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Many thanks to Dave for being a fun guest on yesterday’s SecondHand Radio. You can go to the SecondHand Radio site and download it for later listen if you missed out on the fun. Or you can listen to it here:

Hang around a while, that’s fine with me.

So Karen tagged me with a meme the other day. Another Six Weird Things About Me meme. I don’t know how many of these I’ve done over the years, but it’s getting hard to think of original weird shit about me. It’s also coming at a very inopportune time…I’m trying to think of interesting stuff for my 100 Things list (see the link at the top of your browser window). How can I be wasting stuff on a meme as opposed to a LIST?

Fuck it, I’ll just use these six things in the next 10-item list I do for the 100 Things project.

Here are the rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.
6. Let your tagger know when your entry is up.

Well, I never tag people, so fuck the rules. Yeah, I’m feeling feisty tonight. So that eliminates #4 and therefore #5. I think I can handle #6. It’s #3 that messes with me.

1. I hate when I write a numbered list of items or do a meme with many, many questions and then in the comments people refer back to the #’s in the list. Like “I so agree with #12 and cannot BELIEVE #46! I didn’t realize you could fit a #38 in there.” Because I have to go back and scroll up the page to see what the fuck they’re talking about. I realize it’s inherent with the situation…it IS a numbered list, after all, but that doesn’t make me hate it less. And I know you punks. You’re gonna do that number-referencing thing a lot in the comments now just because I said that.
2. I’m a sit-down peer. I mean, I pee sitting down whenever I can. Unless there’s a urinal. I love urinals. They make me proud to be a man. Well, at least HAPPY to be a man. So yeah, there you go. I like sitting down when I pee. Does that get me any closer to getting some pussy? I mean, I’m just about a woman, already! I’d make a great lesbian.
3. So apparently when I’m really really drunk. I mean BEYOND drunk. The kind of drunk where you masturbate in front of women that you’re not sleeping with and may have just met, THAT kind of drunk. When I’m that kind of drunk I pee in places that aren’t exactly meant for that sort of thing. I mean, they’re not even receptacles of any kind. This has happened on two nearly-public rugs. But those aren’t the ONLY times I’ve found myself naked and standing or in this case sitting in urine. Oh no, they most certainly aren’t. You’d think that these might be perceived of as life lessons and that I wouldn’t drink that much ever again. But you’d think wrong. It’s very, very RARE. But it happens.
4. I am by nature very non-confrontational. I don’t like to see people arguing, particularly when it’s a really heated argument and there’s namecalling and hairpulling going on…even in a virtual sense. I’m a “calm the waters” kind of guy. I want everyone to get along, to play nicely with one another. I’ll even go so far as to try and placate the screaming heads. Don’t get me wrong, it IS possible to get my hackles up in a knot (or whatever the hell hackles do when they’re in an excited state). I DO have a few buttons and they can be pushed. But they’re few and far between and you have to try really hard to push those buttons. Still, I can bust words with the best of them. And I will. Maybe.
5. I love having people - well, women, to be more precise - play with my hair. Love it. That’s why I love getting my hair cut, someone plays with my hair for 15 minutes. It’s like that old game 15 Minutes in the Closet…but with less tongue. I love when a woman plays around with my hair, sometimes going into a scalp massage, other times scratching my scalp playfully with her nails. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrroooooowwwwwwwwllll.
6. I love design shows. Trading Spaces? Love it. HGTV? Awesome. I won’t actually turn those shows on, but I’ll watch the living hell out of ‘em if you turn them on for me.

Filed under 100 Things, 2HT Radio, Memes, Uncategorized | Comments (35)

I can’t for the life of me explain why some people actually give a shit what I think about, well, anything, really. When I wrote the post about “Why I Cannot Stand Your Blog” I got an inordinate amount of comments. Not just on the post, but in email, too. People asked me if their blog offended me, or hurt my sensibilities, or made me want to shoot random people in a mall.

My first imagined response is, “Why the fuck do you care what *I* think?” Hell, I’m just a dude. Just like with art - I recently went to the Dallas Museum of Art - I know what I like and what I don’t like, but I can’t necessarily tell you WHY. Some of my comments at the Dallas museum a couple of weeks ago included: “Blecch,” “I love the colors in this one,” and “while I can appreciate Jackson Pollack’s mental illness, that doesn’t change the fact that he sucks.”

