Light at the End of the Tunnel

So I finally did it. I finally have in order a brand spanking new Verizon iPhone 5.

I've been using a twenty dollar Samsung flip phone for basic telephoning since September. What I thought would only be a few weeks turned into four months. Sometime soon I'll describe what it was like to survive without an always connected device.

As it wasn't bad enough having to deal with the fact that I had technology from 1997, the past week I haven't had cell service at work. AT&T has some kind of problem in that area where one particular tower thinks it is great and has a strong reliable connection, but the actual tower is not connected to the rest of the network. What's worse, it's not telling your phone to stay away, but rather prevents your phone from getting signal from other towers. Unless you're incredibly rich, then you understand that being without any phone service at all for 8 hours at a full time job is terrible. To make matters more complicated, no one knows what tower this is. AT&T doesn't have it on record per say, and I know the problem isn't with my phone. Now, sadly enough, when I tried troubleshooting this problem with AT&T tech support, they immediately thought it was my phone's SIM card. Because why would a whole tower be down? Unthinkable right? Well I knew that wasn't the problem because I was able to make a call immediately after getting away from the area. Troubleshooting 101, when you remove all of the likely possibilities, all that is left is the implausible.

The upside? I don't have to care anymore about whether or not I can make a phone call in an area. Verizon is covered. The downside? Porting my number means that there is a box somewhere en route that is ringing in anticipation. Literally.

First world problems. See you all next time.

Resurrection

Sadly enough, as I quickly slipped into an incomprehensible depression, I started to blog for therapy.


I always wanted to create something. Something people would care about. Love. Argue.

And for awhile, it worked.

As soon as I started really getting into it, I wanted to branch out and see if I could make it more of a thing. More of something interesting for a specific audience. I wanted to be a tech blogger. Now, I'm not really giving up on that, but if I'm also deciding to re-find myself in writing something that I find fun. I also will probably put more of myself on here than I have before.

Now I'll have to deal with one thing I fear and hate: Hearing someone say "Oh you gonna write about this on your blog now?" This caused me to self-censor myself or second guess what I was interested and wanting to share. Well after reading a particular friend's (anonymous)-ish blog, I realized I don't care anymore. Time to write.


I really hope that I write about stuff you all will want to comment on and conversate about.
Happy New Year everyone.

Projects and Circles

My Dad rencently told me he has ADHD or some varient thereof. This
extremly personal tidbit of information can only be followed by more
personal information about myself where I disclose the fact that I too
believe I have this. I constantly stop and start projects as I'm sure
people who read (or don't read) know too well.

I figured out how to mobile blog by (phone) email. This should be
effective as normally my best ideas aren't in front of a computer, but
this also means my ideas become more disjointed.

In the spirit of more projects, I want to make a graphic narrative
using wow and comic life. More on that later.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

Learning Online

I'm wondering if right now this is the best way to learn. Online learning wouldn't be so bad but there is really no telling where things are as far as whats expected and what needs to be done.

I want a list of shit I need to somewhere, including assignments and things clearly telling me what I need to participate. As it stands, I have three places where assignments can land on my head, and I don't appreciate having to babysit all of them. Plus its a programming class so it seems we would be better served if it was here. The worst of it all is that some classes aren't Mac compatible (only because the teacher wrote the stupid java) so, yeah no idea.

Heres to learning in the digital age.

EDIT: Scrap all that, I was able to listen to a lecture while taking a deuce. That is win in anyone's book.

The Cost of Keeping Sanity (on teh Internets)

To be honest, there are to many social circles.

I have Myspace, Livejournal, Blogger (rarely used), stumbleupon (seriously thought that was just a random button on the internet), uh...oh yeah Facebook (cleaner then myspace, can't do as much with it), digg (best news tracking site), and the least of which World of Warcraft forums (sorry, I play WoW). Crap, almost forgot pownce and twitter.

My attention span is divided enough as it is, I just can't keep up with it anymore. And to make matters worse, I've increased my load. I have a *new website called Stormcrow Accident that is a comic using the screenshots of World of Warcraft as my easel. I could draw the comics, but my wit would not show through as well, seeing as I am too much of a perfectionist to put slop like that up there. So I bend the rules and used Blizzard's intellectual property with a program that draws really well with comic bubbles and try to get a few laughs out of the masses. It was intended to create content by making me keep to a schedule because I have a problem with following through on projects.

Needless to say its easier to talk about the internet then make a webcomic, so I should be able to do both more often.

Welcome (again)

I've always been a fan of the internet. From its inception, creating a website, hosting a few pictures, and some paragraphs about ones self, seemed to be more then enough to establish a presence on the web. Now, with server space so abundant and bandwidth costs going down, the internet is now fueling a group of amateur writers who want to share their own experiences to the world. Unfortunately this creates an unnecessary buzzing sound, somehow, in the form of text where people who are just like you and me but may have their own good ideas and observations of the world, that before would have gone unnoticed.

Like most everything on the internet, things flare up then die out as soon as they are created. But if anything is becoming more constant, it is the fact that the technology just keeps on getting better. Back when Hotmail wasn’t owned by Microsoft, the big thing to do was create crappy websites on Geocities or Angelfire. While some of them are good, and filled a certain niche, it wasn’t enough. For someone to post up some pictures they found, let alone a video, they had to conjure up some server space and then some bandwidth to be able to share to the world. Now there are startup companies who will definitely make it their mission to accommodate this digital form of self-expression.

Then Myspace happened. While this medium, in inception, isn’t terribly impressive…the ease of use and interconnectivity is where its power lies. Imagine all of those crappy Geocities pages had a friend list, incorporate a friends list, blogging like Livejournal and a virtual blank wall people can come up and scribble graffiti on…then you have a behemoth.

While I like Myspace and what it has to offer, I’ve always maintained my own space on the web of stuff I’ve found interesting, and come to realize it was a blog all along, sometimes even dated. With Flickr to replace my photo album and links to previous blog posts as websites, hopefully this site will become something more then my old website could ever hope to be, and its ease of use to contribute to it keeping fresh. §