Trimming Down My Digital Footprint

As you can tell from my last blog entry, it has been quite a while since I last wrote. Just shy of 2 months by 3-4 days to be exact. It hasn’t really been for a lack of ideas but time. Real life has butted into all my activities and kept me off the inter-webs. My usual routines had to be rearranged or removed altogether.

One of the bad things about working in retail, because I’m always attentive to my surroundings to deal with customers, I have very little time for my my old consumption habits. In fact, instead of having my ears plugged in for 8+ hours like I used to in the past, I just have time to listen on my lunch breaks and during my commutes (this roughly translated to 2+hours/day). This drastic change made me take a long look at what I used to spend time on and wean off what I was willing to sacrifice.

At first I started with daily podcasts. I just don’t have the time to keep up with those. This in turn led me to waiving all talk-podcasts and just stick to story-related ones (i.e. Decoder Ring Theatre, This American Life, etc). My reasoning is that with stories I have a beginning and an end which gives me closure and I can move on to the next thing. With talk podcasts I don’t get that satisfaction. Also, I listen to Audible (I pay for this, I damn well better use it) so story-related podcasts are a good compliment to this service.

This shortened-consumption time has also led me back to music listening. A four minute song takes up less time than a 30 minute podcast; moreover, I don’t listen as closely to music as I listen to podcasts, so if I miss a few lyrics there is little to no guilt about it and I won’t have the inclination to rewind and re-listen. I’ll just continue to go on with my day. Not to mention music gets me moving and I tend to get more done with music than podcasts (again that listening factor is key. Multitasking isn’t something I’m all that good at).

Next on the chopping block was social networks. I was initially enthusiastic about Google+ but after a few weeks my account just remained stagnant. I didn’t really communicate with anyone there so it was just a waste of digital space. Consequently I trashed that account. I haven’t used Foursquare in months. I haven’t been going anywhere besides home and work and checking-in to those places lost it’s novelty quite a while ago so that account was expunged. With little consumption time I also had very little time to log-in to social apps and I realized that I almost rarely used Twitter except to tweet or share a link. I almost never read my timeline anymore. At work I’m always busy and when I’m home I rather be reading my Kindle or watching Netflix so after a little more deliberation Twitter was also removed from my life. This left Facebook. I use Facebook very seldomly. In fact there was a time that I thought Twitter was more useful than Facebook. My how things have changed. As seldom as I use Facebook, one of the main reasons I keep it is because my wife still uses it and the last time I deleted my account (2 times now, I believe) she reprimanded me for making her a Facebook widow. It still has some uses for me. It helps me keep track of birthdays and there are still some events I like to stay informed on.

Lastly, I took a long look at my hobbies. I knew there was no way I was going to stop watching TV and I am really making a concerted effort to read more which left me to ponder the fate of my blog and podcasts. I started the blog strong early this year and really did my best to keep up with the post-a-week pledge. Obviously those efforts were lacking these past two months which is why I rightfully removed my badge from the site, as I can no longer claim to be a weekly blogger. I will try again next year. As for the podcasts, it takes more time to record, edit and post a 30-60 minute episode than it takes to type up a blog entry. It also takes a lot of passion and commitment to keep one going. I took a strong look at myself and realized that my interests in podcasting have been fickle at best. So with that small epiphany, I took down both, “The Julio From NY Show” and “The Mundane Chatter Podcast“.

There you have it. I whittled down my digital footprint down to Facebook and this here blog. The hope of this change is that my creative energies will be more focused and therefore my output will once again be more frequent than every few months.

Music Makes Your Day Go By

In the past few days, I have been in a pretty good zone. Been posting on this here blog and at the NoF ezine-turned-blog and there is a little secret to it! Well maybe not really, but it’s a little trick that has worked for me. It is a little thing I would do back in my high school days but have seem to forgotten and now I’m using it once again.