I’m much the same way with blogs and web sites. Like most people, when I look at a blog’s design, I have a first impression. That could range from “Blecch” to “Oooooh” to “This is making my eyes bleed.” That said, blog designs really are starting to matter less than they used to thanks to the marvel that is RSS feeds. Even if you have an atrocious color scheme with an awful font on your blog, I can read it in MY feedreader and see it the way I want to see it…black text on a white background.

But the notion that what I think actually matters - to get back to the point - still freaks me the frak out. I’m just me. Who cares? Besides me, of course. But people do.

I’ve had some people in the last couple of months offer to change their whole blog DESIGN just for me. You’ve got to be kidding, right? We’re not even married and even if we were, I wouldn’t change MY blog design for you. Well, maybe if you offered me sex, but then I’d shoot a kitten if you offered me sex, so that’s not really saying much.

Now, most of the things I wrote about in the above post are actually common-sense. Don’t suck…well, duh. Make your text readable. No shit. Don’t truncate your feeds. Obviously. Granted, some of these are also personal preferences, but I can name at least 10 people off the top of my head that agree with the feed excerpts. In fact, they feel even more strongly about it than I do. I’ll drop people that truncate their feeds…but I ANNOUNCE it first. I even post comments on blogs that pull the truncating feeds shit, and I ask politely for them to change it. Most others just drop you, no questions asked.

Some of the other questions I get are in regards to my blogroll. How do I decide what blogs go on there? It’s really not complicated. Generally, I’ll add anyone to my blogroll in nearly the same mouseclick as when I add them to my feedreader. I don’t necessarily read everyone on my blogroll. It’s more a courtesy thing, putting people there that link to me, etc.

As I’ve said before, I used to use my blogroll as a starting point to read blogs every day. Click and visit, click and visit, click and visit. That was before I discovered feeds. Now I can go months without looking at my blogroll and it’s far too big to fit in one of my sidebars. (That’s what Karl said!) You want in my blogroll? You probably just have to ask. Is your link wrong? Just let me know, I’ll fix it.

Otherwise, just go to my blogroll if you’re looking for some new reads. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of them there.

Don’t forget today’s SecondHand Radio show with Dave! Showtime is at 5pm Eastern. Tune in, chat in the chatroom, call in to say hi, and revel in the awesomeness that is me and Dave. Last week we had 44 live listeners and 72 downloaded the show to listen to on their computers and MP3 players. Let’s see if we can up that, eh?

Continue reading »

Filed under 2HT Mentions, Blogging, Memes, Uncategorized, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Comments (34)

Thanks to everyone who participated (albeit unknowingly) in Freaky Frakkin’ Friday yesterday. I got to chat with quite a few people, though I think that firewalls keep the chat thing from popping up with some people. Nevertheless, it was a rousing success and I’ll be randomly chatting with people every Friday now, and offering random people prizes. Woo hoo! Had a great time talking with lots of folks.

I said I’d be giving 2HT buttons to three people, but I kind of fibbed. I gave away TEN buttons in all because I’m a great guy like that. As I write this I still have a couple hours left to give away the remaining two buttons, but you don’t know that because you can’t read this until…well, now. Until I get my hands on a flux capacitor, of course.

I’m glad that a bunch of you found that “What are Feeds?” video helpful the other day. I showed it to my mom and now SHE’S using Google Reader. Course, she’s only reading two blogs: mine and the Alive Campaign blog (the amazing project one of my daughters is taking part in, riding a bike from TX to Alaska).

Still, two blogs is a start. I think she was surprised to see just how easy it is to use a feedreader. I love getting people turned on to life-changing technology, things that just make life easier.

Now if I could only get people to stop posting excerpts in their feeds instead of the entire posts…*sigh*.

One step at a time, though. I really HAVE been dropping people out of my feedreader for truncating their feeds. No offense, but I just don’t have time to click through to your site every damn day. If you need help listing the entire post in your feeds, I’m happy to help. But I’m definitely going through my feedreader this weekend and dropping all you excerpts-only people.

