NaBloPoMo 07

Day Six

So its actually day 12 of NaBloPoMo ‘07 however its only my 6th entry as I was late to the game (actually just late hearing about it, didn’t know anything about it until I saw Clintus post about it on twitter). I already have nothing to post. I normally don’t have a problem with Mondays and can normally get work done but for some reason today felt like Sunday. I think its mostly due to the fact that we were in Lawton most of the day on Saturday for my sons last soccer game and his end of season party. Then had to go to a birthday party for Melissa’s nephew at Kids Zone so it was a long day up there. So, basically just not enough relaxing over the weekend. However soccer is over now so no more 3 times a week trips to Lawton (which is just over an hour drive). I did get a little work today. I finished a design for a client that I’m trying to get and got it sent off. I hope to hear back from them tomorrow. I wasn’t able to start the redesign for another client like I had hoped to but it will be a quick redesign. Mainly just cleaning up the current design, adding a few things, graphics and making it a WordPress Theme. Tomorrow should be a better day and I plan to get more sleep tonight. Last night was a later night then I wanted.

Lazy Day

Sometimes everybody needs a lazy day. Today was one of those days. I had actually planned to get some work done today on a custom coach management system for a client but instead caught up on some tv shows and watched a movie with Melissa. I thought I was only 2 weeks behind on Journeyman but ended up being 4 weeks behind. Lots of good new shows this season and some great seasons to other shows, including House. Waiting to see how this WGA Strike pans out. I’m hoping it doesn’t effect the final season of Scrubs. Been looking forward to it. We watched The Invisible tonight. Its a movie I’ve wanted to see and turned out to be pretty good. Not a great movie but worth the watch. Tomorrow will be a long day as I have a ton of stuff on my to-do list including a redesign for a church in Lawton, complete a design for a bar/live music venue, and attempt to get some work done on this custom php project for LawtonSoccer. Thats on top of a long list of emails that need to be sent out tomorrow and those that need to be replied to. That doesn’t include that 2532|Gigs is still dead due to a bug in the login system (that we still can’t get fixed). So, we will see how the weeks goes.

2007 Road Runners

I coach my sons Under 5 soccer team, the Road Runners, for the Lawton United Soccer Club. Today was the last game of the season. This was also my second season coaching. Before last season I had never watched or played soccer. We enrolled Chase because it was the only sport he could do at 4 years old. I ended up learning a lot last season and more this season. I have enjoyed coaching both seasons (8 kids on my team this season and 9 last season) and the kids are great. Sometimes you can get stressed because you are working with 3-4 year olds but overall its fun for me as the coach and of course the kids and parents have fun. I try to involve the parents a lot and get them on the fields for practices. We also do 3vs3 against the parents from time to time as warm-ups. The kids always love it. Mostly we teach soccer through games. They are just 3-4 so you can’t expect to much but they have fun whether its red light/green light or hit the coach. After the game today, in which the kids did great, their best game of the season, we went to Ci-Ci’s for an End of Season Party. There we handed out the medals that the club provides but I also went and had certificates printed and ordered soccer ball patches to give the kids. Of course the kids were more interested in the pizza and the cake that a parent made.

Next season I plan to coach two teams. My team this season will all be returning which is great to have a full team returning (I had no players from last season return). I will also be starting a second U5 team for my daughter and niece who both will be old enough to play (you must be 3). It should be interesting doing two teams. The plus will be we can have some practices together and on our practice Saturdays (we have 5 games over 8 weeks) we can do mini games between my two teams. I actually think that I enjoy it more then my son.

Video Blogging

I have been a blogger since 2003. I have always been interested in new media. I have done audio and video editing in the past (promotional dvd’s, highlight reels, music videos, etc) and have always wanted to do more in that field. I haven’t really jumped on the VideoBlogging/Podcasting wagon. I do enjoy many podcasts and videobloggers though. Clintus McGintus is of course awesome. I’ve also watched a few of his Justin.tv casts and he really shows his interest in new media and video. Then you have Brent Spore of iBoughtAMac and PodcampAZ who is a very interesting guy. Then who could forget Justine. She is the internet. She not only vlogs but is also a lifecaster as seen on Justin.tv. It becomes addicting to watch her and is sometimes hard to keep up with her as she is everywhere most recently at PodcampAZ and now at BlogWorld.

