tojosan sporting his favorite hat

• Wordless Weekend – Shadows
• Wordless Weekend – Framed
• Wordless Weekend – Fall Around
• Wordless Weekend – Garden Respite
• Wordless Weekend – Sand Art

• Wordless Weekend – Shadows
• Wordless Weekend – Family
• Wordless Weekend – Framed
• Wordless Weekend – Fall Around
• Wordless Weekend – Where Eagles Soar

I’ll add a comment about the ‘resigning’ part. Likely he was offered the chance to resign or be fired.

As for Kurt. It’s easy. He overreacted. The Post comments often swing way worse than using a slang word for female genitalia. Racial slurs are common. Outrageous and slanderous comments are made hourly. Those are rarely moderated.

Kurt should just admit he overreacted and move on. He’s already struggling to establish himself as a wise and knowing social media guru in St. Louis. This will be like a nail in his coffin with the locals.

Folks violate the terms of service of the Post all the time. THis is the first incident where I’m aware that Kurt over stepped normal behavior for moderators. Having been a moderator, even where kids, doctors, and law enforcement were involved, I’ve never felt compelled to contact parents, employers or the cops over foul language.

Originally posted as a comment
by tojosan
on Mathew’s comments using DISQUS.

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Well, No One Said it Had to Be 50,000 GOOD Words…

(Posted using ShareThis)

Deep into your Nanowrimo writing? Struggling to make 50,000 words and make it good? You’re not alone. Kristen is struggling as well.

I’ve crested 37K tonight and am anxious to be a winner. Reading this actually helps to keep up my spirits. So why not click through on the link above and help her along or share her frustrations.

Cheers,

I’m tojosan on nanowrimo.Similar Posts:

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Scrivener Trial NaNoWriMo message

Every day I see this message pop up. It’s the Scrivener NaNoWriMo 2009 Trial message. This software is my success story for this year’s National Novel Writing Month.

Scrivener is a Mac native application geared especially towards novel and scriptwriting. It allows easy organization of work into projects, manuscripts, parts, and subdivisions, such as chapters or scenes.

Research notes are kept in the Scrivener as well. The same interface allows not only keeping text in your research section but also images and links. It’s as handy as drag and drop.

Search has a Mac native feel, a la Spotlight.  Start typing in the search bar and the left hand bar immediately responds by only showing subsections (in my case chapters) that have that search word included. In turn, the search word is highlighted in each section. I’ve found this feature especially useful for name use. Don’t want two characters with the same name right?

Search has more than just simple text searching. Here’s a snapshot of the search drop down.

Full Screen mode is nice. A single column down the center of the screen is the initial set up. Configuration is adjustable to place the column, set the column width, and the transparency of the background. Many writers will find this their preferred mode I think. It blocks out distractions well.

Document exporting is robust. Microsoft formats are selectable, as well as PDF, RTF, and plain text. Selection is allowed at differing levels, allowing any part of the document to be exported. This feature allowed easy email off to my wife of the novel.

Scrivener has other features I’ve been enjoying. It doesn’t have a couple of features I’d love though.

• Web publishing
• One click email sending

Will I be purchasing Scrivener at the end of the trial? Right now it seems a sure bet. Its interface is straightforward. There are plenty of ways to customize and export. Support is built in for CSV version management. (computer geeks will get that)

Find the Scrivener NaNoWriMo deal.

Find me as tojosan on NaNoWriMo.

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So, What Do You Use To Twitter? via Sysomos Blog: “That’s the question we wanted to answer with our latest report focused on the applications to use Twitter. We analyzed a sample of more than 500 million tweets collected over the past five months to determine the most popular applications to use Twitter.”

Sysomos analyzed your tweets and determined that the Twitter website is still the number one tool. I’m not surprised as I know several people personally that only use Twitter.com.

A distant second is Tweetdeck. That’s my client of choice and the one I recommend most often to friends and clients. One of the rising stars is Tweetie. Tweetie is quickly becoming the defacto iPhone Twitter app.

Slicing the pie a different way, Sysomos looked at how many different clients active users use. Limiting active users to those having at least 50 tweets in the last five months. Most interesting fact there? That 82% of users use just one application.

There are some more findings you’ll want to check out there, as well as some nice visuals.

About Sysomos (from their site):

Sysomos brings business intelligence to social media, providing instant and unlimited access to all social media conversations to quickly see what’s happening, why it’s happening, and who’s driving the conversations.

Through the use of contextual text analytics and data mining technology, Sysomos collects data from blogs, Twitter, social networks, messages, boards, wikis and major new sources.

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The Sordid Story of the Pixar Lamp by College Humor.

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Received this from my Ed Lukens in response to my Micro Center review:

Todd, Micro Center would like to invite you to our Grand Opening ribbon-cutting from 9:30-10am this Thursday (11/19). Thank you for covering us in your Broad Brush blog.

Ed, glad to have covered this.  I’m looking forward to writing more about the hot new geek store in town. I really enjoyed my first visit.

I’m looking forward to making use of that free wi-fi on an upcoming visit. The variety of computer choices will make Micro Center a must visit prior to any purchases in the near future.

I’m not sure I can make the Grand Opening myself but I’d like to share it with you.

Go.Buy.WriteAboutIt.

Yours,

Todd ‘tojosan’ Jordan

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Micro Center, the well known electronics and computer store, has opened a store in the St. Louis metro area. It’s Brentwood location is the 22nd store in the chain. Micro Center will be filling the role now left empty by the closing of Circuit City and CompUSA stores.

I had to check this store out as I’m a gadget and computer geek. Twitter and local papers were a buzz about it opening. Apparently it has a great reputation in other locations.

