Posts Tagged ‘Off topic’

You know you’ve been neglectful of your blog when you log in and have 271 spam comments waiting for you to plough through to make sure no legitimate comments have made their way there by accident.

It’s almost enough to make you sign out again.

But then I realized it’s been many months since my last “real” post, and over a month since my last Storify post.

My new job has kept me busy. It’s not an excuse, it’s the truth. I’ve been writing more there than I have professionally in years. It’s been exhilarating and I love every day. (You can read some of my stories here, here, here and here). A couple of them were even published in the “real” paper!

Needless to say, the first three months of my internship have been a blast.

I have also been doing a lot with Storify (you can see all my Storify posts here). Storify is  a nifty little social media curating tool that I’ve had a blast playing with. It may look like the lazy way of blogging, but it actually takes me more time to cultivate a Storify post than to actually write up a blog post. I just haven’t had anything worth writing about that’s more than a 140-character tweet (so if you really miss my lovely words, follow me over on Twitter and kick me over 500 followers!).

A few thoughts in a nutshell before I sign off:

• I read a post by Toronto Mike today about how Facebook and Twitter are killing blogs. I don’t think that’s true. I think blogging will always exist somehow. Twitter and Facebook have made it easier to make your thoughts known on any given subject immediately, but they don’t allow the space or time for analysis that blogs do. I have two Twitter feeds in my RSS feed, but dozens of blogs. If anything, blogging might go back to being a niche thing instead of something everyone does.
• So, you want to be a journalist?

Bill Doskoch blogged he’s the last person to share this video, so I thought I’d let him off the hook. There’s a lot of things this video does and says in under three minutes, which is why it works and why it was so popular online last week.

A few notes to the kids out there: Journalism is all kinds of things at all kinds of places. Not everyone makes it to the New York Times (or their version of that), but that doesn’t make your career any less important than those journalists that did. Oh, and get a subscription for pete’s sake! Support the survival of the industry you want to be in.

A few web shout-outs:

• The lovely Spydergrrl is up for a 2010 Canadian Weblog Award in the science, technology and Internet category!! Go Tanya! Check out her great blog if you haven’t already, and make sure to follow her on Twitter! If you’re a geek girl, she’s got you covered!
• Lizz Bryce (AKA @opinionatedlizz) had her first ever article published! So kudos to her! Can’t wait to meet her and a bunch of other tweeps at an upcoming Tweet-up!
• The wonderful Nick Taylor-Vaisey is the editor of Open File‘s Ottawa branch. Great guy, great cool news website, great news all around! All the best Nick! I know you’ll rock it!

I hope my last update comes sooner than this one. I’ll post before the new year with a round up of the year. Happy holidays all!

Don’t let the title of this post fool you — it’s not really my last post. Rather, this is an idea I got from reading Joe Boughner’s blog, 42 Points on a Double Word Score. He issued a challenge to himself and other bloggers — what would you write if it was your last blog post ever? Make sure to check out Joe’s original post, where he is linking out to bloggers he reads as they complete his challenge, and his last post and then maybe try one of your own. I thought there would be no better day to do my last post than today, which is my 28th birthday.

What is there left to say?

When it all melts away, what can be said? Can be written?

In the end, none of this matters. Sure, we all want to be remembered for something, but that’s so selfish of us. Hell, the act of blogging is a selfish act, is it not? Is it nothing more than a testament that we were here and we were important and our thoughts mattered?

But in the end, none of that matters.

In the end, it’s not how many blog readers you have, or how much money you make, or the kind of house you live in that matter. It’s the people you surround yourself with.

The biggest mark you leave is on them.

We humans don’t like to think of our mortality — we would rather pretend we will live forever in order to avoid it. But we can’t escape that mortality coming.

We are even more foolish to think that we are all going to live to a ripe-old age. We’re not. Some of us will die young. Some will die middle-aged. And, yes, some will live until they’re 95.

Maybe that’s our problem. We measure our life in years instead of in experiences. A good life, we say, is one that was lived long. Perhaps a good life is one that is lived to the fullest and measured in experiences. And love.

It’s corny and cliché, I know, but love really is what matters when all the chips fall. When you lose your job or your mind or your car, if you have the love of someone to fall back on, that’s what matters.

The love in our life is too often what we take for granted. What we overlook. We go to bed and wake up with the same person every day, but we don’t even really see them anymore. We don’t see what’s right in front of our face because we become so used to it, we look past it.

Please, take a second to value the love that’s in your life every day — whether that be your partner, your kids, your family or your friends. Stop taking it for granted. After all, a day could come when its no longer there. Then it would be too late.

Live your dreams. Another cliché? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just how we should be living. Why are so many of us slaving away at a job we hate? Why are we so afraid to try? This year, I gave a try for a dream. I threw myself out there, got to take two steps forward before the door slammed shut.

But I took that one step — and that means the world to me.

Following your passion will make you happier than you could ever have imagined you’d be. Reach for the stars — you never know where you might end up.

Sorry for the few posts over the last few weeks, work has kept me busy and my hockey team is still hanging on in the NHL playoffs (Go Sens!), so I haven’t had as much time to blog.

A few housekeeping items:

1) I have changed my RSS feed, so if you use RSS to read my blog, please resubscribe with the button on the top left there.

2) I have also added the Facebook like button to my posts as per Facebook’s changes this week. So now if you like a post, you can say so on the blog, and it will be reflected on your Facebook feeds (thanks to cordobo.com for that!).

More blogging coming soon, I promise!

Sometimes amid all the seriousness in the world, it’s fun to just do something different, let loose and relax.

In order to help you with that, I give you Beaker.

Is there anyone with worse luck than Beaker? Poor guy.