However hard you may work in the initial weeks/months, those early words (and images) that you publish will nonetheless remain an inferior reflection of who you are as a person.

Like any great human quest (mountain climbing, starting a business, etc.), succeeding with your own blog will have you in turns regularly doubting yourself, reassessing your true ambitions in life, and most likely transforming you in ways you were not at all prepared for. So if you can’t afford to take that kind of risk, stay on Facebook, shop, consume other people’s content, keep your day job, and you won’t have to worry about the pressures of competitive online entrepreneurship.

Through much of this year, visitors to this site will find me talking about myself (or ‘what’s going on in my world’, whatever). Here’s why:

1. The nature of the domain name not withstanding, I created it for personal use and so it should be about me!
2. I am looking for a new source of income, so I expect to earn a good enough reputation with the material on it that I might gain the trust of future business associates and in order to do that, I will necessarily HAVE TO dedicate a substantial portion early on to convincing descriptions of who I am as an individual. I’d rather write about other s**t (as would my wife), but this is the nature of competition, like it or not.

I’ll spare you the philosophical dribble for now, but suffice it to say that promoting oneself can lead to a lot of conflicting feelings that will surely test your resolve.

The virtue of loving oneself loses its luster once held against the self-sacrificing virtues of charity and generosity. Publicly exposing yourself is a two edged sword, because any personal gain comes with the significant price of public scrutiny.

Nobody likes to be called out for being selfish, but refusing to speak out in public is a terrible way to address self-consciousness.

Anyway, it’s on the 11th floor of a fancy-sorta hotel, which was odd, but once I walked in, I found it to be perfectly designed to make a geek feel at home. It’s like being in Austin. I’ve recently been hoping I could find a place filled with intelligent people who trade in code snippets and cool techie tricks without going back to college. (besides, I checked, and all they use is Adobe) I’ve been tinkering around with Firebug, MacRabbit’s Espresso and Github and reading all the cool articles on CSS-tricks, A List Apart and Smashing Magazine, yet I’m still not getting it. Maybe I need a community…

As I’m getting off the elevator, the first thing I see, besides the huge Geekdom wall graphics was a pool table with a bright red top. There was a conspicuous absence of a bulletin board, though, something you’d expect to see in any community-like center. I inquired and was told it’s coming soon. There was a lot of interesting activity around the commons area, and I was glad to see a few iMacs. Apparently the establishment is just getting off the ground at this point. We’ll see…

So why all the fuss with publishing this? Why not just fill in the form and be done with it? For a long time now I’ve thought that when one invests time and energy into writing something online, why not post on your own damn site first, then paste the relevant portions into theirs?

What languages (foreign or programming) do you know?

German
HTML
CSS

What other tech or business skills do you have (i.e. graphic design, UX/UI, marketing, entrepreneurship, etc…)?

graphic design
digital photography, from capture (studio) to post-processing (Aperture 3 and Ps CS4)
extensive knowledge of OS X
efficient in Windows 7, WiFi and cloud syncing
WordPress set-up and maintenance
human relations

What other interests do you have that are not tech related?

meme theory
cognitive neuroscience
linguistics
meditation
avant-garde cinema
bowl skateboarding
foreign culture
volunteerism
ping pong
Rockstar Games

What makes you so darn special?.

That’s a good one. **gee, I already feel special**

Okay, first of all, I’m really a fine artist, with a BFA from San Antonio Art Institute, where I studied painting and blacksmithing. I studied film at Bard College and German at the Goethe Institut in Berlin. In my twenties I was very sociable and eclectic, jumping from one art scene to the next. I still have many close ties to the arts community in SA, though now I’m married with kids (16 yrs), rely on hearing aids, and sing in men’s choir downtown.

While I’ve established a signature style (ink on clayboard) that I developed in the 90′s that still has a long life ahead, I’ve become less interested in the fancies and follies of the art world and increasingly drawn to the sciences.

Special? Hell yeah! But do you mean how geeky I am? Not technically. My brother Guy is the one with the CS degree. I may have completed calculus, but I can’t make heads or tails (yet) of that object-oriented programming/algorithmic stuff. In a general sense I guess I’m a geek, being a social misfit and constantly getting asked by people to solve their personal computing problems. Plus I’ve got some mean-ass keyboard skills and I’m fanatical about Web standards. How’s that?

What makes me darn special is I’m a passionate and creative geek who believes a culture can best improve itself when its members continually challenge conventional wisdom as well as openly share their best ideas and deepest convictions. The new rules of management, radical transparency, convergent media, the Filter Bubble, Anthropocene, or any hot topic covered by The Economist or WIRED, I’m totally on top of it.

I’m just deaf is all.

