So, yes, fuck, okay, it seems I have once again started going relatively long periods of time here without updates, and for that I apologize to whatever the amount of people it is who regularly follow along here. And yes, as my friend Kate correctly guessed the last time we hung out, a big part of this is because of me finally joining Facebook this year; and that has ended up sapping much of whatever small amount of free time I have these days for doing goofy little nothing posts online, because Facebook just makes it so damn fun to post goofy little nothing posts online. (And by the way, Kate, where have you disappeared to? Weren't you going to come over to my place last weekend so we could set up your own Facebook account? Just drop me a line sometime when you're free!)
In fact, stopping and thinking about it tonight, it occurs to me that there are actually now eight different websites where I post updates on a regular basis ("regular" here meaning from once a month to several times a day), each and every one of them serving a slightly different purpose...
--There's the blog for my arts organization for starters, what you can consider my "main" website, where I not only post a photo of the day and interesting links and occasional podcast episodes, but also a thousand words a day of original critical content (or at least I try to write a thousand words of original critical comment there a day).
--And then there's my main personal site, which exists mostly now as a repository for all my old creative work from the '90s and early '00s, a headquarters for my growing collection of Chicago bicycle maps, and also a place for sometimes confessional, sometimes political personal essays, posts that like CCLaP are also usually around a thousand words long but would be highly inappropriate to post over at my arts organization's site. There are still a ton of people who go by that site*, over ten thousand unique visitors each month, so in general I try to be more careful now concerning what I write about there, now that I'm a middle-aged arts administrator instead of a young drunken out-of-control artist, like I was when that site first started. And so that means only infrequent postings there, in an attempt to finally get rid of all my old haters from the '90s (psst -- it's mostly worked), and also much less emphasis on pop culture and sex, and much more on futurism, politics and international affairs.
--Then there's my Facebook account, where I post the absolute silliest stuff in my life -- photos of childhood friends, links to goofy viral videos, smartass comments about smartass comments about smartass comments.
--And then there are all my accounts devoted to specific media -- my audio files to iMeem, my videos to YouTube, my photos (3,400 of them now!) to Flickr.
And so that leaves this VOX account, which frankly has been going through a bit of an identity crisis this year; because originally I set this up as a semi-secret blog, a place to do the kind of confessional writing I simply can't anymore at my main personal site. But then I realized that the VOX mobile client worked really well on the Palm Treo I used to own, right at the same time that I quit smoking and started bicycling seriously for the first time; so that slowly turned this page into a "moblog," devoted mostly to entries and images written on the fly while actually out and about on my bike, posted on the go in real time.
Ah, but living in Chicago like I do, we actually only get to bicycle here six months a year; and that plus the growing popularity of this blog meant a slow disappearance of the ultra-confessional entries, and more and more goofy pop-culture crap in the months I wasn't bicycling, just so I'd have an excuse to post something here in the winter months. And then in January this year my Treo was sadly stolen (it fell out of my pocket at a cafe when I got up to use the bathroom, and was gone by the time I got back -- thank YOU, economic meltdown!); and now that I finally have home internet access, I no longer need a fancy mobile device, so plan on replacing it one of these days with some crappy $20 Piece Of Shit Special down at my local T-Mobile store or whatever, which means the end of moblogging for me.
So what to do with the VOX account now? Well, I suppose there's still a line that can be drawn with the goofy, silly stuff; that instant stupid Twitter-like thoughts can continue to be shuttled off to Facebook like I've been doing this year, while here at VOX I can concentrate more on the medium-sized entries, the ones dissecting a television show or mentioning my latest Chicago adventures or whatnot. Plus, last month I tried live-blogging an episode of LOST over at my Facebook "Wall," and quickly found out that the people on my Friend list there did NOT AT ALL appreciate me posting 35 updates in the course of an hour; and so that reverts the TV live-blogging back to VOX as well, which frankly makes me feel like a fanboy douchebag whenever I do it, but I kinda like sometimes feeling like a fanboy douchebag.
Okay, that's it for tonight. Onward to LOST! Excelsior!
