Busy.Sick.Busy

I’ve been meaning to blog more this year than I have in the past. Unfortunately (or fortunately), it has been busy at work.  Then two weeks ago I had dinner with friends I had not seen in years.  It was great seeing them, but I caught the flu from one of them!  A small price to pay to see friends, but it really through ‘my game’ off for the next couple of weeks.  I still have a lingering cough at this point.  This thing is nasty.

Anyway, I’ll be back to blogging soon. There are several subjects I’ve been itching to write about but I haven’t set aside any time to write.  I will shortly.

Back to Blogging

I know I haven’t been blogging much lately. There are several reasons for this, but the task taking up most of my free time has been trying to defeat General RAAM. He’s the ugly MOFO you see below:

If I haven’t mentioned already, farrah’s Christmas present to me was an XBOX 360. From previous posts you probably know I gave her a Wii for her birthday. So now we have games system to the hilt – only lacking a Playstation 3 – which I see plunking down any change for anytime soon.

farrah knows I was debating the merits of an XBOX 360 versus a Playstation 3. But when I started gushing about how “Gears of War” looked pretty cool on the XBOX 360, she pulled the trigger on it as my present. (Wow, what a wife!)

GOW has been a pretty fun game. A bloody, violent and profanity laced adventure which is all you can ask for in a shoot ‘em up type game. But killing General RAAM, the last boss in the game, doesn’t take the normal blunt force trauma method. It required numerous precise shots to his noggin while his shield of flying friends are not surrounding him. Oh, he’s also armed with a gatlin gun that can cut you in half, so it even makes it more difficult.

It took me the good part of a week to finally kill him. And now that game part is over and I have more free time to blog…and to play “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” on the Wii.

I've Been Vox'd!!!

You heard about //Vox?

Well, Vox is the new social networking site from //Six Apart, the creators of Movable Type, TypePad, and LiveJournal – all good blogging platforms. I’ve tried them all, and one thing is for sure: Six Apart knows their stuff.

Yes, I and everyone else I know is thinking, does the world need another social blogging network? Well, Vox is sold on its “all about ease of use, privacy control, playing well with other web services, and staying connected to the people you care about.” It is easy to use, and there are a lot of features in flux.

What I like: I enjoy the ability to easily integrate Flickr, Photobucket, or iStockphoto account. I also like the ability to selections from YouTube and Amazon items in your blog entries. The interface to create entries is simple to use as well. I like the QotD (Question of the Day) which can prompts you to answer via a blog entry. I also like the idea of neighborhoods – almost like adding a Flickr contact. You don’t necessarily need to make the a Friend or Family, but you can read your favorite bloggers on Vox by having them in your Neighborhood. Templates are nice as well. There is advertising on your page, but it is very subtle.

What needs work: HTML tags can’t be used everywhere, such as My Profile and blog entries. Since Vox is in Preview status, there is only a limited amount of users on the system, so only members can make comments on blog entries. They could probably open this up with OpenID or some other method. I would like to also see the ability to import a blog from another platform, such as LiveJournal, Blogger, or WordPress.

Overall, it has been a good experience on Vox. Oh, so you want to see my page? Well you can view //my Vox here.

Would you like to get Vox’d? I might send out invitations to those I know, once I receive them. Just try it out. At the least, you can get your name – if it isn’t taken already

Writing Here and There

I think I mentioned a post or two ago that I was starting a new
blog.  Yeah, another blog.  This makes a total of three
blogs!!!  Well, actually it’s more like two.  There is:

• [weblog] janella.com – The main
  blog.  I use this to keep family and friends updated on what is
  going on with life’s events.  It also serves as the main method to
  hear about new photos taken and posted involving those life events.
• [360].yahoo.com – My
  work blog.  I write here to keep some friends at work informed of
  what’s happening in my life.  It almost mirrors [weblog] janella.com, so if you read this blog you really don’t need to visit here…unless you want to see what my coworkers are writing about. 360 is a beta weblog offered by Yahoo!
• [LTF] janella.us – The new blog!  A weblog to chronicle my adventures in photography.  We’ll adventures is a strong word.  More like stumbling and fumbling through the learning process.

Having a separate blog has helped me focus my thoughts, and allowed me to write more about the task-at-hand. [weblog] gives me the freedom to write about anything, whereas [LTF] allows me to specifically write about taking photos. I’m not sure if the writing is composed well, but it is the most writing I have done in some time. Plus you won’t need to read about it here – and if you want to read about it you can go [there]. I hope you do take some time to read it over, and feel free to make any comments both encouraging and critical.

Who knows, managing three blogs may become cumbersome – it’s not cumbersome at the moment – so it may well change.

Oh well, it’s time to go do something.

Later.

Looking @ My Old Blog

Since I was contemplating a new blogging service, I was looking at my old blog at [blogger.com]  You can take at look at it here:

http://www.janella.org/

You can see the whole in entries from April 2003 when I stopped using
it to April of 2005 when I came back to play.  I recently did some
side-by-side posts on my blogger.com site and [LiveJournal.com] using [Flickr.com]. 
I must say the template look for blogger.com is much cleaner, stylized
than most of the templates I’ve seen so far on LiveJournal.com

The problem I have with blogger.com is that you need a domain name in
order to post your blog on a domain (e.g. janella.org) or you can have
a blogspot address.  For my blog it was janella.blogspot.com

The [360.yahoo.com] is still a
maturing blog that doesn’t have a lot of features that I would like to
use right now.  First off it can’t accept Flickr posts (I’m sure
it will in the future as Flickr was aquired by Yahoo!).  Also
there isn’t an ability to customize the look of your blog as of yet.

I haven’t played with Typepad much, but I assume it is like Movable
Type, which I’ve used before.  The only problem I have with
Typepad upfront is the cost. Packages start at $4.95/month to
$14.95/month (that’s how much I pay for web hosting!!!)  Here at
LiveJournal.com, if you choose to have a paid site, it would be as much
as $25/year which is a little over $2/month.  Not bad.

So I choose LiveJournal.com for now.  Now it’s time to look for a
home for photos.  Is Flickr the solution or is there somewhere
else?