Celebrating A Decade Of Blogging (4 Days Late Edition)

We've just passed the 10th anniversary of this blog, started back in October 1st of 2006 in a burst of creativity by yours truly.  I was looking for an outlet for all the myriad thoughts going through my head at the time, and blogging struck exactly the right note for me back then.  It was the perfect precursor to writing books, though I didn't know it at the time.  Maintaining a blog, at a breakneck pace for the first few years and then much less frequently afterward, prepared me for the discipline I'd need as a novelist once I retired.

I do most of my blogging on Facebook nowadays, but I'll always appreciate what I learned here over the past 10 years.

9th Anniversary Of This Here Blog

While it certainly doesn't get the traffic that it used to, Kimota94's Place is still up and operating, 9 long years after I started it with a post entitled Misadventures in Blogland back on Oct 1, 2006.  A lot sure has happened since then:

• I've enjoyed 7 years of retirement so far, and have never regretted getting out of the rat race at 45 for even a moment
• I've written 8 books, starting off with 3 non-fiction before moving into the much more satisfying task of novel-writing
• Vicki has joined me as a retiree after about 15 years of off-and-on contract work
• Tammy's graduated from Western (and the Ivey School of Business) with an HBA, become an accountant and even lived in Australia for almost 2 years
• We've been fortunate enough to get the best cat ever, as Jonesy joined our family a little over 3 years ago
• I've finally tired of being a comic collector, deciding last year to begin selling off and giving away some of the 30,000 comics I'd accumulated over the course of 40+ years
• I've managed to keep in touch with the work friends who meant the most to me from both of my last two jobs, even after 14 and 7 years, respectively
• Life has gone on, as it always tends to do

Anyway, I'm not sure how much longer I'll continue to 'maintain' this blog, even at the reduced level I've sunk to lately, though it's already outlasted any reasonable prediction I might've made about its lifespan way back in October of 2006.  So that's something, anyway.

Retiring The Blog Point Board

It's been up there at the top of this page for ages, but I haven't bothered to post anything involving Blog Points in years, so it's time to finally take it down and free up the real estate.

For the record, the tally ended as:

Vicki - 55 BPs
Hinckley - 43 BPs
Shane - 37 BPs
PeterJ - 30 BPs
Tammy - 23 BPs
Tim - 17 BPs
Boneman - 12 BPs
Croptop - 10 BPs
cjg - 6 BPs
AgileBoy - 1 BP
Man from Mars - 1 BP

Thanks to everyone for playing!

Another Hallowe'en Comes And Goes Like A Ghost

Well, it wasn't a bad turnout this year, despite the cold and rainy weather that descended on us today.  We saw a baker's dozen trick-or-treaters this time around, up nearly 50% from last year's 9.  So it goes.

Here are the up-to-date totals for the 9 Hallowe'ens over which I've been blogging:

2014: 13
2013: 9
2012: 14
2011: 15
2010: 18
2009: 19
2008: 19
2007: 18
2006: 12

And yes, that means that this blog had its 8th anniversary at the start of the month, not that anyone noticed (including me).  How about that?  8 years!

7 Years Of Blogging

In less than 2 hours, it'll be October 1st, the 7th anniversary of when I started this blog.

To show how much less I have to say here than I used to, consider this: in December of 2006 alone, my 3rd month of blogging, I put out a whopping total of 175 posts.  Nine months into 2013, I've posted just 137 times (counting this one).

Oh well.  I have to say it's hard to be enthusiastic about blogging when it seems as though almost no one's reading it any more.  But such is life.

Extra Large Double Double

Today's the 22nd anniversary (double double, get it?) of the day Vicki and I got married, waaaaay back in 1991.  That was a Friday, just like today is.  We both took the day off work, and headed to the Justice of the Peace with Tammy in tow and a very small number of close friends as witnesses.  Afterward, it was photos in our backyard (in the cold), and later still, dinner with friends at the downtown Crock 'n' Block, now long gone. 

Today, we've got a new bed being delivered and dinner reservations for two at Tony Roma's.  Slightly more mundane, and yet it never feels that way when you're with the right person.  We were lucky enough to get three weeks of high-quality time with Tammy and Ryan last month in Australia, and thrilled to have Emma living with us for the past 6 months and on into the future.  All these years later, life is still good!

I can't even begin to imagine what the last 22 years would've been like if I hadn't spent them with Vicki, and I'm so glad I've never had to. 

Oh, and as a bonus, this is my 3600th blog post.  Nice day for it, I'd say!