Entering the store, the rows of gear is immediately visible. Off to the right is their service center. Off to the left the check out lanes. Walking in though, you’ll notice that there is no ‘center’ aisle. There are aisles but they don’t line up center and that’s not a problem.  They do serve to divide up sections.

Computers of every make and model take up most of the right front quarter of the store.  There are laptops, desktops, netbooks, and some of those not quite one or the other sizes. Brands included Dell, HP, Acer, and believe it or not, Apple.

Interesting is the inclusion of refurbished, remanufactured, and discontinued computers.  These were also available in various types from desktop to laptop.  The prices were lower on these models, and they actually had more than one of each in stock, literally on the floor.

Wending my way past those, I was greeted by really friendly clerk. He asked if I needed help finding something or just wanted to take it all in. I laughed. There was a lot to take in. We talked about the store opening. It had only been open five days.

He told me about this being store 22, and how they were excited to be in St. Louis. Of course I mentioned CompUSA and Circuit City failures. The clerk said their management was well aware of those closings and planned to learn from the mistakes made by those companies.

Computers aren’t the only thing you’ll find along that side. Walking past them I found the camera center. Warning, it is not as large floor space wise as some stores. On the plus side, there is quite the selection of pocket size cameras. Variety again was shown by including many different models and styles, as well as refurb cameras. There were some specials running but unfortunately not anyone I could make use of that visit.

I’ll save you the suspense of me walking you through all the rest of the aisles. How about some quick notes.

• Video games section – lots of titles – retail prices – more hardware than most places
• Sound – they have a large selection of speakers, earphones, microphones and more – well worth a visit just for this
• roll your own PC – this store has it all. Cases, boards, wires, adapters. Several discounts were running in this section which covered nearly a fourth of the floor space of the store.
• accessories galore – mice from high end to $5. Keyboards the same. Cables of every type and style.
• networking – more than just a few routers. modems, routers, access points – several brands and sizes
• books – lots of variety here

All around, if you’re into electronics and miss this place, you’ve missed out.  Best Buy, in my opinion, is going to get a serious run for their money by Micro Center.

Best points:

• Easy to get to – right off Eager and 170.
• Lots of brands.
• Friendly staff.
• Mac gear.
• Latest gaming titles – including just release Dragon Age and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
• Discounted items and special buys
• Free wifi – yes, free wifi

Oh, it doesn’t have music. It doesn’t have DVDs or BluRay videos. There were no refrigerators, stoves, or microwaves. No carpet. No fancy displays. No wall size television.

In other words, it’s not your typical consumer electronics store as found in St. Louis. So go out, check out the new store in Brentwood. Heck, buy me a gift card while you’re there.

Cheers,

Todd

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This morning I crossed the 30,000 word mark.  I’m excited. This is the highest number of words I’ve reached in three attempts. I’m not done either.

This puts me ahead of the curve. Much better than either of the previous years.

Blue lines represent the word count you’d have if you divided the 50,000 words up over the 30 days equally. As you can see, I’m not doing that.

My personal goal is to be done before Thanksgiving eve. I’m planning on traveling starting that Wednesday evening and be busy for the next few days. That will certainly decrease the opportunity to write.

How am I doing it? I’m giving myself some isolate time to write nearly every day. Only one day did I miss writing. I’m also seeking daily encouragement from others. The flip side to getting that? Give out a ton of it.

According to a recent pep talk, it gets easier after 30,000 words. I don’t know about that, but I’m pumped up to go the distance.  Please consider cheering me on, donating Diet Pepsi products, writing a blog post about me and my story, or something else.

For those choosing to write about me and my story, I’ll send you the text to date and you can excerpt it. Heck, monetary donations would be nice as well, but please make those at nanowrimo.org, under donations.

Cheers to my #nanowrimo twitter family, especially those in St. Louis.

I’m tojosan on nanowrimo.org. Find me. Buddy up.

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Seth’s Blog: Can’t top this: “Getting someone to switch is really difficult.

…

So, you don’t get someone to switch because you’re cheaper than Walmart. You don’t get someone to switch because you serve bigger portions than the big-portion steakhouse down the street. You don’t get someone to switch because your hospital is more famous than the Mayo Clinic.

The chances that you can top a trusted provider on the very thing the provider is trusted for are slim indeed.

Instead, you gain converts by winning at something the existing provider didn’t think was so important.”

Winning at something the existing provide didn’t think was important. That sentence captures it all. Too many social media experts but very little to differentiate them. They all claim to be ‘the’ expert.

They can’t all be ‘the’ expert. They can certainly be experts in some area. Sure, there can be lots of folks that are great at recording videos. Maybe another thousand are great at podcasting. Likewise, there are thousands of great photographers.

The ugly truth? As consumers and businesses acting as consumers, we chose who we know. Alternately we chose the most well known or safest choice. That means that you, that person not being Chris Brogan for example, my company, we aren’t choosing you first as a generalist.

The upside? Chris is no expert in video or podcasting. He’s certainly no expert in French cuisine in Portsmouth. That is something you may well be.

The lesson? As basic as it sounds, do what you know. The key is not to get lost in being an expert at making videos in general. Those are a dime a dozen. Be an expert at filming French cuisine in Portsmouth. Make our mouths water with food we can actually have.

St. Louis suffers from this. We have plenty of bloggers. We have several tech focused bloggers. Only a few really stand out. Why? They have given up trying to be the tech experts and instead focused on their passions. They are getting the biggest communities and feedback.

Which are you doing? Challenge yourself today to narrow your focus. Pick your thing to be an expert at. If there are more than a dozen folks with the same focus as your site, consider focusing even more.

Oddly, by abandoning too much, you may discover your get more in return.
Cheers,
Todd
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