As I said before I’m more of a blogger (and some say not much of that, to which… I would agree). I do however plan to join the vlog scene and start video blogging. This is one of my plans for the new year. I’m not sure how it will go but we will see. I don’t plan to lifecast (although might be cool in the future to go mobile and lifecast) I might put up a cam at my desk (much like Clintus and Chris Pirillo). Personally I love catching up on everybody’s videos and reading blogs and my Google Reader is growing with loads of new feeds. I planned to keep this post short so thats it for today.

Mac vs Windows?

I have been a long time Windows user. My first computer I touched was a Mac and was the first I learned on back in Junior High School. My first PC was a family HP. Within the next two months I will be making the switch from my PC to a new 24″ iMac. I have actually been wanting to make the switch for a few years (back to the G3’s) but the time was never really right. Everything worked out this year both with money and business as freelancing and will finally make the switch. Not only was money right this year to drop just over $2,000 on a new iMac but with Leopard and watching the Guided Tour and reading what everybody else has been saying about it just made it perfect and I look forward to the switch.

I do love my PC though. Windows has personally been great to me. I’m not one who has had tons of problems and BSoDs often. From Windows 98SE, 2000, XP/XP 64bit to Vista I have had very few problems and most were not related to Windows. Of course I am leaving Windows ME out of this list and we won’t get started on the problems with that release. I have had very few OS crashes. In fact my last one was about 9 months ago when I was reloading my video drivers and loaded the wrong ones (I had switched to 64bit XP and loaded 32 drivers). I have of course had my share of hardware failures and OS problems with apps and sucking up memory but knowing how to deal with it is one thing.

I am excited about switching to a mac though. Spent plenty of time browsing around Apple.com and reading their switching guides. Browsed tons of Mac/Apple related websites and forums and of course have got great tips from people I know who use macs. I also look forward to blogging about my switch and finding apps to replace my current. I’m also really wanting to give Final Cut a go. The schedule is to purchase it early January. We are also looking into getting a refurbed MacBook as well. Think we plan to wait until later in the year for it though. I just need it for travel so not really big on the specs for it. Thats it for this post. My next topic will be VideoBlogging.

Update: Sorry for the downtime tonight. I finally got around to upgrading WordPress and had a few plugins that didn’t work with the latest version however I found some plugins (twitter, tags and last.fm) that I like a little better. The tag cloud is limited at the moment as I switched to a new tag plugin and was not about to re-add tags to each post. I did the last few months though.
< /end.edit >

NaBloPoMo

In accordance with NaBloPoMo I am to post a blog every day for the month of November. It looks like I am 6 posts behind. Anyways as I normally don’t post that often these daily posts will be quick and very short.

Back to work today after taking yesterday off to move my desk (near a window, lovin it so far) and rearranging the house. Our house of course looks like we moved in yesterday (even though it was a few months ago). So, we started moving stuff around and going through boxes and trashing stuff we meant to trash years ago. It felt good to finally get rid of some boxes that normally sit in a corner for months. It felt good to have the house look more like a home instead of a place with boxes stack in the corner for a year. Although the house is still a mess as there is still a few more things to do it looks good. Finally made a place in the closet for our camping gear (didn’t know we had that much). Spent most of today doing client updates to some sites and will be doing the same tomorrow. Looking to gain a few new clients this month before slowing things down in December to work on some other projects (such as FieldStatus, 2532|Gigs, and 2532|Cal). Thats it for today. Tomorrow look for my comments on Macs and why I plan to finally make the switch from PC to Mac this January. Some other topics I plan to discuss for this month of blogging (as my life isn’t interesting enough to fill up a month) include VideoBlogs, PodCasting, Music (and lots of new artists), Twitter and the future of this site.