Burnerblog

I’ve been busy. So busy, in fact, that I’ve neglected ol’ Burnerblog once again.

Here is the kind of post I hate to read on other people’s’s’s’s’s blogs.

I’ve been playing bass in two bands, playing Age of Conan online with friends, racing in NCNASCAR (and winning some races!), having friends over from out of town, reading neat websites with cool ideas, and many other things.

Next up for me is making a compost pile, organizing one corner of the garage, and waxing my car.

And maybe keeping this place a little more up-to-date than I have been.

Mention Haley Bennett. For some reason, people want to see her topless or read about her. How do I know? Search terms that have been bringing people here. By far, the top search term by a margin of over 16 to 1 is Haley Bennett.

So, in the interest of fulfilling my duty as being a destination to which a search for her terminates, I provide the following (courtesy of Wikipedia):

Bennett was born and raised in Naples, Florida. Bennett began high school at Stow-Munroe Falls High School in Stow, Ohio and later studied music and acting while attending Barron Collier High School. She and her mother moved to Los Angeles, California to pursue her career in the summer of 2005 during her senior year.

Bennett’s debut film role was as the pop music singer Cora Corman in the 2007 romantic comedy Music and Lyrics, alongside Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. Bennett sang several songs for the Music and Lyrics soundtrack, including “Buddha’s delight” and “Way Back Into Love“. Fragments of “Entering Bootytown” and “Slam” are heard during concert scenes in the movie. “Invincible” can only be heard during the end credits, and is only a minute and a half long.

She has signed a three-picture deal with Warner Brothers Pictures^[2] and has finished filming her second movie College. Bennett is soon to star in a film called She Lived, playing a child who stayed sane after her mother tried to murder her.

She appeared in the February 2007 issue of GQ in the GQ/Features section.^[3]

In 2007, she signed with 550 Music/NuSound Records (part of the Epic Records family of labels), and began working on her first album with the aid of singer/songwriter Shaley Scott.

Finally, I have no photos of her topless. Sorry.

I know I should use a news reader for the blogs I follow, but I don’t. I can’t. I kind of like the whole presentation thing of blogs. People put in the time to make their snazzy layouts and to post pictures and other goodies in a way that compliments the post and fits into the scheme of their site, and I think I should view it the way it was intended to be viewed.

With that said, I do have a news reader, and most blogs are on it… but I use it mostly to let me know when there’s an update, or when something has changed. Namely, when a new post has been written (I was going to say posted, but that would be too much).

I’ve been thinking about blogs, and how they were a big thing a few years back and now, most folks have moved on to facebook or myspace with the exception of those of us who prefer the control and the freedom of having our own site with the script of our choosing, etc. For the masses, myspace and facebook (et al) are a great solution for being entangled in the tubes of the interwebs.  For those of us who have been here a while longer, or are more adept at doing things like configuring data strings and debugging html, there are good old fashioned blogs.

This place is a journal-type blog, and most of the blogs I follow are journal blogs. They keep me up-to-date with what my friends are doing, whether they are real-life friends here locally, or people I’ve met online that I like to think of as my friends (whether they think of me that way or not is irrelevant; what’s in my mind is what’s important to me). There are a few other blogs I read from time to time, my favorite being Engadget, but I love reading about the lives of people. It’s sort of the ultimate reality show for those with a brain.

Then, there’s twitter. It’s the ultimate in TMI (too much information). You can keep track of what people are doing based on their updates, which can be done moment by moment. I’ve started using it, and I’ve found it’s fun and addictive. It gives you something to do when you’re bored or in places you’d rather not be. But, for example, I went to a coffee shop last night and had a nice time and forgot to twitter it for that very reason; I wasn’t bored. It seems twitter is best suited to boredom, although I am trying to keep it up and twitter the good as well as the bad. I enjoy it… it’s the amalgamation of myspace and blogging with text messaging and bulletin boards thrown in for good measure. As fun as it is, it doesn’t take the place of the good old fashioned blog (but it definitely adds to the whole “connected” experience!).

So, I guess not only do I like clicking down my entire blogroll to look for myself if there have been any updates, but I also like to read blogs about folks and their lives. I’m thinking that makes me old fashioned, but if there’s anything I’ve learned since turning 30, it’s that I don’t care what labels people ascribe to me. It’s the labels I use for myself that matter.

I took a few of the bullets out and added some information to two others. I think it’s a much better fit now.

I think I may add some photos to it one of these days, but I might wait until after I lose some more weight. It’ll take some time, as I’m not doing any sort of special “lose weight fast” diet, but with some exercise and avoiding sodas, I am sure to drop some pounds, albeit slowly.

That reminds me… I need to do some more riding of the bicycle, perhaps tonight. Then again, I’m supposed to go see Spoon tonight, but I may skip it.

Sometimes, I write things here that some may consider “shocking.” Heck, they’re shocking to me sometimes “the morning after.” I just read yesterday’s sermon on bad words. Wow. I think my toenails curled on some of the words used in that post. I don’t really know what made me write that, or so much about it, but I guess I felt pretty strongly about it at the time. Half of me wants to take it down, while the other half of me says, “Oh what the hell… leave it up.” It’s posts like that that attract attention (and not the good kind, it seems), and have a life of their own long after the original post was made.

