Out in Perth Amboy

Oh the excitement of New Jersey. I left Geneseo around 2:30 this afternoon and I arrived here in Woodbridge, just outside of Perth Amboy, NJ, at 8:30. I thought that that was making some pretty decent time considering that I stopped for gas in town as I left, went to Barnes and Nobles in Big Flats to do some quick shopping and grabbed a quick bite and drink at the Taco Bell next door while I was there. That means that the travel time is somewhere between five and five and a half hours.

Right now, it is 10:30 and the plan is still to wrap up here as early as a I can (11:30 is the absolute earliest with midnight being a lot more plausible) and driving straight back to Geneseo tonight in the hopes of getting a little sleep before I have to get up and drive down to Castile tomorrow afternoon.

It rained the entire trip from Geneseo to here. Luckily, it was seldom heavy enough to cause real driving issues but enough to keep everyone from travelling at top speeds. I hope that it lightens up some before I have to drive back. That is a lot of driving for one day. In fact, this will be one of my top ten all time driving days, I would venture to guess. The days that I drove from Kentucky to Alabama to Florida was a long one. My shot from Rochester to Chicago and back was super long. My drive from DC to Anderson, DC to Atlanta back to Anderson was long too. And the record is my drive from Rochester to Albany to Halifax. But this one is pretty long.

I am going to be teaching a class on blogging this semester, it looks like. The class is titled "New Media and the Internet Lifestyle" and we are going to be talking about stuff like blogging, syndication, podcasting, VoIP, etc. It should be a fun class. It will be one of my after-school deals down in Castile. It will probably run for eight weeks. I think that it will be a lot of fun. If anyone is interested in attending, just put a comment on this article and I can get you the details.

On the Road to Perth Amboy

Early in the Morning, Taking Out the Trash

Making Blogging Work

I wrote this post once and everything just disappeared. It isn't Blogger's fault, some single key on this broken keyboard (I am in someone else's office) deleted everything on my screen, how annoying.

Anyway, I was writing about the depressing lack of writing that appears to be coming from everyone's blogs. When I am at work at night (I am working overnights all summer this year until mid-October) I sometimes run through everyone's blogs to see if anyone has made an attempt at writing anything. It is very sad that so many people have so many idle blogs everywhere. I can't believe how many people got into blogging this spring and early this summer but have decided not to continue. I have a number of links from this blog to other people's blogs and not a single one of them has managed to make it through the summer still blogging (except for other blogs that belong to me which mostly all have regular content going onto them.)

I was very excited by the tremendous effort that Tony was putting in with two blogs and a podcast on the way. But the second blog ended up just replacing the first one and the podcast seems to have killed the entire thing.

Blogging, apparently, is a difficult undertaking. Personally, I find it one of the most useful, valuable and simple forms of written, personal, recorded communication. Maybe I find it easier because I have been writing my blog(s) for so long that the process has become second nature to me. Maybe I just got started early enough (mid-2000!!) that there was no hype involved to get me excited so the fact that I was writing an online journal had to be cool for the sake of being an online journal and not because I could be a part of the greater blogosphere.

It is too bad. I really enjoy reading the blogs of people that I know. I especially like just simple, personal blogs letting me know what people are up to, what they are doing and what has been changing in their lives. It is so hard to keep up with people these days. It is nice to have a system for keeping track. I especially would like it if more people would podcast. Blogs are great and I spend most of my time in print journalling. But it is hard to find time, for most of us, to sit down with a blog and to read it all. We tend to look for articles that interest us and to only read those. And that is fine. But I want to keep up with people. I find that podcasts are the best way to do that because I can almost always find plenty of time to listen to things while I am busy doing other things (driving, walking, cleaning, etc.)

No Access to Update SGL Until Thursday

For some reason, I am not able to access the company network and I am stuck with only being able to update my Blogger accounts until Thursday - unless something changes, which I doubt that it will. But I have been writing SGL in the hotel room so you should all be seeing updates as soon as I get back.

I am staying at the Comfort Inn in Easton, PA until Thursday. The area is extremely bland. You can really tell that you are near to all of the cities but none of the business from them comes out this far.

It's Been A While.... In Bethlehem Tonight

Always on the road, I am. Tonight I am working in Bethlehem, just outside of Allentown, PA. This is my first time here in the Allentown area. It is all right, I guess. Nothing particularly special. Sorry that I haven't updated SGL2 in a while, I have been having a hard enough time keeping up with updates on SGL itself. But at least I have only missed a handful of days over there. Tony at Urinal Cakes seems to have dropped off of the face of the planet. He and his girlfriend, Jessica, have been planning on making a podcast talk show and even managed to record an episode but since having done that, there has been only silence coming from the Urinal Studios in Avon. Three weeks and no posts or podcasts unless they are podcasting and haven't posted any links or information about it.

I am in the Allentown area all week. Bethlehem tonight, Allentown proper tomorrow and Easton on Wednesday night. I am camping out in Easton for the week to make things easy. Then Thursday afternoon I will be heading back home.