Birdland

The next new thing?

I’ve been writing content for the web off and on for a couple of years now. The main reason I say off and on is that many times over the years I’ve simply shut down due to either a busy schedule or just lack of ideas (blogger’s block).

Enter Plinky. I created an account a while back, played around with it for a while and sort of put it on the shelf. A little explanation first, the writers at Plinky send out user-contributed “prompts” about once a week. They are usually in the form of “Name three songs you will take on a road trip.” You can just create the list and be done with it, or the service will usually ask a follow up question like, “What do you like about each song?” or something like that. Before you know it, you’ve just created a blog post.

The reason I set the service aside for a while was there weren’t many prompts to answer. Now that it’s been a while, I’ve signed in and have so many new prompts to answer.

The nice thing about this service is that a lot of the prompts are user-contributed. So the more user’s sign up, the number of prompts available will multiply.

So the question, does Plinky have the potential to become twitter-esque?

The obligatory music category

A long time ago I put out a blog post about the Pandora music service. Years later, it is still here and I still use it just about every day.

I figured I’d kick off the music portion of this blog by first saying that I have a few bands that I like and a bunch that I can recognize a song that I like. Enter Pandora, I like it because I can simply enter the stuff I like and set up a Quick Mix and discover new stuff.

So I give you the ingredients of my Quick Mix (in Pandora’s display order, not particularly my chosen order):

• Pearl Jam Radio
• Radiohead Radio
• The Strokes Radio
• Red Hot Chili Peppers Radio
• Weezer Radio
• The Killers Radio
• Nirvana Radio

That list has pretty much remained unchanged for quite a while. Sometimes I’ll through something totally different for some interesting results. I’ve often thrown in some Classical (Stravnisky), Country (George Strait), and some Fugees for a little jazz-rap feel.

New books for a new house

I recently moved to a new house and decided that with a new place I needed some new reading material. Also, I realized that there is a used bookstore down the street called Bookman’s. So I loaded up a couple of extra copies of books that I’ve been holding on to and made a visit.

My first stop was the Star Wars section. It’s been years since I’ve read anything from the Star Wars universe so I was a bit curious. I ended up selecting “Outbound Flight” by Timothy Zahn. I’ve always been a fan of Zahn’s Thrawn series so I am excited to read this book.

I’ve been wanting to read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” for a long time. I started looking around and completely forgot the name of the author. Since I didn’t have my trusty internets I did the next best thing and texted a friend for a quick response (Douglas Adams, by the way). In the end I was able to score the entire trilogy.

I can’t wait to get to all of the new material.

Second Attempt

I used to have a tumblr account, then decided that I wanted to focus on blogging on my actual site about web design topics. Months later, I have a couple of posts, but nothing spectacular. I really miss just putting up random thoughts that come to my head.

So, here is my second attempt… enjoy!