The Net Monkey

Tomorrow in the very early morning I will be departing for another vacation in Ye Olde London. I won’t back home until September 15.  I might update the bog while I’m away, but I’m not committing to it.

Here are a few pictures from my previous trip there.  Enjoy!

Lately I’ve been working on things in my personal life that cause me stress. You see, a lot of this has to do with social media. I’m naturally the kind of guy who, if he fully commits to doing it, has to do it fully or not at all. So, this means I’m tweeting on Twitter all the time, or worrying about uploading pictures to Flickr, or reading every article in every feed in Google Reader.

It’s all about learning to relax. There are tons of pictures that I’ll get around to uploading to Flickr eventually. No one really cares if they’re untimely, so why should I? I’ve been mostly quiet for the past week on Twitter, to the point of having some people wonder if something’s wrong. I’m not worried about it and I’m definitely not worried about reading every single post someone makes. There’s just too much information and none of it really matters, in the end.

Probably the biggest service that sucks away my time is Google Reader. In the past week, I have removed feeds that aren’t necessarily as interesting to me anymore or just simply post WAY too much every day for me to reasonably keep myself informed. As for feeds that I want to keep, if there are just too many articles to read, I’m just marking the entire feed as read and moving on to the next one. It’s all about keeping it simple and not worry about inconsequential things.

On the flip side of things, I’ve found renewed interest in my blog, which I’ve neglected a lot this Summer. I really enjoy writing and I think it’s time that I spend less time on Twitter and more time writing out what I’m doing in my life. I consider this article a first step in this direction.

Social media is supposed to be fun, right? It is! The point I’m making here isn’t that social media is wasteful and sucks too much of my time; rather, it’s about returning to what’s fun about it. I love to be connected to the world and my friends this way, and I think it’s more important to focus on quality instead of quantity.

I’ve neglected this site a lot lately. Not only have I not been posting nearly as much as I would like, but the theme I’ve been using was looking old. It’s drab, to be honest. It also hasn’t been updated to use the latest standards in blog presentation, as well as the latest features in WordPress.

Today I decided to switch to fervens-a by Design Disease. I found it pretty quick and knew that I wanted to use it as soon as I saw it. It’s a clean design and not complicated. I like that there are page links at the top and two sidebars for me to use.

While changing to the new thene, I created an online activity page. You’ll see a link to it at the top. This is basically nothing more than an embeddable widget of my FriendFeed activity, which is perfect for the blog.

Another new feature that comes with the theme is a preview of my recent Flickr photos. You’ll see that on the right sidebar.

Anyway, I think I’m still going to make a few tweaks here and there, but I’m generally happy with the way things look now. I hope you like them too.

Barack Obama: He Completes Us

I’ve decided to join Last.fm, again. Sometime last year I got tired of it and deleted my account, but added it back recently. I’m happy with the fact that they support my new iPhone. Yay!

http://www.last.fm/user/mattindy77

If you’ve got an account, be cool and add me.