25CentLife.com

Instead of writing a really impressive motivational post regarding my plans for 2009, I’ve been spending my time doing a little New Year’s cleaning. I realized what sort of impact my not-writing for two months has done to my virtual housekeeping.

I logged into WordPress a few days ago to write my lead-in post for the New Year. Imagine my horror when I saw I had 6,500+ comments to moderate. Given my lack of posting in Q4 2008, I was pretty sure that all 6,500+ were spam. Yeah, not too keen on having to bulk edit those (which, I’ve found, I can do in either 20 comment or 50 comment chunks). I decided to leave them for whenever I decided to post again.

That ‘whenever’, means today. As a much deserved break from mass-deleting unwanted spam messages — deleting in chunks of 20 is faster than chunks of 50, since I don’t have to scroll through the entire ‘comment’. I’m posting. But not posting the content I’d hoped I’d post.

Lessons learned for today:

• post more
• keep better tabs on my spam count
• don’t procrastinate as much
• finish what I start

That last thing is really my official New Year’s resolution. I’ve got oodles and piles of things that I’ve started in the past, but never really saw them through. (Like my 3 or 4 draft posts on deck, at the moment. Should clear those out after I’m done posting.)

So, I’m going to finish this post. Make a bit more headway on this mass-spam-cleanup. Finish that mass-cleanup sometime this week. And, you know, post about all further progress and finishing of everything else I hope to finish this year.

Funnily enough, I had about 7 long interruptions trying to finish this post.

2009. Get ready.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

With the word “life” in my domain, I think it’s a given that my blog/site would be about my own life. Or life in general. Or general life events. Personal events. Not completely personal, though. That might detract from the appeal… and other personal matters of mine would prefer to stay that way (their words, not my own).

While browsing through my Google reader, I came across this wonderful presentation/video/media thing by Rohit Bhargava.

Presenting (and since I don’t know if I can embed this here… I’m just linking to it… lame… sorry) 25 styles of blogging!

I may try to incorporate one style in a post from now until… end of year? End of 2009? It’s a great way to FORCE myself to blog. Even to get into something I don’t normally post about… like politics. I’m not a fan of heavy politicking.

I am a fan of blogging, and admittedly, I’ve been falling short lately. My bad.

Try it out. Let me know how it goes.

or rather… internet-less at home. After experiencing some of the most fantastic thunderstorms I have ever witnessed on Long Island, I was faced with the bitter truth — it had blown out our cable, and therefore also our internet.

I caught my parents looking out over the torrential downpour battering our street, but was also struck by the same sense of nostalgia. It was a rainstorm straight out of the Philippines.

Thankfully, we still had power.

Maybe it will be back once I get home tonight.

Let’s see. I feel like I haven’t posted in ages. My work days feel like work MONTHS. I’ve only been at the workday, where day=month thing for about a month and a half, which means I should be done with half a year right now.

So in those mental 6 months, I’ve sprained my ankle, fallen in the workplace, filed for workers comp (oh, wait, that’s all one thing), have logged in more overtime hours than I care to count — knowing that I don’t get paid overtime (I do know that for every normal 2 weeks of work I do, there’s at least a bit more than a week of overtime in there), been so swamped with work, that’s all I can see…

Um. All I can remember from the last 6 weeks is work stuff. And I can’t remember why I checked off ‘books’ in the Categories section.

I decided I’ll be taking the GREs in the next 12 months from now. No, I’m not solidly planning on attending grad school, I just think the test taking part of it will be fun.

Yes, I used ‘test-taking’ and ‘fun’ in the same sentence. I’m such a nerd. Sue me. I’ve always been the kid that everyone hated in grade school through high school. I’d barely make an effort in lecture, but come test taking time — I’d breeze through with extra time to spare. It’s an art, I’m telling all of you. It took time to be perfected. New grade, new obstacles to overcome.

It’s like I told my interviewer from a long past interview: I love the idea of a great challenge. And I hate being bored. Taking the GREs later serves both those statements. The GRE seems to cripple most people’s lives. I’d like to give it a go. If I get an awesome score — that’s really great, then I could possibly look at grad school, just for the hell of it — I have no such need of things yet. And prepping for the tests will give me something else to fill up my non-work minutes. Should be interesting.

Along with possibly taking the GREs in my future (without the certainty of attending grad school after that), I’ve also picked up a book on HTML/CSS/beginners SSI and one on “Tagalog for non-native speakers”. Of those two, the latter is posing far greater a challenge. I’m fine with pronunciation, having grown up with it all my life. I know a great deal of the words, again, having grown up in such an environment. I’m completely baffled as to sentence structure and basic grammar. Nearly 26, and the Tagalog comprehension of a 2 year old (possibly less).

I make such an awesome Filipino.

And what’s it take for a blogger to get a little love from her friends? Seriously. I delete more spam every day than I get emails (and I’m not talking email promotion kinds) from friends. Yeah. I totally was not just begging for insightful and friendly comments right now.

