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Warren Shea

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Blogging about blogging Part 4

Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 1:25 pm

Continuing the tradition (sorta – I missed last month) of blogging about blogging every month, here’s part 4: 5.5 months of blogging :O

On average, I have over 1 post/day with the exception of March 2010 where some crazy work got in the way. This month, I’ve been falling behind as well…like I said in previous posts, I’ve been a bit bummed lately and it’s been affecting my will to write.

Anyways, even though my posts are 1+/day, I wouldn’t consider some of my posts real posts. I’ve definitely noticed a decline in long, thought out posts. A correct assumption from a previous post regarding Z’s presence in my life. That and well, I wouldn’t say I’m running out of things to write about but most of my topics occur on the fly now. Also, my attention’s been pretty divided lately between updating this site (warrenshea.com) and actual blogging. I love doing both…but I love working on my site more. Still, working on my site…satisfies me a bit less because there’s a lot of development for subtle changes and quick glances. My Portfolio section, which took quite a while to do, doesn’t get many hits. Kind of disappointing…

My homepage though, receives 90% of my hits…and is also the main drop off point. People come, read my blog a little, and bail. I almost feel like I owe my readers more content, I want them coming back, I want them to looking at the various topics and while most of them may be pretty meaningless, I hope that one post here or there will grab a random reader enough that they think “…wow, that was interesting, I’m gonna bookmark this site and come back to see what else this guy has to say”.

People find my site mostly through Google searches. I get a lot of redirects to my site when people search things like:
“Why don’t I like myself” or “Why does a person hate who she is” and stuff like that. It redirects to this post: A person who does not like herself should not want be friends with a person like herself” which actually simply discusses a Gate Keepers 21 character.

I also get this quote in Google:
“With the coming of man came the illusion of free will and with that illusion came chaos. With every choice we make we literally create a world..”
which leads to this post Welcome to Earth Prime. I guess I wasn’t the only one that thought those few lines were a masterpiece.

/to be continued in Blogging about Blogging Part 5: Bots and content stealing websites >:(

AN EPIC JOURNEY – 100 POSTS! O_O

Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 12:54 pm

I want to write about something EPIC to commemorate this special event !
But alas, much like the rest of the blog, I have nothing of interest to report.

Blogging is pretty fun. Writing is pretty fun.

I’ll continue this journey…I seem to be attracting more readers. People who DON’T know me in real life. I’m surprised O_O and confused O_o. Thanks to my readers…Google Analytics tells me the numbers are steady/going up…at least they aren’t going down.

*raising Tim Horton’s large steeped tea 1 cream 2 sugar* Here’s to another 100 posts….to 500 posts, to a bajillion! Cheers! :D

Addictions: Old & New

Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 12:23 am

Old Addictions
I have an addictive personality. Obviously. I can only recall a couple of things I’ve been addicted to recently though I’m sure there are tons if I think a little harder…which I don’t feel like doing.

1. FarmVille – I started playing FarmVille despite telling my co-workers that I shouldn’t. I resisted longer than everyone but eventually caved. And then I went crazy with it. I did the math on the crops with an excel sheet…found out the best exp. per dollar per time per space. I caught up and surpassed everyone I knew. Really fast. That was my goal. And then I quit. At least I went out with some AWESOMENESS:

2. World of Warcraft – I played this for years but recently quit. I won’t go into the reason why I quit. While I had a goal (10 80s, one for each class) that I reached a couple of months before quitting, I still had other goals that will remain unfinished forever. I’d like to say quitting was difficult because it was an addiction…but it was surprisingly easy. One day…it just didn’t matter to me at all anymore.

New Addictions
With these two old addictions out of my life…I’ve started a few new addictions. Slightly more productive than the last 2.

1. Twitter
2. Blogging/warrenshea.com
3. Google Analytics

RE: 1 & 2 – The first 2 are obvious…given the number of tweets I post, as well as the number of blog posts.

RE: 3 – With my new site, I’ve recently began to love looking at Google Analytics. It’s quite interesting to see what Browser/OS is being used to view my site, how many hits I’m getting, what resolution people are using, where the clicks are coming from (with map overlay). I can’t tell where specific clicks come from, Google blocks that level of detail…it only says what city they’re from…so my Toronto # is huge…and I have some readers in Waterloo, Montreal (?) and London (?). I have no idea who these people are -_-; Kinda creepy. Post a comment so I know!

Phasing out Addictions & Distractions
1. Gmail – I have Gmail open all day. I check it hundreds of times a day. I don’t think it’s healthy. I’m going to try to limit my Gmail use to a couple of times a day…
2. MSN – not sure what I want to do with this…I don’t really like getting messages when I’m working on my site, which I’ve been doing a lot lately. I like being in the zone, being left alone, just me + music/show + warrenshea.com + PS + DW. I might start going off MSN when I start working…just finding it slightly annoying these last few weeks. Even when people message me, my replies are pretty cold anyways…like I don’t have time for them. And I don’t. It might be better socially if I’m just not there so I don’t reply with rudeness.

Side Note of Creepy
Tried logging in to Facebook and it seems someone’s been trying to get into my account…someone from the US (Saint Paul, Minnesota). Never had this happen before…I’d assume it’s because I’m a much stronger online presence now? Maybe my email’s “out there”. Or maybe it’s just coincidence…Anyways, I’m on to you !

New Self-imposed Blogging Rule

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 6:51 pm

No posting blog posts til the day after I write it.

