Apparently I have been posting new blog entries for a few weeks now and no one can see them. Oddly I see them and they say viewable by friends however they do not show up. There goes the fancy way of posting from WordPress to FB. I am back to the old school way.
Blogging
My Decor Choices in the New House, Oh I Mean The Blog Has a New Name
That picture is the decor of the master bedroom in our new house. Ok maybe not. I am not sure if MC would be cool with that. I really did not ask. If she is then I might totally go for that minus the monolith. Unless the Monolith has a flat screen in it.
The main reason for this post is after I wrote my blog renaming post yet before it was published this Wednesday I came up with what I feel is a great name for this site, A Scott Odyssey. I have had a few names over the years but have never focused on the name aspect of the site identity. I have fixated more on the URL and as i have written before i kept coming back to what i am using today. With my track record in waffling on names and URL’s i may change both in 6 months.
I think “A Scott Odyssey” is something fun and semi descriptive enough. I also feel that it avoids all the things I highlighted I do not want to do when I renamed. On one hand writing about this is too much technical side of the blog itself however this is the minutia I OCD over. I like the Odyssey part and the play on words from 2001. Life is an Odyssey and this move we are taking is the next Chapter in it. Here is to another 14 years of writing at “A Scott Odyssey”.
Expat Blogging Minus The Catchy Title
One thing I want to continue to do is to blog internal about my experiences. Since our family is moving overseas it makes logical sense to write a lot more about being an expat and all the new things were going to be doing in England. In researching our overseas move I did a lot of searching the Internet for blogs to follow of Americans living in Ireland and England. Some of those blogs have been pretty entertaining and informative. Many more of them were either sites left unattended with no recent posts or just dead links. On one hand I was surprised I found a bunch of active blogs. On the other hand all the sites I came across referenced all the other sites highlighting how small of a community that was.
One thing I decided I did not want to do was change the name of my blog to some catchy phrase to note that I am an American and I’m in England. from all the blog reading I have done I know that’s the thing to do however I’m going to buck the trend.
I might still rename the site since Blog @ Scott.ac just isn’t that catchy. Since I no longer use my powerz.org domain name the old title of the site “Powerpedia” is no longer applicable. I did love that name however. Going to look for any previous posts over the last 14 years that explained powerz. I must’ve wrote about that if not I will need to. I’m thinking of a name something like Scott-o-Pedia? I am not sure. I’m open to ideas as long as they’re not catchy on American in London phrase of some sort.
For Those Who Actually Subscribe to this Blog…
It turns out that I have people subscribed to this blog’s Feedburner Feed. It was not many however more than I thought. My challenge is I previously deleted most of my Google Accounts. Turns out one of those was the account that controlled my Feedburner account. Opps. I liked Feedburner because I could change domain names and still have the subscription feed be up to date. Over the years I have changed his blog’s URL a bunch of times. Surprisingly I would end up back to the original URL that I started with. That is what I use today.
After 14 years and I keep coming back to the same site name and URL I figure I am not likely to change the URL to something else that is that much better. I might try but I know deep down I should just give up and not try. If I do that I do not need to maintain this feed that no longer represents the name of the site anyway.
If you do happen to use my RSS feed please update your feed to follow blog.scott.ac/feed. The old feed “should” be telling you to redirect to the new one however I cannot test that since I am cashing the old content. I will get around to testing later. Thus this public service announcement about making the change if you do want to keep following me and you are not getting your updates from Facebook or Twitter.
The Story of Why I Make Short Blog Posts and Link Them to My Social Media Accounts
In the summer of 2013 I made the decision to delete my Facebook profile. I wrote about it at the time here: I wanted to delete a large amount of content I had created and there was no way to do it without individually deleting things. I did not want to take the time or effort to do that so the only alternative I had was the so-called nuclear option of completely deleting my account. At the time I even thought I might not come back. I still think about getting rid of my account again however it is a good place to share photos and what’s going on with friends and family I don’t get to normally see. Communicating in other ways might be problematic so for now I keep my Facebook account.
The reason I wanted to delete all the content from the account in the first place was because when I initially signed up for my account somewhere in 2007 or 2008 my expectations of privacy were vastly different than what you are today. There wasn’t anything incriminating, illegal, or anything like that posted however with Facebook continuing to inch people to share more I was uneasy with a large amount of information that I hadn’t vetted since I published it was solely in their system. I didn’t like that so I removed it all. In the fall of 2014 I did the same thing with Google.