*For those who don't know, back when I was a creative writer, at its height I had around 35,000 unique readers of my personal journal every single day, mostly because of it being one of the first personal journals in history available through mobile devices, long before both wireless internet and the invention of the term "blog," through an old third-party service in the '90s called AvantGo.com. Those days are long behind me, however, so I'm surprised at how many people still stop by.
I decided the other day to finally download the latest version of Google Earth (version 5, that is); and since I wanted to try out a bunch of different stuff once I had it open, I ended up downloading again the three customized bicycle maps I've made over the years for Google Maps and Earth, all of which can be found over at jasonpettus.com/maps. And that ended up reminding me -- oh yeah, that's right, bicycling season is just about to finally start again! Biking is a huge part of my life whenever it's warm here in Chicago, for those who don't know, because of being middle-aged, because of trying to get regular exercise in my life these days, because of trying to save money in my life these days, because of wanting an excuse to do cool little projects using all these unbelievably powerful tools that Google Maps hands out for free these days; it's a sort of perfect storm in my personal life, frankly, that has led to me doing these insanely detailed bike maps that anyone in the general public can check out through both Google Maps (2D) and Earth (3D). And just to be a smartass, the entire collection of maps is entitled "From My Place," and all of them either begin or end from my apartment in the Uptown neighborhood here in Chicago.
Only one problem, though; that although I've actually done all ten bike trips shown in the above master map, and took copious amounts of photos and videos during each, I was only able to get three of those maps actually finished (1, 2 and 9) before having one of my computers crash last summer, the one I had been using as an external hard drive and that actually held the hundreds of photos and videos I had taken for the other eight map routes shown above. And that just depressed the hell out of me, which brought a quick end to the bike maps last summer, and then of course the autumn finally rolled around here in Chicago and it suddenly became too cold again to bicycle, so off into winter storage went the bike, where it still remains to this day.
Oh, and speaking of "why aren't more people doing this," did I mention that the map you're seeing above (the one I made of the southern half of Lincoln Park) has now been viewed and played with by 25,000 freaking people over at Google? Yeah, I just learned about this myself, in fact; turns out that for the last several months, that particular map has been featured on the front page of the "Google Customized Maps" page online, as one of those "See what Google users are already doing with this technology!" amateur examples that these kinds of companies love highlighting, as a way of inspiring other amateurs to create similar maps for wherever it is that they live. I have to confess, I'm really kind of thrilled that this many people have ended up enjoying this goofy little amateur map I put together; I have to confess, simply this and this alone makes the entire endeavor "worth it" for me, and makes me determined to get the rest of these eight maps finally finished before Labor Day this year, exactly six months from when I'm writing this particular entry.
Okay, so that's it for now; and don't forget, to check these out for yourself, you can always go by jasonpettus.com/maps. Wish me luck, and let me know if you're in Chicago and would ever like to go on one of these rides with me! Riding companions always wanted!
Back when I still lived in my collegetown of Columbia, Missouri, in the early 1990s when I was visiting both Chicago and Manhattan on a regular basis, among the many pleasures I experienced back then was this -- I loved while in these big cities to be able to find some comfortable, quiet little public corner for myself, some padded chair in the back of some cafe or pub somewhere, next to a giant window overlooking a busy street. Back then it was one of the things I truly treasured about being in Chicago or New York, that I simply couldn't achieve in my podunk little collegetown, a sense of being a part of something just much, much larger than yourself, while still having your little spot in it all where you can sit and enjoy the random, always changing view.
I'll never forget this, that the day I moved to Chicago, I stood on the Michigan Avenue bridge downtown that first evening and declared to myself at the age of 25 that my life had now officially begun; that I would no longer have nights of sitting around thinking about the stuff I would eventually do once I 'grew up,' that the things I now did with my time are officially the things I'm doing as a grown-up. I still think about this a lot on nights like these; I think about the quiet, calm, assured contentment I get from evenings like these, of reading a good book and people-watching and feeling like an active part of this giant urban organism we call Chicago. If I can end up filling an entire adulthood with evenings like these, punctuated with occasional more exciting nights and events, I will consider that by the end a pretty happy adult life indeed.
Anyway, just some idle thoughts on a quiet, contemplative Saturday night; and now I'm off to go buy some beer and watch the original '50s The Blob on Svengoolie. BERR-WYYN!
