Some Knowledge

Just thought I’d leave a merry Christmas wish to all my loyal readers.  It’s another cold day and there is ice everywhere after it rained and thawed yesterday.  I guess it’s nice to have snow for the holidays, but already I miss summer.  Anyway, I hope everyone is doing well and that you all have a nice day.  Merry Christmas.

It’s the winter solstice.  This is the shortest day of the year.  A blast of arctic air is howling down out of the north this morning and snow is blowing everywhere.  At least there is nowhere I have to go today.  The roads are covered with snow.

In ancient times people used to light fires on this day to help the sun back on its course north.  We have a fire going in the woodstove.  It’s nine degrees outside right now.  I don’t imagine I could get a bonfire going outside in the snow without a lot of gasoline, not that I even want to go outside.  It’s a fine day to hide inside and read the Internet.

The days will be getting longer now that the sun is as far south as it’s going to appear.  Of course, there is a lag to the seasons.  It will probably be even colder and snowier in January.  That is just the way the seasons go in this state.  Perhaps when I become rich and famous for writing the best book ever written I will follow the summer and spend this time of year somewhere warm in the southern hemisphere.  Perhaps I will just move to Tahiti.  I can see myself living on a billion dollar yacht cruising the Pacific.  I like to dream.

As this is something of a turning point in the seasons and the shortest day of the year, it might be an auspicious time to start a new writing project.  I’ve tried to spend most of this year working on some blogs, but it is hard to attract a lot of attention with a blog.  I think what I need to do is write some kind of novel.  At least with a novel it is not a question of what to write, as a novel is all a bunch of lies that tell some kind of truth.  I read Stephen King’s book on writing this week, and I have a few more on my shelves that I should probably look at.  It is of course actually writing something that gets you the skills of an author.  Blogging is a good place to practice stringing words together, but it fails as a way to make writing pay.  If you want to be paid for writing, you have to write something that people want to buy.  It is a very simple thing.  All I need to do is write a book that tells how to change the world in some kind of fictional way and figure out some way to sell what I write.  Very simple.  For here, I’m going to let people read what they want and check in from time to time.  Now, to take over the world.

It’s snowing.  There is like a foot of the stuff on the ground and it’s still coming down.  I don’t have to go anywhere today, so I am waiting for it to stop before I fire up the tractor and clear the driveway.

Every once in a while I hear freezing rain pelting my windows.  It’s not bad enough it’s snowing, the rain has to freeze as well.  Winter is evil.  Perhaps I should start writing a long novel about some plucky adventurers caught in a snowstorm.  Perhaps I should write a book about a guy who hates winter so much he writes a book about how to make a fortune writing books so he can afford to move to some nice tropical country where it never snows.

I got so much ridiculous email this morning about how to make money on the Internet that it took me a while to sort through it all and delete it.  I suppose I set myself up for these things by giving out my email to hucksters.  Of course I know how they make their money online.  They sell people little ebooks about how to make money online.  What a simple business.  Get rich quick selling information on how to get rich quick.

I think I really am going to start a writing project today.  I am sick of just complaining about the lousy weather on this blog.  It’s Michigan, the weather sucks by definition for most of the year.  Perhaps I should write a book about how some guy helped the car companies drag their sorry selves out of bankruptcy.  Who knows.  I think for now I am just going to register my complaint about the snow to the world, and who cares.  Maybe I should get a snowmobile and move to Alaska.  I don’t know how the Eskimos can stand it in the arctic.  Perhaps they sit around all winter in the darkenss telling each other jokes.  Perhaps I’m just being too dramatic.

It is a cold winter day, but the sun is shining.  I’m not doing much today.  Just stopped by here to see what people are reading and leave a couple words.  I think I am going to cook up a plan for my future today.  I don’t think this blog has done much for my earning potential.  It’s just a lot of words on random topics.  It was good practice to write every day.  Now I have to find some way to focus on something and cook up a project with sales potential.  In any case, just thought I’d leave something on my blog saying how beautiful the sun is shining today.  Take care everyone.

Here I am, back at the old blog.  Just thought I’d stop in and leave a few thoughts to pass the time.  When you have all this storage space, you may as well fill it up with something.

I read for a while about blogging yesterday.  It seems there is the potential in this hobby to make some cash.  It seems this way, but the reality is different.  You have to become insanely popular to get anywhere with a blog.  You need a lot of readers and you need some way to cash in on their attention.  I have thought about this a lot, and it seems there is no good way to make money from a blog unless for some reason you are popular.

I’m not worried about money right now.  I have better things to think about.  Since I have been spending so much time typing at my computer every day this year it seems, I think I have built up a habit of writing that may take me places.  Writing is an interesting pastime.  You have to order your thoughts into a logical progression to write anything useful.  It is good practice in communication to write something every day.  So today, this is my post.  I may as well write just about anything, because there is no way I am ever going to cash in on all this work, maybe.

It was very cold this morning, though there was no snow.  The sun is shining right now, and there are a few clouds in the sky.  I think I am going to read for a while online and see if I can find anything interesting.  If I get an idea for a real story I may be back later.  For now, I think this will be all I post.

It’s taken a while, but I am starting to lose interest in blogging.  There seem to be too many blogs these days.  There is really no way to get traffic up unless you are really lucky or buy advertising.  Perhaps I complain too much.

Maybe I just have nothing interesting to say.  I should probably look around this service and read some popular blogs and see what other people are writing about.  Before the election it was all politics.  I don’t like politics.  I don’t like spectator sports.  I don’t like celebrities.  I like science.  I like interesting technology.  I like art and music.  I don’t fit into any niches.

