and fledgling budgetary practices, I’ll have to trim some fat from somewhere to make this purchase possible. And I’ve decided that place is my .Mac account.

Really, .Mac just hasn’t been a good deal for some time. The $99 a year I’ve been paying gets me little that I can’t get for free online from Google or elsewhere. The only real good thing was the email account and iDisk (slow though it may be). The one feature that got me to buy in the first place — syncing settings between computers — hasn’t worked right in some time. I am actually afraid to use it these days, as it has a nasty habit of hosing my setting in the process of syncing the,. Hell, I’m still cleaning out my address book from the disasterous corruption it suffered some 9 months ago.

Don’t get me wrond: I loves me them Apple products. But they’ll have to give .Mac a huge overhaul to get me back.

I had already been working on cleaning up things on my web host for the better part of the week, and this has been planned for a while now. Of course, with the fragile nature of the content, I was taking my time to make sure nothing got lost in the process. It should have been a lot easier than it was, but by default WordPress lacks an export feature for its content, which frustrated me to no end. Eventually I found a nice export plugin to do the job, but this should be part of the default setup.

I still have some work to do. I’m moving photos around, so old pics are going to be M.I.A. for the time being, and the recently posted ones have lost their formatting info. The sooner I take care of the dull and boring aspects of this, the sooner I can get to work on the redesign.

Oh, and in case you didn’t notice, the beginning of an About page has sprung up, along with the hasty return of the Contact and Portal pages. Expect more falling code and traffic advisories as the restoration continues….

Update: Some pics of the show are up over at BrooklynVegan.

Hopefully it’ll get back there soon. But for now, I’m just working on getting the post frequency back up to snuff. The rest will follow with time.

Four in a row. Pretty sneaky, sis.

Kind of a gray and overcast day today, but it’s not as bad as the weather reports were making in out to be for the city. No sleet or freezing rain for my morning commute, thought the clouds have descended from the heavens to chop the skyline off at the shoulders. Rather symbolic, considering my head feels like it’s in a similar fog. Sleep deprivation can do that to you sometimes.

At least I didn’t waste all that time awake last night doing nothing, like I have so many times before. With the workload I have between Lime Group work and the one or two freelance projects, my own sites have languished behind design-wise. And to be honest, after staring at Photoshop all day at work, it’s been hard to drag myself back in front of the desk after I get home to do it all again for my own endeavors.

I’m finally putting that Wacom tablet I bought back when I first made my switch to the Mac to good use, as you can see by the slice o’ screenshot attached. Very early work indeed, but a better result than I expected. Hopefully that will drive me to be ambitious and continue working on things with some regularity.

Then again, this is me we’re talking about…. ^_^

Yeah, add another thing to the list of projects I’m starting this year — podcasting. You may call the program “The Outer Edges“, and you can expect to hear the results of this endeavor within the next 24 hours or so. The site is all set up (yeah WordPress for making my life easier), but I screwed up the mix on the first recording. A learning process, to be sure.

Side note: One of my large, time consuming projects is near the finish line, so expect to see some wholesale changes here, on my portfolio site and other places that I’ve been neglecting.

April sure entered strong this year. For better and worse.

It’s amazing how much the world has changed since I last posted. Mitch Hedberg went quietly. That makes one favorite author and one favorite comic gone in the calendar year. But of course the big one would be his holiness Pope John Paul II, which had the effect of stopping all television news. One thing garnered from the thousands and thousands of hours of biographical footage was that he was a varied individual — more sides to him than I gave him credit for. Now the world watches as the Vatican begins the cryptically ancient process of selecting a successor. Even in death, there is rebirth.

And musically, it’s been a very exciting few weeks both live and in new releases. Queens of the Stone Age and The Benevento Russo Duo have blessed me both with new albums and live performances. Lake Trout delivered on the show and will have the album coming later this year. The shows begin to get more numerous as the month progresses, with the Jammy’s looming large on the 26th. How can one not get excited by all of this?

In fact, one might just run up to a total stranger and get into a screaming contest. Or perhaps a total stranger just rushes up to you and starts things off. Maybe even a cute as all get-out stranger. Yeah, there’s about as much a chance of that happening as running into someone you used to work with in the subway.

And who’s to say that these things don’t happen?

With all the sweeping changes that seem to be going on, it was about time to do some here on the web as well. The posting system has been changed over to WordPress, which I intend to hack to pieces along with the default layout. It really is quite lovely, but my personal site must scream from my soul. That creative voice in my head won’t rest until I have rebuilt the site in his image, and damn if he isn’t annoying.