Some of you have asked what my specific blog-reading habits are and that’s hard to quantify. Like I’ve said before, I have numerous folders set up in my feedreader (which you can do with ANY feedreader out there). Each folder contains a bunch of blogs, seperated by various random categories. The “Folks I Know” folder is reserved for those blogs that belong to people I’ve actually MET. Even if you’ve been a guest on SecondHand Radio, you automatically move to the “Folks I Know” folder.

Exceptions being…I have a TequilaCon folder set up with a bunch of people I met at TequilaCon. They don’t automatically move up to the Folks I Know folder because that would be around another few dozen people. I can’t really explain it, that’s just the way it is.

I have a folder set up for Writing and Design blogs…things related to writing job boards, Wordpress news, shit like that. And the rest of the folders are just ways to seperate groups of people, really no rhyme or reason to a lot of it. There’s also a TBD (to be determined) folder, where I stick new blogs I come across, until I figure out whether or not I want to read them on a regular basis. I used to just add people willy nilly…I’m a bit more discriminating now. I read around 250 blogs, so I’m sure you can understand. If you bore me, I drop you. Harsh? Nah, it’s just survival, baby. Still, I leave people in the TBD folder for quite a while. Everyone has their off days, after all.

The first blogs I read every day are those in the Folks I Know folder. Yes, it pays to meet me. Then from there it’s just moving on to the folders I’ve neglected the longest. I’m almost never fully caught up and I don’t promise to read them all every day. Every other day, perhaps, maybe every third day. Even though I’m not working, there’s only so much time I can devote to reading blogs every day.

Plus, I sometimes have wicked ADD, so I have a really tough time reading ANYTHING those days.

Every morning when I get up, I get my coffee, flip on CNN, and sit down to my computer. I start by reading my e-mail and answering blog comments. Yes, I respond to EVERY comment. I realize not everyone has the time to do that, and that’s cool. My philosophy, though, is that if you take the time to leave me a comment, the least I can do is take time to respond. I used to respond to every comment via e-mail. I stopped doing that when I switched over to Wordpress.

I don’t know why, but my reader numbers have been going up steadily since the big switch last month. I can’t respond to every comment by email any more, but I DO respond to them all in the comments section of the posts. I rationalize that this is just as good because now you can easily subscribe to the comments of any post and get e-mailed the latest comments. That way you can see when I respond to you without physically having to go back to my blog multiple times a day. I’m all about the convenience, people.

Then, I look at all of my incoming links to see if anyone has linked to me on their site/blog. I DO go and personally visit those sites, if for anything to say thanks for the link. I really do appreciate those. Once I do that, THEN I fire up the feedreader and start reading blogs. And I twat during all of this, as well.

There, that’s kind of my daily Net habits in a nutshell.

Let’s talk briefly about SecondHand Radio. It’s that time of week again. If you’ve never listened before, I hope you’ll start. I have an hour-long weekly radio show on Blog Talk Radio. This week, my very special guest is none other than Dave from Blogography! If you don’t know Dave, you must be a trappist monk living without electricity. On another planet.

Dave is wildly talented, a real renaissance man, photographer, graphic designer extraordinnaire, and can drink 20 Smurfs under the table without even batting an eye. True, he generally leaves his clothes ON at TequilaCon, but to each his own. We can’t all be me (thanks be to God).

I hope you’ll tune in live and join in on the fun chatroom. The show starts at 5pm Eastern, 2pm Pacific, and you can get the exact time for YOUR location by clicking above on the SecondHand Radio link. You can even set up automatic reminders so you can get an e-mail to remind you of the show time.

There’s a call-in number: 646-716-9370

So you can call in and talk to Dave and I. Ask whatever you want. Ah, who am I kidding? Most of you just want to call in to hit on Dave, but still. You’re welcome to do that.

You might want to show up a little early, even register with Blog Talk Radio if you haven’t done that already. That way people will recognize you in the chatroom. And I’ll also put reminders on Twitter Sunday afternoon, along with links to get to the show.

I’m still looking for future guests, but I have some good ones lined up. NEXT Sunday, June 1, is the amazing Jester from Jestertunes. I’m working on the schedule for future weeks, too, and will post the full schedule when I have things finalized.

Please join Dave and I tomorrow afternoon…or evening, depending on where you are in the world.

Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (19)