Those actions do not mean that I don’t publish personal things on the Internet. On the contrary anything I post nowadays I do so knowing full well that is public on the Internet. The only exception would be photos on Facebook that I post however I do it in such a way that I delete them after three months.
Some people including my wife have pointed out in may have made fun of the fact that I link very short status posts from my blog to Facebook. I do that for a specific reason. Normally I do not make status posts at all however there are times when the situation warrants it. My opinion might not have any bearing on anything however I would rather have something posted on my blog and crossposted to Facebook and/or Twitter then have it exclusively within the control of Facebook and their systems.
Now that I’ve started blogging more I post my writings to twitter and Facebook because that’s where the people I know go to browse. By sending the link instead of writing directly within Facebook their system only has the URL and may be a snippet from my blog. They don’t have all of the content. Like I said I don’t know if doing this has any bearing on anything however it’s my little way of controlling information I generate. I can control who spiders my blog and I can get analytics on who’s going to my blog whereas I have no idea what Facebook is doing with my data. Worse yet I have a bad idea about what they’re doing with it and it doesn’t have my best interests at heart. They’re not evil however there trying to make money for my information or information about me. That compels me to limit what information I provide to them. If you’ve actually read this far into the post and you feel that I might be getting my tinfoil hat out again I recommend you watch the 2013 documentary terms and conditions may apply. If you do you understand how disturbing and prevalent mining data about you really is.
So there you have it. You might think it’s silly however I feel I have very good reasons why most comments, status, updates I make on Twitter and Facebook are generated from my blog no matter how short it may be.
Blog Update
I haven’t been updating this blog in a while. That is usually a sign of me not writing however I have been doing a lot of off-line journaling as I mentioned in Dragon Anywhere. Some topics I would like to write about for this blog however I just haven’t had a chance to get to them. I do feel like I’ve gotten a handle on my journaling enough that I’m going to try to churn out a few topics that I’ve been meaning to write about. The first one is already scheduled to post tomorrow is a follow-up to something I wrote and backdated earlier this month.
It does feel like every few years I write a post like this about how I want to write more. I always do want to write more. Getting into the routine is always the hard part. Getting pretty close right now so stay tuned.
Dragon Anywhere
By the looks of my posts on this blog it would seem like I’m not writing much for some time. In recent months as far back as February I’ve started to journal more. The difference I guess is that the journals are private. The fact that I am writing at all is a positive for me.
I wanted to write more in general for some time. I’ve also wanted to be more active in my journaling. It’s something I wanted to do when Teagan was born and I did for a little while but didn’t keep it up. I’d like to say I’ve improved because of my determination to write. Slightly true however I feel like there is a different answer. That answer to me is Dragon Dictate. My so-called writing isn’t in fact writing it all. It’s mainly my dictation letting the software do the typing. I’ve had Dragon Dictate for several versions on my Mac. I think it’s a fantastic piece of software. My proof is that I think over time spent more on upgrades for it then on any other single piece of software. Unfortunately what has happened in the past is I will get it and use it and then start using it less over time. Part of that was due to feeling self-conscious about using dictation at work. The other part being probably just general laziness. Flash forward to this February I think I got rid of the laziness factor and just started dedicating some more time to writing. Using the dictation software I was able to actually write faster. That meant I could write more in the same amount of time or just get finished quicker.
Once I started sitting at my computer and dictating it was still challenging to find time to do that. I started using the dictation option built right into Siri on my iPhone to dictate into the journaling I use DayOne. That work rather well however it did require corrections more often than I would like. It also required me to do bursts of sentences quickly before the dictation stopped listening. This method still enabled me to keep writing almost daily.
The next big improvement for me was signing up for the Dragon anywhere subscription sometime around May. As a monthly service it’s kind of expensive for what it does. It gives me and always listening dictation option. I find that much better and more accurate than the built-in Siri option for dictation. I figured for $15 a month I would give it a try. What I found that I’m doing now is that I will dictate as I’m walking. I get a lot of my journaling done now between walking from the subway home and walking from the subway to my office. I probably just look like someone talking on the speakerphone to someone however it works surprisingly well.
I still want to do more. I’ve a list of draft topics in my Dragon anywhere app for things that I’m either partially done with or to do’s. That gets me back to trying to find more time in the day to dedicate towards “writting”. My other option is to just go on longer walks! Either way if unable to carve out more time I hope to write more about topics fit for this blog. I’m trying to do some cool things as a hobby however I don’t have the time talk about it.
