DrHogie.Com A blog about me. Whoever that is.

Only One Child Tonight…

Our oldest is spending the night at a friend's house for her friend's birthday party. And the youngest stayed up till 9:30pm. Here's hoping we can sleep in tomorrow, provided the dog allows it...

Almost there

Only one more day until the weekend. I'm typing this up on my iPhone because, quite frankly, I'm too tired to go to the PC. I'm really hoping the kids and animals sleep through the night.

I wouldn't know how to act with eight consecutive hours of sleep.

Getting Old

I know I'm not ancient (34) but one thing that sucks these days is being tired as all get out at night. I used to be able to stay up late and get a lot of things done. Now, 9PM rolls around and I'm ready for w long winter's nap. It's just frustrating. Granted, I've been playing Hero Academy when I could have been writing. But, c'est la vie.

At least the streak is still alive. Kinda.

Distractions.

I honestly had a big idea for a post, but I got completely sidetracked tonight between Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Slotomania HD for iPad. It's a nifty free slot game that runs well enough on iPad -- just these dang "10 Free Spins for Friends" doesn't appear to be working. All the better for you to buy coins, I guess.

Here's hoping for tomorrow.

Wheeeeeeee

Working late trying to get EOY books finished. Really gonna try a full post tomorrow night. Even got a few drafts cooking up -- I've just got to make the time to get them typed up.

Yeah, posting like this just makes the posting streak a formality -- but for me it's not so much the content starting out. It's building up the habit of knowing I should post every day.

Nothing to see here — please disperse

A day that was full of laziness, where very little was accomplished. I'm hoping it will give me a great recharge for the week ahead.

At least I remembered to scoop the litter boxes.

Trampoline . . . yay?

I got the trampoline built that the kids received for Christmas this year. It's a long story as to why the trampoline wasn't built on Christmas Day -- but it's built now. It was right at dark when I finished it, and a few kids from the neighborhood came by to try it out. I spent the entire time hovering around the trampoline watching everyone like a hawk, waiting for that moment when someone would get a busted nose or a broken limb. Like my 6th grade teacher used to tell me, I'm a huge worrywort. Having kids just made it worse.

A comical note about the trampoline was the numerous notes stating the trampoline could only be used by one person at a time. A fifteen foot trampoline -- and only one person at a time. I guess you say what you have to when you're preventing lawsuits. Needless to say, that limitation lasted all of 30 seconds.

The Weekend

Quite thankful it's the weekend. I did bring a good bit of work home, but it'll be a great chance to recharge my batteries and get everything lined up for next week. Of course, there will be plenty of XBox time as well. Maybe even a little XCode time if I can get an hour or three where I won't be bothered that's before 10pm (as if).

Here's hoping the animals and children actually let me sleep through the night tonight.

Why am I doing this?

I was trying to think of a topic for a post tonight, and I started thinking about why I'm attempting this "Blog 365" deal. I've had this domain for years now. I've had a blog in the past but rarely posted on it. Lately though, I've had this urge to start the blog again. I think the main reason is because having to get my thoughts onto a screen/paper forces me to slow down and think about it. I have a lot of issues with slowing down and taking my time -- so any practice I can get with it helps.

Another part of it I think are the different writer's websites I read every day. My favorite to read are a lot of the "Mac pundits": Gruber. Merlin. Shawn. Marco. Brooks. Hackett. These guys do a masterful job of writing and telling a story, or giving their opinion, writing a review, or just commenting on something outlandish. I'm nowhere near their level and probably won't ever get there. But there's a part of me that thinks I can. The only way I'll ever know whether or not I'm capable of it is to try. I might succeed . . or I might fail. I'm starting to learn there's nothing shameful about failure. There's shame in being so afraid to fail you never try. There's shame in learning nothing from your failure. But failure is one of life's greatest teaching tools. And so, I write.

Digital Cleaning

It's funny how badly having things untidy can unnerve me. My wife gets tickled at some of my OCD-ness qualities. Example: all the video games and movies on the shelf need to stay in their cases and be in alphabetical order. I feel accomplished when they're like this -- I feel unnerved when they aren't.

I try to keep my bookmarks in my browsers (which stay synced by XMarks!) organized as well -- but all too often they end up overflowing all over the place. I'll find a nifty site in GReader or my Twitter feeds, bookmark it for later observation, and there it will stay for months and months. The nice thing is I'm hoping Pinboard will be the last piece of the puzzle in this workflow.

Currently, this is how my bookmark bar looks:

The first 3 bookmarklets will let me take a given URL and send it to Pinboard, Instapaper, or my WordPress blog. The different folders are self explanatory: Daily for daily sites I use all the time, Main for sites I'll visit a few times a week, Admin for bookmarks to all the servers at work, Reference for any online manuals I'll need for different things.

The last 3 folders are really a thrown together hodge-podge of all kinds of links to anything and everything I've found over the years. Now, instead of keeping them in a bookmark bar, I'll move the ones that are work keeping to Pinboard. It's a very nice bookmarking service that gives me a taggable, publishable, searchable database of all my different bookmarks. It even gives me an RSS feed of my latest submitted bookmarks, which reside in that widget in the upper right over there. So after this post I'll start going through and either deleting a lot of this junk, or submitting it to Pinboard for a permanent home.

Sidenote: I found a nice, clean theme that I really like for the site -- Lightword. I may try playing around with editing the theme and/or even rolling my own theme at some point. It would give me an excuse to finally learn CSS, I suppose.

At any rate, hey: four days, four posts!