Escape from Pianosa

I have to say that my blogging hiatus has felt good! Still, the urge hits me every once in a while and I’m thinking of ways to go about personal blogging in the future.

For now, I’m starting my own search engine optimization company, and the website has a blog as well. I’ll be posting there weekly if you’re interested. I do not intend to compete with the “big boys” of the SEO blogging world, but it’s a good way to express my thoughts on web marketing and keep my site content fresh.

If you’ve missed my tales of real estate woe, then you’ll be happy to know that in the past 3 months I’ve had a roof collapse and a tenant that, 6 months after notifying me of her plan to vacate, has still not left the property. The law’s delay… Hamlet did forgot one worldly woe in his little soliloquy–the hourly rate of a decent attorney!

So there you have it; I’ve been gone for a while but I came back with a new blog, some real estate drama, and even a little Shakespeare.

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Well I’ve been running this blog for about a little over a year now. It started as a real estate blog called Carter’s Adventure and then moved to its present domain. I’m shutting it down. I’ll leave the site up, but no more posting for the foreseeable future.

I’ve been thinking a lot this past week about “what is this blog about.” Because that’s really a central question to any successful blog. Is this a blog about my daily life? Funny things going on? My real estate misadventures? Improv? Marketing? Liberty and being a libertarian? All of those things? That’s way too many topics for a successful blog.

And so I think it’s a good exercise for anyone to go through, to try and create a blog. So they can think about what their brand is and what they want their identity to be and what they can offer to the citizens of the internets.

The irony is that I’m never short on things to write about. I have about 50 draft topics waiting in the queue. But every time I go to write one of them, something comes up. A little mental resistance. I’m not really sure where that comes from but I’m going to listen to it now. I may start up again in a month or a year from now. As I get more involved in online marketing I may choose to start another website that deals with those specific topics. In the meantime, if you’re a friend or just interested in what I have to say, you can stay subscribed to the RSS feed.

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I had dinner tonight with my friend from college, Dave Ford. He’s got a really amazing travel story going, not to mention a powerful message: you can quit your job, travel the world for a year, and change your life forever if you put your mind to it. In his own words:

I worked my ass off for 6 years, put some cash in the bank, and set off to see what else was out there in the world. What I am finding is completely rocking my world. Life has never been better. I have walked through Penguin colonies in Antarctica, climbed mountains, layed on some of the best beaches in the world in Brazil, and have stood in front of wonders of the world. I am just getting started…. Currently less than 20% of Americans hold Passports. If you do not have one, go get one and see what else is out there. I promise you will not regret it.

After tackling South America, he’s headed off to Africa in January for another six months of amazing travel stories and videos. I’m going to help him take his current blog, which is now hosted at Blogspot, and set him up with his own domain, a clean and powerful WordPress blog, and some effective ways to get his message out and build up an audience.

As I work through the improvements in his blog and his online marketing, I’ll post updates here and hopefully this will serve as a guide to moving from blog hosted by a third-party to a more serious and professional blog, hosted on your own site.

In the meantime, I definitely encourage you to check out what’s going on in his life at his old blog, soon to be new and improved. For some intense reading, check out his adventure with the hallucinogen Ayahuasca.

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BIG is holding its Fall auditions this Saturday at 12pm at the Hamilton Arts Collective. For more details, check out BIG’s official MySpace blog, where I am now blogging.

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Chris doesn’t have a blog, but you can still find him on the internets, saying goodbye to his white coat. Last night he asked me to bring back some of my old blog posts from back in the day, you know, the one about the blind lady you worked with. Oh yeah, here it is:

I returned from lunch this afternoon to discover that not one, but two residents of aisle C were sound asleep. I’d like to protect their identities, so let’s just call our first subject “the blind Asian woman.” Apparently she doesn’t have much work to do because she literally sleeps half the day. How does this happen? What kind of manager tolerates this? Seems to me, if you’re blind, you better go out of your way to justify your space on the payroll. Otherwise people might start wondering…

It gets worse though. The other sleeping co-worker is the guy whose job is, get this, to help the blind lady! She’s a programmer and she has trouble seeing the screen. So he goes into her cube–ostensibly–to help her with her program. Usually they just fight:

“Why you touching my screen!”
“I’m looking for an email I deleted!”
“No touch my screen!”
“Listen blind Asian woman, I need to find an email that I deleted, ok?”
“It’s not there!”
“How do you know? You can’t see the screen!”

How long does this take? How much time does he spend ‘helping’ her? Maybe 30 minutes a day. Wanna know what he’s doing now? Let me go check. Big fucking surprise! He’s passed out in his chair with a book in his hands! I love the government. Nap time.

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I’m putting all my satirical stuff on a new site, Absolutely Serious.

I’m going to continue writing here as well. My (working) trip to Europe is looking more promising by the day, so I’ll be blogging that here as well.

Enjoy.

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Hey everyone, I changed the URL of my blog, although everything else is pretty much the same. If you were subscribed to the old feed, then you should be subscribed to the new feed as well. In fact, every post might show up twice in your reader, something that should stop happening in 28 days, once FeedBurner switches permanently to the new feed. Enjoy!

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