A Blog Post For Future Reference

I just finished the 2nd draft of my 3rd novel, and Vicki was eager to get it onto her Kindle so that she could be the first person (other than me) to read the current version.  I mentally estimated that I'd need about 2 minutes to complete that task, and then... I realized that none of the software I've used for converting my books into ePub and Kindle format in the past is installed on this laptop!  Oh, the joys of having a compute die on you, even months after you've supposedly recovered from it.  Anyway, the news that there's a 2nd draft ready to go is the only thing that might interest non-Matt readers of this post, and you all can stop reading now.

The hardest part in completing the task, which stretched it out over an hour or more, was trying to find the names of the software I used before, as I simply didn't remember them.  So to make that easier in the future:

Mobipocket Creator is the app that takes in an HTML version of the book and converts it to Kindle (.prc) format.

KindlePreviewer allows you to see what the .prc file will look like on a Kindle.

Calibre will input the HTML version of the book and convert it to ePub format, and then give you a way to send that ePub file to a device such as Kobo.  I've actually made fairly detailed notes on how to do the Kobo install, and they're in the Books folder I have under "Documents" (which gets backed up daily).

Tired Of The Spambots

Lately, I've noticed that the spam-to-content ratio of comments on my blog has risen to about 20:1, which is by far the worst it's ever been.  I've obviously ended up on some spam-generation service's site list, which is really a shame. 

As a result, I've made two changes to the settings for comments.  I've turned on comment moderation, and I've introduced the often-annoying word-verification feature.  I expect the latter change will make more of a difference than the former, but we'll see.  I apologize for the hassle to the real commenters out there, but to be honest you're such a rare creature anymore that I doubt anyone will feel much pain. And if it stops me having to delete dozens of spam comments every week, it'll be worth it.

Author Interview, Part 1

I was honoured recently to be invited to be interviewed about No Brother of Mine by a friend of a friend who's also a writer.  She sent me 10 very interesting questions about my 2nd novel, and my answers to the first 5 of them are provided in Part 1 of the interview.

Another Anniversary Missed

Just like I did last year, I completely forgot to 'celebrate' the anniverary of this blog when it came around on October 1st.  Bad Matt!

Kimota94's Place is now 6 years old, and possibly starting to show its age.  My posting is at an all-time low, indicating a certain lack of engagement with the blog, I suppose.  Having Facebook and Twitter competing for my time hasn't helped, and I just find that there isn't as much going on in my life that I want to post about these days.  It's possible that I'll get back into it more once the current book gets back on track, though.  But I do apologize to those out there who wish there was more to read hereabouts.

Still.... 6 years of blogging must be some sort of achievement, right?

Better Late Than Never - Five Years!

I guess I was distracted on Saturday on account of Julie coming over for our first Movie Night in more than six months, but that's still a pretty lame excuse for failing to post something to commemorate

this blog's fifth anniversary!!!

Sorry about that.

October 1st, 2006, was when it all started, and here we are five years later, still at it. It's been a fun ride, but also sometimes quite mentally exhausting, and so we'll just have to wait and see if I manage to make it through another five.

Coming Up This Weekend: Trivia!

As hard as it is for me to believe, the very next post here will be this blog's three thousandth! That's a mind-boggling amount of blathering to have produced over a 50-month span, and yet it's true.

So keep your eyes peeled for a bunch of trivia questions coming your way over the weekend. You'll have a few days in which to provide answers in the (temporarily moderated) Comments section and earn truly (un)valuable Blog Points! I hope this can at least provide a momentary bit of distraction as we all brace for the coming Christmageddon 2010!

Something To Look Forward To

I'm now only 7 posts away from 3000, counting this one. At Tammy's suggestion, I think I'll post a long overdue trivia quiz to mark that occasion. (The Blog Point Leader Board at the top of this page hasn't changed in ages, so it's clearly time to do something about that.)

Therefore, keep an eye out for post # 3000, sometime between now and Christmas. When I run it, I'll turn Comment Moderation on so that any and all readers out there can submit their guesses - without spoiling it for anyone else - and be awarded invaluable Blog Points! Invaluable does mean "not valuable", right? Yeah, I thought so! :-)

Wow, That's (Not) A Lot Of Blogging!

As November closes down and makes way for the last month of 2010, I see that I'll have hit another new low in terms of monthly blogging (probably 25, unless I think of something else to write about in the next 3 hrs). I have to admit that this month flew by, so it's not too surprising that my output was so meager. I did a lot of walking (with Julie), Mad Men watching (with Vicki), Black Ops playing (some of it with Boneman), yoga (3 classes last week!) and have been busy reading quite a few books. Lots of living but not that much of anything worth blogging about.

For those who weren't following the blog that long ago, you might get a kick out of checking out what December 2006 looked like hereabouts: 175 posts! Yes, you read that right... 7 times the output that I managed in the current month!

