the photine blog

Photine Chronicles

A few years ago I really had high hopes for my photography.  I thought I was going to have my photos in exhibits and get published.  I was going to get recognition from cool websites and be a photoblogging star. I was really going to be something.  I set up a separate blog to keep track of the successes from Photine.net and named it the The Photine Chronicles.  

Three years later, there are 21 sad little posts over there.  Did some of those things happen?  Sure, but not to the degree that my dreams had imagined.  And I can be honest with myself and say that I really didn't go after those things.  I'm not a marketer and have no desire to learn how to become one.  The bad part is that I even stopped updating when good things were happening.  For example my photos were used in promotional material for Opera in the Heights, a promotional magazine about Houston for Texas Monthly and an end of year report on the cruise ship industry.  Little stuff with no money, but fun places to see my photos in print.  And, oh yeah, a new Houston It's Worth It Book.  None of those things made it over to my "brag" blog.  

For some reason that blog just felt separate from what I was doing and who I was. The things I was posting about didn't feel big enough to have their own blog and I think that is why I stopped updating.  It became neglected.  Well time for a refresh. From now on any cool recognitions for my work will be posted here under the new Photine Chronicles category.  I have moved the posts over from the old blog that I think are important milestones and tomorrow I will post my best photos from 2009.  See you then. 

P.S. Sorry if the blog move junked up your RSS readers!

Blog Here, Blog There

I'm back from Panama.  I had an amazing time.  I was asked if I got some closure with my father.  No. Instead of closure I got amazing new beginnings not just with him, but with my wonderful family and even more importantly the beautiful country of Panama.  I adore it.  I will be doing daily write-ups eventually.

While I was gone I posted at Posterous.  You can see the posts here.  It was so easy.  Thinking back I can do most of the same things here at Typepad so I'm not exactly sure why I didn't.  I do like the way I can send short Twitter like messages by email over there.  I wish there was a way to integrate that here so I can have a record of my thoughts on important things like this.  I'm going to leave that page up, but think about how I want to integrate things like this in the future with my blog.   

Many times I have thought about setting up various blogs on the journal side and the photoblog side, but in the end I am always turned off by the idea of splintering my voice.  I've even tried it several times, always with the result of closing the blogs down.  Things are disjointed enough as it is with my blog, photoblog, Twitter and Flickr.  I could direct people to things like Friendfeed, but I really don't want to do that.  So even though Posterous was easy I don't want to start yet another blog.  Sigh.  These are the things I agonize over.  Gah.  I'm such a blog geek.

Housekeeping

I've been an updating machine today.  It wasn't planned, but in the end I'm glad I got stuff done.

First up was the sorely neglected Houston Photobloggers.  After writing up posts for the week I started looking at new theme designs.  That snowballed into a full scale assault on the site, but it really needed it.  I changed the theme, updated the FAQ, added a navigation bar, cleaned up the blog roll, updated the content on the sidebars and changed around the welcome message at the top.  Of course once I did that I had to tweak the Houston Photobloggers Twitter page with a slightly better name and more interesting background than solid blue.

Of course that led to a desire to change my personal Twitter page.  I bought a nice graphic on iStock photo, but then had to work with it in Photoshop to get the right dimensions for the Twitter page.  Of course a new design means new text and link colors.  I actually love fiddling around with website colors (as I'm sure you can guess with the numerous changes that occur here).

Then it was on to my other neglected blog, the photine chronicle.  That blog isn't meant to have a lot of activity, only updated when I want to remember particular milestones for Photine.net.  But when I looked at it I realized that I hadn't done my Fave Five for July - September.  Oops!  So off I went to choose my five favorite photos from that three month span.  Stop by and take a look.  I refreshed the design, added a new post about Pixyblog selections and added the Fave Five (backdated).

Whew!  Website-o-rama.  Oh yeah I also wrote up the December Assignment: Houston and decided on two new link features for the photoblog (I had to think of names!).  And now I'm here.  I might very well have a blogging addiction problem, but instead I choose to think of it as simple housekeeping.  

