It is my wish that everyone, young and old, have a happy and safe Halloween! Treat each other well, have some awesome treats and be someone (or something) else for a spell.

And if you get hungry, and I’m there keeping you company, you can have a bite… it’s on me…

Not much to blog about today. It’s approaching the end of my day off and it was kind of wasted. I woke up at nine, which shot my efforts at getting a head start on anything. Went to make a quick trip at 10:30 to the bird store for some food for our flock and got stuck in a major traffic jam… both ways! Got home at 12:30, ate lunch and, soon after that, Christine’s home. Don’t get me wrong, I love her to death, but I relax too much around her instead of doing things.

Though I didn’t have much planned today, I would have liked to enjoy my day instead of sleeping in and dealing with craptastic traffic!

A bright side to all this: I finally ordered the puzzle that I’ve been wanting for so long. Too bad I had to go the eBay route, where the supplier is surely making up the low margin with an exorbitant shipping fee. I couldn’t order it from the original supplier’s site because their site doesn’t work with either Safari or Firefox, and their sister site won’t accept any of my info!! Grrrrrr! Sorry guys, but I’m not touching their preferred browser, Internet Explorer, with a sanitized mouse!

I’m not telling you yet, dear readers, what I ordered. However, here’s a hint: it’s related to the puzzle I’m holding in the picture.

Well, I’m off to make dinner. Cheers!

This post is going to hit close to home… literally!

Way back a few years ago sometime in 2005, I think, I bought a webcam. This wasn’t the first webcam I had bought, but it was the first good webcam I had the pleasure of using. The iSight! I was so anxious to try it out, that I signed on to the first social cam site I could find. It was Chatfinder, and I met some pretty cool people on there.

Most of them were American, like the wonderful Mixkat, aka Sonya (she’s a Facebook friend as well, too!). But, I also struck up my first international friendship on that camera, as well. This would be Christian Wüst, from Germany. To this day, he has continued to be a good friend to Christine and I, and he was our friend and guide on our vacation last year in his home country. One of the most heartwarming things I took from that experience was talking with his friends and seeing that we are all not so dissimilar as we’d like to think sometimes. Also, in conversation, they took us as an exception to the general view of Americans, which is that we are mostly ignorant.

Before that vacation and since then, I have me and talked to various people on the Internet in other countries. Mainly small talk, but some good conversations nonetheless. However, I have just had a Skype conversation tonight with a gentleman from Brazil. In the talks that we had, one of the things that came up was the very same thing I got from one of our German friends last year. Both conversations echoed the viewpoints from people that have only (or mostly) seen Americans from the perspective of entertainment and news filtering. To most of them, we are funny, intriguing but somewhat… well… not quite intelligent, with some exceptions of course.

This strikes me, not as insulting, but quite humbling. It tells me that we in America should be doing a better job in reaching out to people in other parts of the world. We should not be afraid to learn about other countries and cultures by making new friends internationally, and seeing through their eyes and listening to them. America has a huge tendency towards having an isolationist stance. And it’s hurting us more so than helping us.

The Internet, with all these wonderful tools that are becoming more inexpensive every day (computer, headset, a camera which is sometimes integrated with the monitor) and free cam software, has definitely made the world as small as one’s living room. Let’s get off our Big Mac-ized butts and talk to our international friends!

Prost! Saúde! … Cheers!

Ok… here’s where I talk about all things going on in my internet life.

First, Dailybooth… the picture-a-day site. Well, some people do a pic a week, some treat it like hourlybooth, but I digress. I’ve decided to stay on the Dailybooth site. As you know, if you’ve read my earlier postings last week, you know that I went through some personal struggles, with a friend on that site, that ended with ties being severed. This was very painful for me to deal with, as I had gotten to really like that person. Unfortunately, my wife’s feelings were hurt and she felt threatened by some things that were said and, instead of leaving well enough alone, I tried to make all parties reconcile. Bad mistake; you can never make two people get to know and like one another, no matter what you do. Because of my mistake, and other things that happened as a result, I lost a friend. I was so hurt by this, that I just wanted to leave and never return. I felt that, because of the circle of friends on there that this friend and I share, it would be painful to comment on the same pics and see them commenting as well, and not be able to reach out to them.

Well, I thought that I was doing some long thinking in the decision to leave, but I now realize that when you think about what to do in a situation, while you’re still having strong emotion, you’re not going to make an objective decision. So, after more hard thinking for a week until last night, I decided to stay with the Dailybooth community. Several things played into this decision. First, all of the comments from friends on my “farewell” pic made a lot of sense. For example, GratefulDogZX, a friend on DB and overall good guy, put it best when he explained that all of my other followers shouldn’t have to lose me because of a falling out with one person. Second, a quote from Bill Cosby, that sometimes appears on the random quotes section of my blog sidebar, states: “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” It’s so true; you shouldn’t try to be all things to all people. Third, someone else’s feelings were hurt on DB and mentioned that my decision to leave was probably a good route for them to follow. Well, in my thoughts this week, I concluded that no one should have to leave a site because of personal pain over any situation or anybody (and this person even went so far as to say that they missed me and our conversations on DB. That meant the world to me).

Even my wife doesn’t want me to leave Dailybooth, even though she’s gotten pissed about the time I spend on it sometimes!