In high school, whenever I wanted to get myself in cartooning or writing mode I would listen to some of my favorite tunes, any songs that I was really into and just let the melodies, rhythm and beats take me to another place. Before you know it the day has gone by and I would have a completed piece of work. It was wonderful and awesome and I can’t believe I forgot how music would keep me focused on the things that I needed or wanted to get done. Podcasts have something to do with that.

Since 2006, I discovered and have enjoyed podcasts tremendously. This also happened to coincide with the time that I was falling out of love with some genres of music so listening to something that wasn’t music was quite refreshing. Podcasts also have led me audio-books and Audible.com. Since then I’ve been listening to mostly podcast shows and books. Music was always at the bottom of the things-to-listen-to list. The only times I would really listen to music is if I had a small commute to do or a very small errand that wouldn’t give me enough time to listen to a podcast or audio book while I was doing said action.

This past week however, I was falling behind on too much consumption and I had a lot of thoughts that I wanted to express. With so many thoughts bouncing around in my head I didn’t want to add more ideas in my already cluttered mind. Music became the go to choice. And it paid off! I got many blog ideas out of my mind, got my podcast episode recorded and posted. I even dwindled my in-box down to single digits!!! All that and bucket loads of housework out of the way. I’m still behind on my web-comics and some blogs but hey, Rome wasn’t built overnight. Kudos to listening to music while getting your groove on!

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No Resolutions This Time Around

A new year has come and gone and this time I decided not to do any resolutions. I’ve come to the realization that I just never come through on any of them and therefore there is no need for this pressure on my life, only to end up in failure once again.

One of the things that made me come to this realization is that I’ve come to grips with the fact that I’m a consumer and not a producer of content. If my two failed podcasts and my irregular blog entries aren’t evidence of this I don’t know what is.

Take the New Year’s three day holiday weekend I had. Instead of doing anything creative or productive with my time I spent it watching episode after episode of a TV series called Psych (all 5 seasons). Upon watching this marathon of content I saw actress Sarah Shahi, who I’m a fan of, on one of the episodes of Psych and wondered if she was doing anything presently. I discovered she is going to be on a new series on USA network and promptly subscribed to it on Hulu.

Instead of looking forward to doing something creative I just look forward to more stuff to take up my time. Even this blog entry took a backseat to other more recreational tasks. AS I’m finishing this entry I’m watching the NFC divisional playoff match between the Packers and the Falcons.

So to sum up. I look forward to entertaining myself than to doing something creative. Last year wasn’t too bad. It definitely started promising but then dwindled down during the Summer and pretty much came down to a halt in the Fall and Winter. Let’s see if I do better or worse for 2011.

 

An Issue With Skype

This past weekend I decided to try something a little different with my podcast. For some time I’ve wanted to experiment with Skype and I missed having a co-host so I convinced a friend of mine, Greg, to do a show with me. It seemed that everything recorded fine but at post edit I realized that his levels were much lower than I thought. After much tweaking I realized that the recording wasn’t salvageable unless I was willing to post an episode with a cohost who sounded like he was under water.

For whatever reason I just don’t have the proper hardware for this scenario so I decided to look for a software solution. I found two in Audio Hijack Pro and Call Recorder. I’ll be testing these out and hopefully the next time around won’t be an abysmal failure.

So because of this setback, there was no podcast posted this past week and for that I apologize. Hopefully things wil be back to normal by this weekend.

My Podcast Got Added To Stitcher!

For anyone who is a fan of podcasts and wanted the ability to stream their favorite shows like a radio station a la pandora, Stitcher is the website for you. If you have an iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Pre/Pixi or Android phone, there is also an app to make streaming easier. I had heard of this program a few months ago (right when I first got my iPhone) but they seemed to had a limited amount of shows to choose from.

Then lo and behold, when I checked out Marc Maron’s website recently, I realized that they have been adding more content and that they now had the option for podcasters to request that they add their shows on their directory as well. I immediately emailed them and can now proudly say, The Julio From NY Show is now available on Stitcher as well. Please support them and my show as well by clicking on the Stitcher badge below, signing up and adding my show to your favorites.