Also worthy of note, I suppose, is that I'm closing in on 3000 posts here on Kimota94's Place. Sometime before Christmas I expect to hit that milestone which, given my pathetic blogging rate of late, might be the last one for a very long time.

Temporarily Closed For Renovations

(If "renovations" means what I think it does, which is the non-stop playing of Call of Duty: Black Ops!)

Nothing To See Here

I've been under the weather for the past couple days, and hence blogging even less than normal. Get over it. Hopefully I will...

Reality... What A Concept

Topics have a way of converging upon me sometimes. As a trivial example, three recent books I've been reading (The Plot Against America, Unscientific America and Einstein: His Life and Universe) which are not only unrelated to each other but also come to us from three different literary genres (Fiction, Non-fiction and Biographies) nevertheless managed to crossover with each other in terms of characters (Einstein and Charles Lindbergh show up in two of the three but not the same two!) and themes (how difficult it is for laypeople to understand Science, and the plight of the Jewish people). That sort of thing often leads me to imagine that everything's interconnected and life is simply a journey toward finding all of the key connections. Which is probably silly. But maybe not.

The difference between reality and what we project it as is another concept that's cropped up in several places for me over the past few weeks. Following our viewing of 28 Up on the weekend, Vicki, Julie and I (and possibly Tammy, though she might have gone to bed by then) talked about what sort of effect being profiled on a documentary series would have on its subjects. For example, would they become better at manufacturing the storyline for themselves each time director/interviewer Michael Apted returned to film the latest chapter (at seven year intervals)?

I mean, that whole act of constructing "personae" for ourselves is something we all do, every day, to some degree. We often work hard to reinforce self-images that we've become fond of or reliant upon, such as "the funny co-worker", "the problem-solver" or "the long-suffering housewife." But imagine if periodic slices of your life were being captured on film and made available for all the world to see. Wouldn't the incentive to "control the message" be even stronger then? Obviously a documentary film-maker recognizes that danger and prepares for it, but in this case the subjects are necessarily afforded the opportunity, over and over again, to hone their image-making craft with each successive attempt... with lots of time - seven years! - between each attempt in order to reflect and apply what they learned last time.

Watching a Colbert Report from a week or two ago, Vicki and I heard Aaron Sorkin (screenwriter of The Social Network) talking about why he doesn't have much love for Facebook and other similar platforms (including the one you're reading this on): it's all about presenting yourself in a way that you can control and manipulate at your leisure. As he put it, the personae found in those places often resemble the actual people behind them in the same way that Reality TV resembles reality. Which is to say: not necessarily much at all.

I certainly try to be honest on this blog, but there's no denying that I carefully control what sort of updates I provide and often strive to avoid making myself look bad. I suppose that's all well and good as long as the audience recognizes that, but is this sort of thing becoming the new reality now? I hope not, as we're all obviously much more complex and flawed individuals than anything that most of us would ever choose to reveal whenever we're dictating the message rather than revealing ourselves through our actions. It's definitely given me great food for thought.

(The title of this blog post, by the way, is taken from Robin Williams' 1979 comedy album of the same name.)

Oh, And Happy 4th Anniversary To This Blog!

That's right, it was 4 long years (and over 2900 posts) ago that Kimota94's Place kicked off its long and still-continuing run of meandering commentary. I'm sure, had you asked me back on October 1, 2006, just how long I expected to stick with it, I would have answered with something less than 4 years. And yet here we are. Go figure. Over that stretch, I've seen a lot of blogs start up, burn brightly for a short while, and then fizzle out. So far I've avoided that fate, unless I'm in the fizzle stage now and just don't realize it!

So raise a toast to this blog, if you're so inclined!

A Slow Month Ends

Assuming that this ends up being my final September 2010 post, I'll have set a new low for blogging productivity in a calendar month, at 27 posts (previous record of pathetic output was October 2009, with 28 posts). There's no exciting reason for this drop-off, as I just haven't had as much to say as usual. I've been busy organizing my Fall tutoring schedule, which is continuing to change even as we speak, and trying to get more exercise in (biking, walking, yoga). None of the weekly comic fare lately has been particularly interesting or blog-worthy. I've started playing Halo: Reach but it hasn't grabbed me yet, although tonight may feature some Coop action with McChicken. None of my consulting leads have borne any fruit yet, which leaves September as a pretty uneventful month. Hence the downturn here.

Interesting Discussion About Science Writing And Social Media

I quite enjoyed reading this blog post on the question of whether or not Science blogging and other related activities are actually increasing Science literacy. Even just the fact that there are so many people thinking about this topic is encouraging to me.