About-Nothing

I was suppose to start blogging on a regular basis, that was the promise in April.  It is just not happening.  Whether from lack of sleep, stress or any other distraction, motivation has been non existent.  I would love to say I will do better., but I’m not sure I can do it.    I am going to try though.  I will try to post as often as I can whether motivated or not.

There I got that off my chest.

Until next time

God Bless

Mother’s do alot for us through out our lives.  From when we are young until we are married to the  Mother of our children.

I hope all the Mom’s out there have a wonderful Mother’s day!

Until Next Time… God Bless!!

After being at home with the kids for 6 years.  I am clinging to my sanity.  I love my kids but there are some things that happen through out the course of the day that make me want to put my head in the door jam and slam the door repeatedly.   So I thought I would share a few.

Why is it kids always without fail have a question when I am on the phone.  It is like the phone sends out some sort of signal that only a kids brain can pick up.   “Go interupt the person on the phone.”

That toy that is never played with become super popular once one kid finds it.  It never fails whether its a sibling , friend or family.  Once the toy that is never touched is picked up by another kid.  All of a sudden this is the owners favorite toy and they happened to be heading for it at that very moment.

The Great TV Controversy. Here is where a good portion of battles are fought, and my sanity is pushed.  It starts the same way every time.  One kid will turn something on and the other will speak up to say they were going to watch something.  Never mind there are other TV’s in the house.  The battle has begun.

I know I only listed three things.  But I wanted to give you a peak into my world not make you insane.

Until next time

God Bless!!

As I have mentioned in many posts I am a Linux guy.  I have used it for many years. In March I purchased an ASUS  EEE netbook.  It came loaded with Windows 7 , I thought this would be a great opportunity to try it out and write some thoughts on it.

After the initial setup you end up at log in screen with a beach background.  The wallpaper gave me the feel of the default wallpaper on WinXP, alth0ugh a little different.

At first glance the desktop was rather clean.  But after about 10 minutes or so I realized the clean look was intentional.  This version of Windows was a hacked down version of Windows 7 Home it was Windows 7 starter edition.   I liked the clean look however I wasn’t able to change it even if I wanted too.  Apparently Microsoft thought it was in the best interest of the consumer to disable a basic feature like changing the background.  This feature is main the feature people use to make there computer feel like there own.  And they disabled it.

Don’t get me wrong I knew there were multiple version of Windows 7 but I didn’t expect this.  I expected them to disable the so called bells and whistles.  I didn’t expect to be thinking I need to make an upgrade just to do a basic function.  What’s the next step disabling mouse function unless you have a professional version of Windows.  Not 10 minutes after getting my netbook running my blood was boiling.   Now I know why I use Linux.

For the record I know there are other features disabled.  This one surprised me though.  Especially after I read their claim it was paired down for netbooks.  I know there is ways to change the background and like any good nerd I figured it out quite quickly.

Over the last month I have used Win 7 starter regularly and although I discuss it in a negative light in this post.  For the most part it hasn’t been horrible it just the marketing ploys that get my nerves.  To be honest using it on a netbook where the browser is up all the time.  Doesn’t supply a great amount of interaction with the OS but I certainly should be able to change my background.

Until Next time

God Bless!!!

Note: Billotics refers to Bill Gates Politics

Well it has taken me a lot longer then I thought to start this back up.  But because it has taking me a long time, I have had a long time to think about what I want out of this blog.  With that being said, I have a lot of changes in mind.  The blog was never meant to pigeon hole me into a particular subject, although I tried to do it to myself.

In the past my post were mostly about my interests,reading /writing and some observations.  In doing that I kind of left out quite a bit of who I am.  I plan on focussing on things I see through the day and thoughts that occur to me.  The subjects I have wrote about the past will be written about again but I will be including some others, this time not leaving how who I am.  So there will be some posts on being an at home dad, a christian and other stuff.

As far as number of posts I plan on trying to post 2 or 3 times a week.  We will see how it goes.  Over the next week I will be doing some reorganizing then hopefully a post will come out later this week.

Well that’s it for now

Until next time

God Bless

I am sure you have noticed that although I stated I was back I really am not back.  Nano had a strange effect on me.  It did influence me to think in ideas for stories.  However it did also seem to make it hard to go back to the way things were before I started Nano.  For one I would blog regularly.  I am not sure if it is because I stopped or if I was drained from Nano but starting back up has been harder then I could have imagined.

So where does that leave us.  Well no where really.  I will continue to blog.  But decided I will start back up after the new year.  It is always hard to get time to do extra things during the holidays anyways.

So here is the plan.  After the new year I will resume blogging at a rate of 2 or 3 times a week.  The other thing about taking a break is it will give me time to refocus on what this blog was meant to say about me.  I tend to constantly search for a focus without realizing this blog is my observations.  It doesnt have to be defined as much as it has to be an honest part of me.  So when we start back up we will get back to blogging about my observations on mostly things I enjoy.

So until 2010.  Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  (Yes I said Merry Christmas and not Happy Holidays)

I am out… God Bless!!

We are finally back from Nano Wrimo… I know it ended two weeks ago.  I decided that it was a good time for me to get my thoughts together before I posted.  I am hoping we will now roll forward as usual.

NanoWriMo was so much more then I expected.  I had some ups and downs through the whole process but in the end it was a positive experience.  In case you don’t know I came up quite a bit short in the word count.  I only made it to around 15k .  Yes I was disappointed but the positives outweighed the disappointment of not making it.

I learned so much from this experience that I decided instead of dwelling on why I didn’t make it.  I thought I would list some of the stuff I picked up from this NanoWrimo.  This was my first shot at this so the list should be decent size.

• The first thing is to go at Nano on purpose.  You can just hope to work on it when you get time.  You have to be intentional.  Regardless if you have support or not I believe if you work at it intentionally support issues can be overcome.
• Support is definitely helpful when you get behind. It is already hard enough to keep up with the schedule but if you fall behind it is twice as hard to catch up with out a peanut gallery.
• Being familiar with your characters.  I found myself in a few situations where I wasn’t sure how my characters would react to the situation.  It wasn’t that I couldn’t come up with something for them to do,  I did not know them well enough to know how they would react.  Knowing your main characters is very important.
• Another thing I will do next time is have easy access to my characters.  Forgetting who your characters names are in the middle of a story is a pain, you have to stop the flow and page back to find out the characters name.  Getting back into the flow or taking the chance of forgetting where you were headed are all possible if you can’t get to a character list quickly.
• Making the decision to go 1st or 3rd person.  When you are a new writer this isn’t something that comes naturally.  Like any other newbie I started out first person and switched to 3rd only to want to switch back later on in the book.  This is something in the future I will consider before anything even gets started.
• Researching the setting is another problem I ran up against.  I never really considered knowing the area in which my characters lived would be something I should of known before writing.  If I would have done a little setup and research on the setting it would have been a lot easier to avoid setting hiccups.

• Writing conversations is still very alien to me.  It seems almost every writer does it a little different.  I don’t have much in the next thing to try except to say this is something I need to research more.

No I didn’t get the 50k and win Nano.  But what I learned is so much more and I can tell writing is not something you ever master.  You just have to keep doing it.  In case anyone is wondering I am still working on that novel.  I enjoyed the process so much that I have no intention on giving up.

Until next time… God Bless!!

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

Douglas Adams

“You must not come lightly to the blank page.”

Stephen King

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

–Mark Twain