For now, I’ll leave it there, but if it becomes one of those lightning rods to bad attention, I’ll scrap it in a heartbeat and make it private. I don’t like getting rid of posts entirely, but I have no problem “hiding” them when they become a problem.

Edit: On second thought, I will make it private for now. Maybe I’ll resurrect it later, but I think it’s too long, too much, and just too… I don’t know… out of place?

I don’t know why I’ve been doing it. Heck, I know it’s not even proper, correct, or otherwise acceptable, yet I do it anyway. Some people don’t capitalize, others don’t use punctuation. Me? I add punctuation where it is not required; at the end of my titles.

Why did I start doing this? I think it was initially a mistake, and I just kept doing it. It’s not something I’ve been doing for a long time; it only began when I started posting on Burnerblog again. There’s no reason to keep doing it other than continuity, but I’ve come to the realization that at some point, I’m going to have to stop doing it. Either for the sake of my own sanity, or for the sanity of the readers. I know how it pains me sometimes to read blogs that use incorrect grammar or punctuation, and I don’t want to be a hypocrite by using periods at the ends of my titles.

Is this some sort of excuse to write a post today so that I can get away with filling a day on the calendar on the side of the blog? NO WAY! This really is something I’ve been thinking about… I just decided to write about it. That reminds me… I’ve got some other stuff to add to this site…

I was reading some of the archives on my site and found one that cracked me up. This post written about something my son told me. I’m glad that I wrote so much back then, and at the same time sad that I have taken the many breaks that I had taken throughout the life of this blog. So much of my life and the lives of my friends and family are here in these entries. Reading them took me back, back to when I would go to my dad’s and hang out with him watching bad movies and eating good food and having good times with him and the kids. I was taken back to the first night I met Kenny, Elaine, Hanna, and my future wife (who sadly didn’t get a mention in the post!). I was taken back to the night my kids, my mom and I all sat out on her driveway out in the middle of nowhere (which is officially close to Sealy, TX) and watched the Leonid Meteor Showers in 2001.

My blog has been a diary of sorts for me, and I’m glad it’s here. Sure, there are some embarrassing posts here and there, but that’s life. At least there aren’t any nude photos of me… that I know of.

BIG THANKS to my wife for getting archives out of DNN and into WP. She had to write a program using the SQL client to be able to extract the entries and to put them into a format that WP would be able to use to import them properly. Then, she made sure they were all in there correctly and literally spent the entire day doing this. I think I’m going to have to do something nice for her for this… she literally gave up her entire Saturday to do this for me.

So… you can now see 1686 entries in the archives that date back to July 2001 when this blog began. There are some missing entries, but it’s for the best. Some of those were the darkest and saddest days of my life, and some of the things I was writing then weren’t either nice or something I’d want anyone else to see later on. Those posts were cathartic for me and it was my poor man’s therapy (especially considering the feedback I was getting in the way of comments). Those posts helped me through a bad time, and like the bad time, they’re gone. So… don’t fret the missing posts. Oh, and comments. I told her it was okay to not bring the comments over. It was proving difficult (but not impossible) to bring the comments over. I figured that it might take up too much space, anyway.

Customization. That’s what I’ve done. Sure, it’s nothing more than a title image for my blog, but it’s MINE, dammit! MINE MINE MINE! I took the photo in California a few years ago when Stevie retired. I went out to see the ceremony and to partake in the party thereafter, and then drove back out here with Stevie and Lawrence (aka Manz). That was a great road trip!

Anyway, the picture is of the tracks of an armored vehicle that was brought back from Iraq as a war trophy from the first gulf war (GWI). It was just one of those photos that I thought might turn out neat using some depth of field, and lo and behold, it did! I did a lot of color alteration to make it kind-of sort-of fit in here, but the detail is still there. Most importantly, I like the picture.

Speaking of pictures, I just had a client of mine send me some questions for a shoot I’m doing in December. I keep forgetting to invoice them for a deposit. I really need to do that… it’s a healthy-sized chunk of change!

I’m still feeling under the weather. I think at this point it’s getting worse before it’ll get better. My head is pounding, and my nose is running with what feels like acid against my skin. One thing about having a beard and mustache: the snot never touches your skin.

One of the weird things that’s happened since going to WP is the order in which the posts have been hitting the site. It seems that since I didn’t have the proper time zone setting for the site until the third post, it made my third post look as if it were my first. Then, when I updated all the times for the posts to reflect when I actually made them, it made my second post my first, the first second, and at least the third is still third. I’ll try one last time to get it right, and then I just won’t care. Besides, they’re nothing more than glorified “Hello world” posts just to make sure things were working, that I remembered how to type, etc.

Speaking of time and date, I love getting the first phone call of the day telling me that what I was supposed to have corrected in my guide (which was incorrect to begin with) was still wrong after I had republished it. Then, when I called the editor to allow me to make the changes, I gave her the wrong object number on one of the objects I need to change, so the chain of crappola continues. They sound pretty understanding about the whole thing, but I don’t like making mistakes. (I’m sure none of what I just wrote makes much sense, but it does to me, and it helps for me to write it. Kind of helps me get the frustration out).

So… I need to go get a cup of coffee and wait for my objects to change and then I can get back to work.

Grrr.