Things about me

I only do one regular meme, but when Little Ms. Bossy says to do something how can you say no. That's how she got the name!

Rules:
The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
Each player answers the questions about himself or herself.
At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

Ten Years Ago:
I had been living in Houston for three years. I had been dating GKA for two years (I think... exact years are getting fuzzy). Looking back I was in a happy personal routine. I wish I could have some of that back. At work I was still an assistant director, but making the realization that I liked my school despite my frustration with the working dynamic and was probably not picking up and moving to San Antonio by my three year deadline. Many pounds lighter. But also looking back, I can't seem to remember any of the things that are synonymous with the me of today. No photography, no blogging, no social media. For the life of me I can't remember what I did for a hobby. I don't think I had one.

Five Things on Today's "To Do" List
Buy supplies for pie party (I'm getting pied tomorrow!) - Done
Go to bed at a decent hour. Monday night I slept from 6pm to 5 am because I was sick. Tuesday night I didn't fall asleep until well after 12:30 am. Hopefully tonight will be normal.
Hmm.... its weird to write a to do list after the day is done. Can't think of anything else. My days are filled with a myriad of "to do" lists.

Things I'd Do If I Were a Billionaire:
Travel the world in luxury taking pictures
Buy houses in a few select locations
Set up some kind of foundation to give students in my district more opportunities for exposure to the arts
Give money to organizations that need it, especially arts and animals
Volunteer at a handful of organizations in town to keep myself busy
Travel the world in luxury taking pictures (I *really* want to do this)

Three Bad Habits:
Taking my shoes off as soon as I get in my apartment and then leaving them there. There are shoes everywhere. It's the weirdest thing and a very bad habit.
Eating when I am stressed.
Negative thoughts.

Five Places I've Lived:
Panama City, Panama
Harlingen, TX
San Marcos, TX
San Antonio, TX
Corpus Christi, TX
See... I need to travel!

Five Jobs I've Had:
Teacher
I did some kind of work study thing one semester in college where I cut articles out of papers for the researchers studying the aquifer. My mom always had the belief that school was my job and I was never allowed to have a part time job. We only had one car anyway, so it would have made things difficult. Same thing in college. So my only real job that I have ever had is teacher. I day dream of a new career, but you can see now why it is such a difficult concept to really face.

Five People I'm Tagging:
I'm sorry to say that the meme will die here. I don't have very many blog friends (sadly, just like real life) and the ones I do would probably not do a meme. Instead they would look at me askance while slowly stepping away. But this was definitely enlightening. Now do me a favor and go visit the fabulous Little Ms. Bossy.

My birthday wish

So today is my birthday. 36. I usually don't have positive attitudes toward even numbers for some reason and this is no different. However I thought 35 was going to be great and it actually was more sad than happy overall, so maybe my number sense is off. I guess I'll know one year from now when we look back at the year that was.

So my birthday wish? True love, happiness, money, all the usual. But for the blog let's say for this one day (ok... this one weekend), I'd love for my blog visitors to de-lurk and say hello. If this is your first time here, or you read but never comment, comment on occasion or are a frequent commenter say something below. It's a small thing to ask really. Of course if you want to get more extravagant I'll take anything off my Amazon wish list. :-)

My city

I saw this theme first over at Sarah's blog and loved it. I knew it was a Movable Type theme, but after a few half hearted searches I knew that I wasn't going to be able to bring it over to TypePad, at least with my lack of design knowledge. Then TypePad started adding more and more designs and they brought in four citycapes, none of them Houston. And tonight? Ta-da. They added about 12 new cities and thankfully Houston is among them. I love the banner especially that it has a little space shuttle since I am such a NASA fan. The only thing I don't like is the green background page, but I'll get used to it. Hooray for my hometown!

As an aside... what is your definition of hometown? I feel like I really should say that Harlingen is my hometown since that is where I grew up, but I live and make my home in Houston. So is that my hometown? What do you think?

