Personal brain dump

I'm going to wind up self-hosting my blog again.

I want 3 columns and modern screens are not 640x480 any more so why the hell won't blogger show me a template that is wider than six inches wide? I hate the narrowness of blogger blog posts. So I'm going to have to self-host, which means trying to figure out how to convince blogger to aim the name I registered through them at the new blog.

Fortunately for most people who read this blog you'll never notice. You're feed readers, and thank you for sticking with me through this dry spell. Here's the thing. I should go into what's going on or shouldn't I? That's a lot of my problem is self-censorship. I feel like I shouldn't get too personal, or that I should remain positive because of who may read the blog. I've considered a clean break with the whole old blog because of employers and potential employers and employees reading it. While mostly my employees are fine reading it... You know who you are. What if one reads more into things that I say than I actually mean?

These are uncertain times in the job market. I'm being extremely careful what I say so that it doesn't make any employees nervous, or endanger my own job or future jobs... that's making me very quiet to be honest. I've got a problem with that very quiet aspect. So... I think I'll get a self-hosted blog and quit being very quiet about things. I can't be the only person out there with concerns about their job can I? Seriously.

I recently got pretty active in Facebook and have had a lot of fun in there. Weird fun. People I haven't talked to since I graduated over 20 years ago I'm talking to now. Here's the thing... most of them probably had to look me up in the year book to even remember who I was. I made a point of not resorting to year books though. I was very much on the fringes in high school. If I had my druthers I'd be on the fringes now. I'm not an upfront kind of person socially. I wasn't then and I'm not now, although for different reason.

I went into the Navy intending to be behind the scenes sort of person, under the radar, finish comfortably in the top 10% but not high enough to attract attention. Day 1 I wound up in charge of making sure everybody was on the bus and accounted for on the stops on the way there and then had to get us in. CRAP! Then I wound up as Education Petty Officer in boot camp, in charge of helping ppl get up to speed enough to pass whatever tests they were having problems with. Fancy title for tutor. I know.

The whole staying just a little bit back didn't work out for crap. So I scrapped that idea before I was out of Nuke "A" School and haven't looked back. I don't go for back of the pack as much any more. I do socially, but not at work. At work I tend to be hell-bent for leather. When I get home I don't want to decide which movie we should go see. I'll follow at home. At work though... if you're not leading I'll walk on your heels, then your back, then your head. I'll push for as long as I can. I'll do everything I can to be the best follower I can be with a whole army of people behind me... but if you're in a leadership position in front of me... be prepared to lead because in the spirit of Miles Vorkosigan, I'm a huge believer in forward momentum.

If you haven't already clicked on my bitefight.org link feel free to click away. It's a web-based diversion that doesn't take up much time and plays out the eternal struggle of vampire vs. werewolf via html on your screen. No vampires were hurt in the playing of this game (well, I've been hurt a couple times, but if you join up you'll see what I mean and it's fun.)

In completely unrelated news, I finally beat someone to the punch. Wil Wheaton has finally come around and started using lulu.com to publish some stuff. I got there first! Neener Neener Neener! (OK, my lackluster sales book was out in 2004 and was a result of 2003's NaNoWriMo and is not the great american novel. But still... I'm sure he went there because I did.) I'm such a freaking trend-setter. If you're a fan of Wil's blog (Yeah, now that he's copying me, I can call him by his first name) go get this most recent publication of his. It's available in PDF for only five bucks. And it's a good intro into the rest of his stuff. (No future paragraphs will contain this many parenthetical comments.)

I'm back to listening to last.fm again. That's something that comes and goes for some reason.