Other than a few manual corrections this in my last several posts were entirely dictated.
What was once old is new again
Back when I first started writing my blog over 11 years ago I did so using my scott.ac domain. I was pleased with myself to have gotten a domain with just my first name. Over the years I got too many questions about the .ac so i moved my online presence to other domains with the more traditional .com, .net, & .org. Oh how I thought powerz.org was a cool sounding domain name back in 2000.
With my recent changes I decided to make with regards to my web & email hosting I took the time to change the domain I use once again. This time back to scott.ac. Now a days there are literally going to be thousands of new domain names out there. I have bought a few myself. I realized then that with so many new TLD’s I still have one of the easiest domains I will ever get. So after that realization I went back to the domain name I have had the longest (since 1999, man I feel old).
My Feedburner feed will redirect to the new URL. I will once again (i have done this a few times in the past) take the hit and lose my google rankings while the site gets reindexed. I don’t really care about that. I am still surprised I get traffic on this site. I still enjoy writing even though i only just started writing again in recent weeks.
Of course I am a realist and I give myself 2 years before I decide to change things again.
Deleting Facebook and Starting From Scratch
If you are a Facebook friend of mine and are wondering why suddenly you got a invite to be my friend again and can’t find all my old content here’s why.
I have been pondering my use of Facebook for over a year. It started last year when I took the entire month of July off from using social media. I read in an article somewhere and thought it was a good idea. It turns out I did not miss it as much as I thought I would. Once that month was over I started using it again but on a more limited basis. Over the past year I keep reading about the things Facebook can do with my content or is doing with my content. I wasn’t pleased. The new search functionality just spooked me. It’s not like I posted anything questionable but I just don’t like some of the business practices they’re doing with the information I put in the system. When I first started using Facebook it was treated as a personal area to post things to my friends only. Over time they keep doing things in semi-sneaky ways to make your data more public. It just makes me uneasy. I tried to remove old content but after much searching online it became apparent that there is no easy way to bulk delete anything. Most forum posts suggest just deleting your entire account and starting over. I didn’t want to do that but in the end I felt there was no other feasible choice if I wanted old content removed.
Everything finally came to a head today when I deleted my old account. First I exported all the data from my old account and verified that I wasn’t using Facebook authentication on any sites that were critical to me. Then I just remove the account. Apparently it takes 14 days for account to actually be deleted and then another month or so for all the data to be removed from their systems. After deleting the original account I went on and created a new one. I spent time inviting friends from the old account to the new one. I will be honest in saying that I did not invite 100% of the frames on the old one to the new account. I took this change as an opportunity to remove people I really don’t talk to anymore. I seriously thought about not signing up for an account again but in the end I did for two reasons. First, a lot of family loves getting photos of Teagan via Facebook. The second reason is more practical. I like having Facebook because it does enable me to stay in contact with people I don’t always get to see but I had issues about security and what they do with my data so I will continue to use it or treat anything I put there like I do with twitter. When I first started posting I didn’t do that and that was what bothered me.
Longer term MC and I are talking about how and if we continue posting photos to Facebook. We have read some articles about what people (or Facebook themselves for that matter) can do with the photos and Face recognition and EXIF data. I would like to find a way to use my Flickr account to link to my Facebook wall with no data remaining on Facebook systems.
The bottom line is if you’re a friend of mine please don’t be offended if I don’t “like” post of yours or do lots of commenting on things you post to your wall or mine. I am just not doing that at all or very often going forward.
Catching up on Blogging
The way I write this blog is I will try to come up with a subject to an entry and a sentence or two on what I want to write to job my memory when I finally sit down to write about it. Many times I will write the full post within a few days of my thinking of it. Other times I pile up entries that I really want to write but dont get to them for weeks or sometimes months later. Tonight I had some down time so I went back to a half a dozen posts that I have wanted to write since as far back as November and tried to catch up. I still have over 38 drafts pending but I made a dent in my backlog. I will usually back date things to the day they happened or when I thought about writing them instead of posting things dated today. It is my way of keeping a certain point of view. My post for today is that I spent almost an hour and a half catching up on posts this way. it is news in my life only because I dont normally get that much time and when I do I dont always focus on writing. I almost never focus on writing. I like doing it and it sometimes helps me relax so I will try to do it more often. Of course I can find a half a dozen times when I say that over the past 10 years and it is always a struggle to sit down and write.