For one, I really suck at it, always have. My SAT verbal score was 300 and something, and generally writing assignments in my school days were crisis events for me. (Didn’t know I had ADHD back then) Nevertheless, in recent years I’ve become an avid reader and have grown to really appreciate good prose.

I’ve studied a ton of blogs out there and I have to conclude that most of them produce garbage, content that’s either poorly written, looks and/or sounds phony/fraudulent, or in many cases, was produced by robots. Great bloggers are rare and I look forward to promoting them in the near future. Chris Coyier posted a list of his favorites

In a recent post by Chris Gillebeau, he described how individuals starting blogs can expect their first year of activity to be fairly lousy. A pretty sobering thought. He was just being brutally honest, a trademark of his. How does he do it? Perhaps he uses dictation software too? Whatever his tools, his workflow HAS TO BE EASY FOR HIM, because he writes so damn much. Same goes for all the other superstar bloggers out there.

Way back I remember learning about the concept of “content is king” but hadn’t completely understood it until just recently. Recently at San Antonio WordPress Meetup there was this old fellow who complained that when he installed a new theme, how disappointed he was to find the page looking so empty, feeling as though he was ripped off somehow by the developer. This is something that I too had experienced often myself, which is why I experimented with all sorts of Latin gibberish and other bot-generated filler text.

Mark Levy is a popular writing coach who’s inspired me a lot. He makes the point that writers should produce as much draft content as possible. Essentially, that there is no such thing as too much material to start with. Levy makes the case that writers who are concerned with the readability of their draft writings are essentially handicapping themselves. He claims the best ideas are summoned with a wreckless kind of spirit, as there are NO RULES you need to follow. Whatever it takes for you to get to the finish line is up to the writer alone. ONLY the finished result should be judged!

Ever since then, I’ve been on a quest to find out how I could adopt this strategy without losing my mind. Although I can type at 60 words per minute, that’s still not fast enough to be able to sustain over a long period of time in order to gather along a large volume of words in a short amount of time. I’ve done some experiments and have confirmed, at my typing speed, just what the software makers claim: that software dictation produces results three times faster than typing. It’s not just that my fingers get tired after a lot of typing, but also I get restless from sitting in one position for too long. Writing using dictation software allows me to stretch and move around while I generate content, which is essential for maintaining a fluid line of thought.

In fact, at this very moment I’m lying on the floor in my studio with a USB mic in my hand, dictating this draft using speech recognition software. This still feels super creepy to me, but it’s a viable approach I’ve considered for so long but never attempted it until now. Of all of the tools that are at professional writers’ disposal, it seems to me that voice dictation stands above all the rest in terms of raw performance.

So why haven’t I been using this software? I suppose it’s the way you feel sitting in a room all alone, talking without somebody in front of you who’s listening. Really, it’s so embarrassing, like you’re some hobo on the streets babbling to hisherself! Perhaps we all have that potential in us, it’s just that most of us instinctively keep their inner voice silent.

So, in summary, here are my top priorities for a successful blog post:

• The writing should represent the topic well and be carefully structured.
• The author shouldn’t quote too much from sources gathered online.
• Blog posts should be no shorter than 500 words. These days it’s common to find blog posts that are a mere footnote, like a bloated tweet. The solution? Put more effort into your writing! Post less often, consolidate your notes/text snippets and to meaningful messages and dedicate yourself to a schedule that can accommodate this extra work. Effective use of tagging can help allieviate the bad habit of organizing by blog title.
• Post on a regular schedule. Twice weekly is common. Once a month should be the minimum.
• Keep a few drafts on hand to resort to so that you don’t have to rush a post to make your schedule. On rare occasions, a good blog post can be drafted and published in one day, or even one sitting.

Thanks for reading!

Please visit mozilla.org/sopa for information on the bill that’s up that threatens the future of the web and could potentially stunt innovation for EVERYONE!

Or better yet, visit americancensorship.org

SOPA IS AS GOOD A SOLUTION TO INTERNET PIRACY AS SETTING UP BARRICADES AT EVERY INTERSTATE HIGHWAY ONRAMP IN THE COUNTRY WOULD BE TO FIGHTING THE TRAFFIC OF STOLEN MERCHANDISE IN THE US! It does not deserve floor consideration. I urge my representative to vote “no” on SOPA, the corresponding House bill.

This is a little piece of art I made with my iPhone. I’m thinking of using it on my website. Much of my skills center around the use of a full keyboard to employ powerful macros and program shortcuts that can be triggered with the simplest of combinations. The difference in productivity is immense! It’s like an extension of one’s literacy, as vital as the use of one’s hand for writing.

My books have played a huge role in forming my outlook on the world. Consequently, I intend on dedicating a portion of my blog to showering praise on those authors whose voices have won a high place in the chatter of my daydreams. It’s true that nonfiction writing has grown immensely in recent years, and I feel fortunate to live in a time to enjoy it.