I think that last post was TMI. I shouldn’t talk about my OCD……Agree/Disagree?
I hope no one read it…but I doubt that.

And if I discard my last post about not blogging until Friday, does that self-imposed rule still exist?

…I guess not.

Blogging about blogging part 3 + Why I wear black + Love, compatibility, and complementation.

Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 12:24 am

I’ve been reading someone’s blog lately, someone who posts about the same random stuff I post about, someone who posts more than me, and someone who, I didn’t know until I read the blog, is pretty similar to me.

Because of the sheer volume in posts, I skip over anything that isn’t particularly interesting to me. I imagine that’s what most/some of you do for my blog as well. Too many posts makes the content…trivial. If I were reading my own blog, I’d probably skip over the LOLs posts and read the interesting, well thought out ones, of which there are few. Though to be fair, some of you may like the LOLs and ignore the other posts…so I guess it’s okay to have the balance.

Despite taking a lot of time and sometimes a lot of effort to write posts, I realize that lately I’ve been trying to force others to read my blog in the same way those religious people try to make me believe about sh!t. Honestly speaking, I do sort of guilt others into reading my blog. Like a child, trying to get people to do things for the wrong reasons. I’m going to have to watch out for that, it’s not a good quality to have. My blog is important to me but my blog is not important to you. I have to make an effort to remember that.

Part 2:

I too often have high expectations of everyone and equally often, they let me down. But it’s not their fault, it’s mine. Everyone’s only human but I often put them on a pedestal…until they disappoint me enough that they fall off it. I can think of only a handful of people in my life that still remain on that pedestal but they’re not people I know that well, it’s probably that I just haven’t given them enough time and opportunity to disappoint me. I admire those who are truly…good people. There aren’t many out there…Zena’s godmother comes to mind when I think of a very loving, truly good person. But I don’t know her that well. It’s rare in the world we live in to find an untainted light. Being cruel, negative, selfish….that’s easy. Being genuinely good……that’s difficult…and rare.

Side Note…but possibly very interesting:
It might be why I like Itachi from Naruto…despite being a mass murderer…in my eyes, he’s a very good person (I guess you have to know the story to understand that sentence….). Even before Itachi’s origin is explained by Madara, I thought he might be a good person. There was something about him, some things that didn’t make sense….He was powerful but never really hurt anyone other than Sasuke, of whom he had reason to (in an ends justify the means sort of way). He also spoke very politely. I was really happy when his origin was revealed and I confirmed what I thought about him. It would be revealed that he was bad on the outside, good on the inside. It reflects me and the way I’d like to be, as well as the way I dress.
I wear dark/black on the outside, and light/white on the inside. When I’m walking around, alone, I really…try to look unfriendly, unapproachable, cold on the outside. I try to convey “eyes that have been out in the rain too long”. But as soon as I’m approached, I’m very friendly, very polite, very nice. I try to be as helpful as I can and I always have a smile on my face. Something about seemingly bad guys being good…just…relates to me.

Part 3 (this goes after the last paragraph, ignoring the blockquote):
It might be why I love being around Zena…her…light hearted attitude brightens the darkness inside me.

Until I met Zena, I always thought that I would end up with someone similar to me. Someone equally fracked up, someone who hates sh!t and people like I hate sh!t and people, someone who understands me. But…that would never work. Two jaded, cynical people would just….be jaded and cynical together. But that’s not happiness.

A lot of times, people try to find things in common with the person they’re infatuated with. They think: “We both like movies, we can watch movies together!” or “We both like rock climbing, we can go rock climbing together!”. Zena and I have talked about this a number of times but we have almost nothing in common.
She loves to cook. I hate to cook.
She wants to travel. I don’t want to travel.
She likes going out. I don’t like going out.
She’s happy, outgoing. I’m <insert negative trait here>, introverted.
She has facts about cooking, science, daily news. I have facts about comics, anime, math, technology.
and now, She plays WoW. I don’t play WoW.
Given our difference in lifestyle, I’m shocked and surprised we’ve lasted as long as we have. When you look at us and the type of people we are, we don’t work. There’s no connection. There’s no similarities. From an objective point of view, I would look at us and think we’d never last.

But when people see us together and the way we interact (and it’s not to brag, I’ve had a number of people tell me this)…we have this…very unique dynamic and people can see that we just…work.

All that stuff about the similarities we don’t have, the differences…none of that matters. And I may be wrong, I am by no means any type of relationship pro….but the key with us is that we complement each other well. I’m not sure what she loves about me but I love her BECAUSE she’s different from me. Because she makes me do stuff I wouldn’t generally do. I make her watch shows she wouldn’t watch on her own (Hikaru no Go, Initial D, and now: Battlestar Galactica). She makes me watch stuff I wouldn’t watch on my own (Gilmore Girls, the Sex and the City movie, Wicked – the musical, Julie and Julia). She brings me out to try new things. She teaches me about tons of information that I generally don’t know or care about. It’s a life-long process of complementation (and yeah, I’m as surprised and -_-; as you are that this non-existing word actually makes a sort of sense given what I’ve written). We’re fundamentally different people. And that’s why we work together. I always thought “Birds of the feather flock together” would work…it makes logical sense to me, and it’s what I’d always believed in. I’m quite surprised that this “Opposites attract” thing is working…

Note: Doh, Complementation IS a word…it involves genetics and…homerzygous simpsomething. I still like my use of it though…