This blog seems to get a decent amount of traffic every day.  I’m approaching five hundred posts here.  It’s hard to say where my most popular ideas came from.  Some of them came from Google Trends.  Some of them I just thought up.  I think I am going to take a different direction in blogging.  I think I am going to sit back for a while and see what happens.  Perhaps I will start a new writing project.  Perhaps I will start writing fiction for the mass market.  Who knows where that will take me.

It’s nice to be able to post my thoughts somewhere other people might read them.  I will continue to check in from time to time to see how things are going.  I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into writing everything on this blog and as yet have no rewards aside from the occasional good comment.  Perhaps what I need is to take some time off for a while and think up a good theme.  Perhaps there is really no point in keeping a blog.  For now, I’m just going to sit back and see how things go for a while.  Some of the stuff I’ve already written continues to get some page views.  Perhaps this is good enough for a free blog.  Later everyone.

Wonderful, not only is it snowing outside, it’s snowing on WordPress.  Reading the comments on the admin blog post about this annoying feature, you’d think everyone loved this nonsense.  Seriously, I thought there was some kind of computer virus infecting the site when I saw the falling pixels.  This is supposed to be snow?  How about you leave a perfectly good service alone and stop trying to annoy people with stupid graphics like fake snow?

I suppose this might be cute if you live somewhere warm without the white menace freezing your feet all winter.  It’s nice to have something cute, if you think snow is cute.  I think it’s a nuisance at best and a definite hazard at worst.  Ever try to stop a truck on a snow-covered road?  Snow is a pain to shovel or plow and causes a lot of accidents.  It builds up on your roof and caves in your ceilings.  It’s no good for anything but skiing or snowmobiling, two seriously silly activities.  Nevermind the hideous injuries received in sledding accidents each year by people crashing into trees.

If you want snow, then fine, I won’t stick around on your blog.  I have to take a trip to the botanical gardens and get a nice picture of a palm tree.  That’s what I like to see in winter, tropical islands.  There’s enough snow outside for all winter to make me sick of the stuff.  As for me, I will keep the snow applet away from my blog and try to think warm thoughts.

(There, I’ve complained enough for one day.  Now I think I will go sit by the fire and warm up.)

It’s snowing this morning.  It’s cold as hell outside.  I’m in my room typing something on this blog.  It would be nice to live in a warm climate where it doesn’t snow and where the sun shines on any given day.  Perhaps someday my blogging will pay off and I will move to a tropical island.  Then a hurricane will come and blow it all away.  What beautiful thoughts.

I wrote a long-winded post on Too Cool Things this morning about how blogging is like gambling.  You throw the dice by writing something, then wait and see if anyone is interested in what you wrote.  The payoff is traffic to your blog.  Of course, I don’t get tons of traffic to any of my blogs.  This is my most popular blog and gets less than 200 views a day.  Still, that’s pretty good considering I don’t even know how many people view one of my blogs on Livejournal.  I had to hook up tracking scripts on my Blogger blog to see if anyone was visiting.  How annoying not knowing if anyone is reading what you write.

I have no idea why anyone would read this post.  I don’t really want to write about what kind of a freezing hell it is outside today.  Perhaps that’s why we have holidays in winter, to distract our attention from the annoying weather.  In any case, I think I will go out and do some shopping this afternoon.  Maybe I can find something tropical to distract me from the arctic weather that is happening now and for the next three months.  Perhaps I will choose to live in an imaginary world of blogging that will distract me from the lack of heat on this planet.  Global warming just isn’t working.  Go out and burn more fossil fuel.

Alright, they changed the way everything looks. Instead of blue it’s all gray. They moved all the buttons around and changed the layout of the pages. They added a quick-post feature and an exerpt box to make a summary of your post. Very interesting. Now, it’s just going to take me a while to find every button I need to write a post and relearn where to click everything.

I’m wondering now if they changed anything about the way the blogs look to people viewing them. I doubt they would do that. They already changed how the Journalist theme looks that I use for this blog. Oh well, you can’t stop progress. It’s just going to take me a few more seconds to figure out where everything moved to and how to do the simple things I do to write articles for this blog.

I guess it’s nice that WordPress is keeping things updated and new on these blogs. It’s cool that it’s still free to post here. I was a bit surprised today when I checked the stats for this blog. Page views were up yesterday, especially for a post I wrote a couple months ago. Who knows why or when something is going to get popular.

Anyway, I just wanted to check in and post something so I can see how the new system works. As long as I can still write and add links and see what’s going on with the blog it’s all cool. I can imagine there might be some people who don’t think highly of the changes that have been made, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s just some shuffling and added features. Alright, now to see how everything looks.

One thing I missed was the tags box. Pulled an edit and added them in just for good measure. I guess that’s something to keep people thinking, looking for where everything has been shuffled to.

I just stopped by to see how things are going on this blog.  So far today I’ve had 118 page views and one comment.  Pretty good considering the day is three-quarters over.  It looks like they are going to implement an upgrade to the wordpress software here in a little over five hours.  With any luck everything will go well and there will be no problems.  I don’t think it will cause me any problems, as everything here works on the principle of point and click.  Look for the icon, read the description, and click.

I had a surge in page views on my new blog yesterday.  Today I hooked up a Quantcast thingy to the html there so I should get even more statistics as far as who is reading my new blog.  I really appreciate how well wordpress does the stats on my blogs here.  It helps to know what people are reading and what’s popular.  I doubt I would have written so much on this blog if I didn’t know anybody was reading these pages.

That’s all for today.  I will probably check in tomorrow to see how the new software works and leave yet another post in this long string of random thoughts.  Until then, look around and feel free to leave any comments.