My decision to stay on Dailybooth is conditional. I got so wrapped up in it personally, that I lost focus on the other sites in my internet existence that are important to me. Even more so, I lost focus on the things that matter to me in real life. This can’t happen again. This blog, for instance, was severely neglected for almost two months! Now I’m reminded that I have to always strive for balance in everything that I do. If that means setting time for this and that and the other thing, then so be it. I value Dailybooth and everyone in it, but I value the rest of my life too, y’know? I say this more to myself, than anyone in particular. The site, and the way things work on it, is just that addictive… even if you’re not even remotely an extrovert by nature. With that being said, I’ll move on to the next topic.

This last week enabled me to blog more, and also catch up with my friends and family on Facebook. This is an area that is also needing some attention, bigtime. However, I will NOT get caught up in those app games on it (such as MafiaWars or other games). I have too many other interests to divide myself with! However, chatting it up with everyone on there this week has been a blast.

I’ll be posting a bunch of pictures to my Flickr account today or tomorrow. I’ll also share some samples and links here. I’ve been using Flickr a lot more because the convenience and community sharing far outweighs that which I have in the picture gallery on my personal site here. That’s not to say I won’t use the gallery here; it will be for more personal galleries and family pictures. This is one area that Dailybooth helped resurrect in me; my love of photography. I’ve been using my camera more and learning manual shooting to get the best out of my pictures. As a result, I have a new, potentially wallet-breaking hobby!

Of course, I still have Twitter, the stalk-me micro-blogging site. My interaction with that will never change. So, go ahead and “stalk” me there, if you’re not already! The sidebar here has my recent tweets, so you can see what I’m up to, even if you don’t feel like visiting my Twitter page.

I haven’t been making videos like I used to. YouTube is still an excellent forum for sharing videos, but I haven’t had much reason to do a video yet. However, I will still make videos on special occasions or when I really have to share/review a new acquisition. All of my recent YouTube vids are in the sidebar as well, so feel free to watch me being, well, boring old me… hah!

Well, thank you all for reading this. I realize I just unwittingly gave myself some goals to work on. However, these are healthy goals and ones that I think I can reach. One more goal for me: write an entry a day in this blog. So far, this week I’ve been doing pretty good with this objective. It shouldn’t be so hard to, at least, devote about 15 minutes into the blog. It can even be an extension of what I’m doing on Dailybooth, since that has been a “blogging” platform of sorts.

I’ll conclude the blog entry here with this thought. One could just as easily live their whole lives on the internet, as they would in real life… but it just wouldn’t be as interesting as what real life offers us! Cheers!

Something different here than my usual blog entry. One of the reasons I went back to trying to write regularly is because I want to grow as a writer. In general, I’ve always been told throughout my life that I’m pretty good at writing. One of the ways I think one can grow in this area is to remember recent experiences and put them to words as best as one can.

So, we’re at the end of the week, and it’s been a rollercoaster of emotions and I’m just glad it’s been ending on a good note.

Saturday and Sunday, I went through some personal drama on one of the social sites I frequent. This drama got way out of hand, as misunderstandings are prone to doing. This resulted in losing a friend and hurt feelings between the friend, my wife and me. I won’t go into it any more here now but, because of that, I decided to step away from Dailybooth. For good… so I said… but read on to the epilogue for more thoughts on this.

Monday, I walked into work and got handed some bad news that made losing a friendship a walk in the park. Hearing about a co-worker/friend getting killed is, putting it lightly, not the best way to start the work week. I tried toughing it out that day, but my mind and emotions were at war with each other. When I had to go into her office to get some figures for a report, when I saw her writing on the pages and I thought about the hand that would never again put pen to paper… I finished up work early and got the hell out of there. My time at home was spent reflecting and praying.

Tuesday, I started healing slowly from all of this. I tend to bounce back from things pretty quickly. I’ve often wondered if that meant I didn’t have much of a heart. But I think that’s far from the truth. Things went well at work. At home, I was getting back into Facebook more and I was gratified at seeing comments of well-wishing from friends and family. I blogged more about my feelings here, and I have to thank everyone who commented on that blog entry. Your support is awesomely heart-warming!

Wednesday, work went surprisingly smooth. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t chance. This was prayer at work; God giving me some breathing room to heal. And I spent some time thinking more about everything. Especially Dailybooth, and wondering if I truly made the right decision. I visited some of my friend/follower pages; there are people on that site, that I’ve gotten to know, that like me and want to get to know me more. I thought about that, and other things too. And I did some quick clothes shopping.

Thursday, I had the day off, so I slept in a bit later than I wanted. Consequently, I was slightly rushed to get ready and go to the rememberance service. It was at one of the bigger Christian churches in the area. It was a beautiful service; lots of people, yet very simple and to the point. I liked it and, knowing the kind of person that she was, she would have loved it.

Now we come to today. Work was great! My work area is looking better that it has been for a while, and now I’m relaxing in bed and writing this entry. It’s good to see that the week ended well. I can only hope to write more recaps in the near future, even if the endings aren’t always going to be sunny.

I did say something about an epilogue, didn’t I? Well, about Dailybooth, I’m leaning more towards going back, but with the presence of mind that I need to be more balanced with all the interests I juggle in my day-to-day life. I usually am somewhat thick-skinned; I’ve dealt with a lot on-line. The problem happens when I latch on to one person and make them a primary focus online. I lose focus on not just everyone else, but myself as well. I’ll have to be more careful of that in the future, and let internet friendships take real-life time to grow and ferment. I will give myself more time to think and heal before making a decision. Whichever direction I choose to go, I also want to keep blogging daily. I think this is a good discipline.

A time of healing is different for any situation, any time, any person. But what matters, partly, is what we do with that time. The other part is how we conduct ourselves in our dealings with others, and ourselves as well.

Cheers!