UPDATE: How can you feel anything but sorry for me. I obviously have some kind of weird design problem. One thing I think I'm realizing is that I like the more minimalist look and sadly the cityscape was not it. I'm still not happy with my choices, but this will have to do. Subject to change.

Categories

I have plans for some changes to the blog and I wanted to be able to put those posts in categories so they would be easy to find. Thus I have finally, after years of blogging, implemented categories on my personal blog. One reason I've avoided categories is because I'm so fussy about organizing things. Some posts overlap and can fit in more than one category or don't fit perfectly into any of them. That freaks out a er... "meticulous" .... person such as myself. I've spent the last week going through 580+ (wow!) posts and organizing them. I've only posted things in one category based on what the majority of the post was about.

It was an interesting exercise. Over the course of the week categories evolved, appeared and disappeared as I sorted. I saw that I write a lot about geeky things, the internet, and of course personal issues which are split up into multiple categories. I don't have much to say about for example, movies, I guess since I'm not a big movie person. I wrote a lot more about work than I thought I did which was a surprise to me.

My writing has also changed since Twitter. I had a feeling it would. Things that I used to post about are now Twittered. Those posts pre-Twitter were short, a sentence or two, but they were little glimpses into my life. I actually think this blog was a little more interesting pre-Twitter which has given me something to think about especially since I'm making a lot of changes in my online presence.

It was funny to read posts where I was over the moon about things I don't care about any more and to watch me worry about things that were no big deal. I ran across things that were genuinely funny and I was surprised that I could write like that. Posts where I set out definite plans to change certain areas of my life that fell by the wayside months later. It makes me wonder how well my current determination to change is going to go.

And a quick health update. I started losing my voice on Friday. It made singing at the mall difficult to organize. I have hardly talked this weekend, but it isn't much better. The only thing that really improves it is complete rest, but there is not a single day I can take off until Friday because my concert is Thursday. On the plus side my throat doesn't burn anymore so hopefully I'm on the upswing.

How many is too many?

Can you have too many websites? I think that answer is yes, but it is hard to stop creating new ones.

Let's start with photoblogs. I have my photoblog, Photine, and since I revamped the structure in January, I needed another place to put extra photos. Ones that I wanted to upload for memes or extra shots relating to the theme, but that didn't make the cut. Something more flexible than the structure of my photoblog. Now right there you could stop me and say, just put your extras on Flickr. But Flickr isn't a photoblog in my mind, so that just doesn't work for me. So along comes Patchwork. And that is all fine and good. Then I start hearing about this term, photowalking. And finally, FINALLY I have an explanation for my photo style and how I do 80% of my photography. And I want a site dedicated to this idea. I think it will be good to view my photos in this structure and within this context, thus Photowalking Houston is born.

Ok. Let's move on. I have this personal blog. I got my start in blogging which led me to online photography so a blog is obviously not something I'm going to give up on. I have two groups that I administer: Houston Photobloggers and Assignment: Houston. And then I have various social networks like Flickr and Twitter.

So let's count up shall we? 6. If you take out the group sites, 4. That's a lot. Not to mention the ones that I don't really use like accounts at Vox, LiveJournal, and Tumblr and the sites I do use like Smugmug and Zenfolio. I'm not quite as bad as some, but it is way more than the average person. I should probably stop listening to tech podcasts that talk about all these new sites, but I don't wanna.

One Year

Photine was one year old yesterday and this blog will be one year old on Monday. What a difference a year makes.

The long and sordid blog tale, below the jump.

I need an idea

I really need to figure out something I can blog about over at Vox. I had an idea and so spent an hour playing around with it (much better experience on Camino than it was in Safari), but then I backed out and erased everything I did. But it has awakened that blog addiction. It would need to be something specific because I already have a photography blog and a general, rambling, "I have no idea why people read it" blog (that would be this one). I have lots of interests, but no expertise in any of them.