This is the first visual representation of an effort I started back in November. After finding that splitting my old content into two separate blogs was a bad idea, I merged them back together. I also folded back in the last of my pre-MoveableType comments and gave those posts that were missing titles some snazzy eye catchers. This is the most complete the archives have been in ages, and it’s only going to improve from here on in. The technical switch was all done in about 2 hours or so, thanks to the ridiculously easy manner in which my hosting provider has made it to set up an installation of WordPress.

I’m also trying to get a bunch of work from my freelance business out the door. The ever present patience of one client with a serious musical slant to his site has to pay off soon. It seems like every time I finally find the time to work on his stuff, the bigger, more resource hungry company that I’ve been distancing myself from comes and weighs in on my time. Late night sessions where I burn through the night have become overly frequent, but somehow I would manage to get everything asked of me done.

Of course, it has to end eventually and one of the smaller projects slipped, with the work only getting half done. That was the sign I needed. I’m cutting back how much work they can give me in an attempt to even the playing field for my other clients. Once they were my employers. Now they’re a client. I think I like this arrangement better.

And we’ve come full circle. Sometime long ago it was decided that there would be orbits and rotations in the universe, and ever since spinning wheels have been a way of life. Motion is conveyed and time is propelled in these fashions, which means that you get to spend as much time looking at the sky as you do with your face in the mud. I’ve already had my taste of dirt, so here’s to drinking in the sunshine.

• Queens of the Stone Age – “Lullabies to Paralyze”
• The Benevento Russo Duo – “Best Reason to Buy the Sun”

In spite of the risks, I’ll be doing posting over there as well as here, but things here will be more personal and things there will be more topical and events driven. It’s already begun with this post. (Hat tip to Mike on half of the post)

Now where am I supposed to find the time for this along with building my freelance career and the regular well paying job? Damn son, you might want to say no to an idea once in a while if you don’t want to be considered ambitious or something.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about blogs as of late, partially due to the freelance work I’m currently engaged in. This has also been mixed in with a bit o’ feedback and the own ideas I have kicking in my head for my next redesign. So I’m asking those of you who partake in my particular brand of madness what direction you’d care to see things head in.

• Do you like longer article-sized posts or the shorter, bite-sized ones?
• Should I get more link heavy with my posting?
• Are there any other features that you’d like to see added?
• Is everything right with the world and am I a fool for wanting to change it?

The more feedback, the better. Now that all the world knows what a blog is, the standards are being upped ever so slightly. So what if this is all just some overly-consuming personal hobby? It’s a hobby I take quite seriously, damnit! ^_^

Make sure to preheat your ovens to 425° before baking:

• Probably the funniest Strong Bad Email ever, though the spawning of a popup via Flash unnerves me a bit. In the wrong hands this knowledge could be big trouble, as Chris at decaffeinated points out.
• XM Radio is giving people a chance to listen to their broadcasts online free for three days. Hopefully Opie and Anthony’s channel is in the mix — I’m curious to hear how the new show is shaping up.
• I have been graced with the opportunity to give BrooklynVegan a new face and a shiny new logo to match. Good to be working on someone else’s blog for a change and getting paid for the honor is just icing on the cake.
• JamBase has a review of the Lynard Skynard tribute album “Under the Influence“. Sounds like it’ll be worth the price of admission.
• I have a bunch of Gmail invites that I can’t get rid of fast enough. Anybody want one? If so, drop a line. (Update: All gone! Sorry.)
• Tired of waiting for the PSP to launch, someone decided to hack together a truly portable PS2. Either someone is really impatient, or they have way too much time on their hands. Maybe both.
• With all the time I’ve missed over the past 90 days or so, I’m luck my desk didn’t look like this when I got back to the office. Some truly vindictive people live in this world of ours.
• On the home front, it has been personally observed that splitting up my weblog into two separate beasts was a good idea in theory, but bad in execution. Expect everything to fold back together in the near future (along with other changes).

That’s about it for now. Let’s see if this can be made into a semi-regular feature as the written voice is tweaked yet again.

Why is this all taking so long? Well, I used the excuse of changing hosting providers as an opportunity to do some serious cleaning of said entries. There were quite a number of comments that had been in mothballs from my shift from Blogger to MT that I had to reintegrate, not to mention all that comment spam to clean out (and I’m still finding some stragglers *grumble*). Finally, in preparation of my next major redesign (due August 15th…I hope) I split a host of entries into separate blogs.

HEY! Wake up! It’s been a long time since I last geeked out, so the least you could do is feign interest! Geez….

Getting the comments back up and running is job #1 — I’ve missed hearing from my loyal readership, which I’m sure has dwindled during this transition. But I can promise a lot of new and interesting things will start showing up as the sumer drags on. Well, back to the code mines I go….

(Update: Comments are back on! Now I have to get the archives styled — a whole new can of worms….)