What’s a friend anyway? In the age of Web 2.0 and all things social media, the word ‘friend’ has become dilute. Originally a noun, it’s now taken on the form of verb as well. We friend people on MySpace, Facebook, Friendster (still a huge hit in the Philippines and countries other than the US). We add friends to our buddy lists on AIM, meebo, Gchat, and other instant messenger programs. We friend each other on LiveJournal (and all other clones). In blogs, we add friends (regardless of whether or not we’ve actually met these people IRL or otherwise) to our blogrolls — even though we try to make it seem more sophisticated than it is by saying ‘blogroll’. There are friend lists on World of Warcraft, Puzzle Pirates and other assorted MMORPGs (did I spell that right? Friends? Help!).

Who are our friends? When I was younger, friends were the people who you had things in common with, shared the same jokes, the same classes — essentially the people who you didn’t want to throttle on a daily basis. As I grew, friends were shuttled into different categories: best friends, close friends, friends of convenience (parental term, not mine) and acquaintances.

Now we have networking friends. MySpace friends. Facebook friends (which now seem to span everything from elementary school contacts you’ve fallen out of touch with, one night stands that don’t seem to understand ‘one night’, to business contacts, and family members). Friendster friends (who in the US of A still uses this?). Business associates. The list goes on and on.

But who, out of your 400+ friends, do you still talk to as actual friends? Since when did the word ‘friend’ need so many descriptive adjectives?

So, in defiance of this new dashboard… karma has been depositing all manner of vulgar and vile spam in my Akismet box. At least Akismet is smart enough to stop them where they are. But now I don’t know if I get any comments!

No, wait. I don’t have any comments. What silliness do I speak of?

I headed over to gently moderate 25cents.wordpress.com (the original incarnation of this site), and was greeted by their new dashboard. Good lord. I’m happy I escaped back here. The UI is totally unfriendly and clunky. And, dare I say it, a bit like the latest version of LiveJournal (also some heinous design). The worst part is that they seem to have destroyed any option of going back to the previous UI (which I still have on this blog, thank god). Unlike LiveJournal, which has still managed to preserve the last (or 2nd to last) site layout… which means I can still use it.

Back to WordPress’ boo-boo. Tiny font. Not cool for those of us with 22 inch widescreen monitors and maximum resolution. Did I also mention my horrible eyesight? Bad enough I get eye fatigue on a normal-use basis… but this is horrific. Maybe I’m happier that I have my own site and only need to gently moderate once every couple of weeks. This could quickly convince me to be super happy I do have my own site.

Don’t get me wrong, I like easy access to info. But I don’t like everything being thrown up (literally) in my face. This is the same problem I had with Facebook’s NewsFeed. TMI, much? I don’t like that the stats graph is crammed into the same space as the comments, and a full short description of incoming links (wait, full AND short?). All the useful stuff is at the bottom, and all the useless shit (yes, I really meant that) is cluttering up the top. No, I don’t need to know how much spam has been blocked. I don’t like spam, I don’t care for spam, that’s why I delete my spam. I really don’t need you restating what theme I’m using — I chose the theme, I should know what theme I have. I don’t need to know how many widgets I’ve put in it. Why do I need an RSS of my incoming links? Especially when a good portion of them are from spam blogs — USELESS!

The text to the right of the squished stats graph? Useless. The squishing? Useless. If you thought the ‘What’s Hot?’ section was so hot, then why is it cooling off at the bottom of the page? Useless. If we’re supposed to know what’s going on with our account and our blog, then why is the feed for that at the bottom? Useless.

Wordpress (and Matt), you have just been one massive pile of useless to me in the last 15 minutes. I know a decent UI when I see it. And anything that isn’t readily accessible by me in 15 minutes — is really, just USELESS.

I seem to have forgotten to examine the new ‘Write Post’ page. Where did my ‘Categories’ go? Why are they at the bottom? Okay, points for having Post Page and Link at the top. Why do you not explain the difference (for Links) between top and none? What happened to the convenient popup you used to have? Why is everything squished towards one side of my monitor? Last layout had me using the entire display. That’s become a waste of good space. The color scheme is a WashOut. Literally. The orange swatch on the Dashboard is out of place.

You’re turning into Blogger. That’s NOT a good thing.

I guess I should say at least ONE good thing about this… Widgets win. That’s it.

Wordpress, I am no longer recommending you as an awesome free service. (Even though you power this site)

Some other view points:

My Errant Mind and his original comment
Daddy’s dig

…when your life suddenly changes direction and you’re in the first few weeks of your new job, the little things you take for granted like free time and mentally awake time — suddenly seem to evaporate.

Just in case anyone was wondering where I’ve disappeared off to.

And another teeny rant, that on any other day, I’d have more time to expand on — I really hate the new iTunes store. But I can’t really hate my “purchases” because I’ve been “purchasing” using an awful lot of gift cards. I really really hate the new iTunes store (please keep in mind that the last time I purchased anything was back in August 07 — so think of the 7 month window that I hadn’t “purchased” anything).

Like women have their monthly cycles, I think [my] existential crises come and go on a regular cycle. I should go look through my blogs for further evidence.