The other day I was reading a blog post over at johnchow.com entitled, ‘You Are Already Rich‘. It got me to counting my blessings and really thinking about the good in my life.
In posts such as last Friday’s ‘Fatherhood Friday‘ post that I called ‘…And They All Lived Happily Ever After…‘, I’ve talked of my family and all the blessings that they bring to my life.
Then I thought of other blessings:
As some of you who follow my twitter updates and Facebook status updates know, I’ve been using my AT&T cell phone as my modem. I had what was advertised as an unlimited tethering package. So when I recently moved, I didn’t worry about setting up cable TV, because I could stream my favorite shows online! I’d hook up the laptop to my TV, and we’d catch up with Heroes, Pushing Daisies, Daily Show, etc.
Incidentally, Hulu is my current favorite site to stream television shows, though Joost has a lot of good stuff too.
Waay back in 2008, I blogged about the dangers of Twitter. In that blog, I made the case that it’s possible to pollute your favorite social media sites with compelling entries such as “I’m eating a burrito.” I thought that this could be off-putting to the people you could be trying to attract to your blog/online business by tweeting.
Today, I watched this video on johnchow.com:
Wow, this video makes a compelling case that “I’m drinking a cup of coffee.” Is something people might actually want to know!
Hmmm….
There’s only one conclusion.
As we look to a bright new year, many of us are looking back at the year we just had. Then we look forward to the year ahead. I am doing the latter with a vengeance. This does not come without the required retrospective, however.
The past year has been very busy for me. I moved twice, continued to try to sell my home in Missouri, worked overnight and days, considered a second job, started several blogs, discovered Facebook and Twitter while growing increasingly impatient with MySpace, and somewhere in there tried to figure out how to get family and ‘me’ time.
It seems like any blog you look at these days raves about Twitter. Well, let me join the crowd! Twitter is a social networking tool that allows users to quickly send out messages to keep in touch, communicate, pimp their blog, or whatever else they feel like selling/doing. I have blogged previously about how a tweet got one of my favorite Star Trek novel writers to comment on my blog. Today, I used it as a form of text support. Using Tweetdeck I sent out a cry for help.
What my plea for assistance looks like on tweetdeck
Yet again, my twittering has landed me on michael-wayne.com. He is another blogger/social media user. Unlike me, however, he actually has made a few bucks with his blog! 
Check out his Twitter Question of the Day for 11/24/08.
-Justin
Popularity: 3% [?]
Today was really crappy. Super crappy. I mean, it couldn’t have gotten worse if Murphy himself showed up, slapped me around a bit and screamed his law in my face. It was seriously that bad. I was so depressed and mopey when I got home that my wife, empathic soul that she is, immediately felt depressed and mopey too. A few minutes before Heroes started, my wife got a phone call and left the room. Not wanting to watch one of my favorite shows without my favorite companion, I hit record, changed the channel on the T.V., and sulked some more.
Just thought I’d play around with wordle for a minute, and look what I made!
I discovered wordle through Rebecca Bollwitt’s incredible blog Miss604.com.
With wordle you can be as restricted or as free as you like. You can enter a stream of words, or plug in your blog’s URL and it’ll automatically generate a work of art! You can then work with the colors, number of words, size of the image, etc. Pretty fun. I expect to do more with this in the future…
-Justin
Popularity: 2% [?]
In the spirit of this new blog, I’m not going to tie myself down to a set pattern, i.e. Manic Mondays, Two-fer Tuesdays, Whimsy Wednesdays, etc. However, with the release of the latest preview for J.J. Abrams’ new Star Trek movie, (view it here) I think I will try to stick to one dedicated feature. Every Friday, I will post a piece of fiction from yours truly. Since I just decided to do this about ten minutes ago and didn’t have all week to prepare an original story, I’m posting my favorite Star Trek story that I entered into the Strange New Worlds short story contest. Needless to say, I didn’t win, but this story still reserves a soft spot in my heart. 
Deep Space Nine remains my all time favorite Star Trek series, and ‘Far Beyond the Stars’ is, for me, the quintessential Star Trek episode. So I decided to dig into that just a little deeper. Unfortunately, I forgot to include a tribble, so Dean Wesley Smith passed on publishing it.
After taking some down time from the ol’ laptop, I decided to check out some new developments I had heard about, starting with the new Gmail themes.
GMail Themes
If you’re a user of Gmail, you may have noticed it looks a little different. That’s because they just added themes! If you go to your settings panel, you’ll notice a new tab called, you guessed it, ‘themes’. If you’re the more condervative type, there are several different color schemes to choose from. If you like to have a little more fun, there are themes such as Bus Stop (similar to the bus stop theme in iGoogle). My two personal faves are Ninja and Planets.
