It’s been a while since I’ve posted here on my personal blog.  I have tried to do some different things with person blogs, but I really find it hard to write on them.  I think that’s partially because I spend so much time writing in a personal manner on the other blogs that I write on.

I write about personal interests on those niche sites, and it leaves me with almost no content for this personal blog. I don’t know that I’ll ever keep these updated like I should – but I do try.

Still if you want to find my most recent updates you’ll need to look at AppleGazette.com, TVJab.com or Travelbrook.com

I just wrote an article about it at Apple Gazette, comparing it to the AppleTV.

I’m probably going to be on Xbox Live a lot, and I’ll be looking for people to play with, so if you’re on too, let me know.

My ID is: infinitymurph

I started with My Tech Lists last year.

I was hired by the Bloggy Network a few month later.

I started blogging on Apple Gazette for them initially, then when I went full time, we added Forever Geek to the mix. Now, I’m proud to announce, I’ll be working on LifeSpy as well.

LifeSpy is a great blog filled with life tips on everything from computing to money management, to cooking to business endeavors. It’s a great resource, and I’m very glad to be a part of it.

I will be contributing mostly “How To” styled posted to the site. I have already written my first two:

How To Blog

and

How To Write a Novel

I’ll be writing about just about anything you can imagine on LifeSpy, and I’m really glad to have the chance to spread my creative wings a bit…I love Apple, and I love being a Geek…but sometimes it’s nice to write about other things as well…and LifeSpy will give me that opportunity.

Thanks to everyone who has been reading my work, and helped me get to this point. I’m very appreciative of you guys, and I hope you’ll come on over to LifeSpy and check it out.

Also, while you’re checking things out…be sure and check out TV Jab, a new member of the Bloggy Network family written by my long time buddy Drew. If you’re into TV, TV Jab should be the FIRST place you check every morning. He’s doing lots of cool stuff over there.

Sometimes, you can say things with music that you can’t actually say yourself. I remember it was like that for me when I was in high school (as it was for many of us sensitive types). It hasn’t been that way in my life for a very long time – at least not the way that it was in high school.

Now I hear songs about being a Dad, a husband, and things like that….which is probably why I don’t listen to much other than country these days…(The Strokes don’t really talk about fatherhood do they?), but the songs are still just as powerful.

There is one right now that I keep listening to over and over again from country singer Rodney Akins, called “Watching You” about how his son is constantly watching everything he does, and emulating that. There is another on the same album where he sings about taking a young man aside and scaring the hell out of said young man before the young buck goes on a date with his daughter. While my little girl is nowhere near old enough for me to be worried about that, every now and then I see a little boy in her pre-school look at her in a way that I don’t quite like, and I’m ready to take him into a corner and put the fear of God into him…so I can relate to that song.

Sometimes, I think we use music to express things like that…

…and I wonder if sometimes we can’t tell what people are actually thinking and feeling based on what music they are listening to. Perhaps we could all better understand what our spouses were going through just by listening to their playlists.

(See…this is the kinda crap I write at 3 o’clock in the morning…must stop blogging…need sleep)

Anyway…since I have switch over to AppleTV instead of cable, I find myself listening to my iTunes music library WAY more than I used to. You know how you just put the TV on a channel for noise sometimes? Well, now we’re just putting it on Shuffle and letting the music play. I think that’s where this is coming from, and why I’m thinking about it..as I type this, I have the AppleTV playing shuffled songs right now…

Regardless, I must now attempt to sleep…even though I am in no way tired…I have a feeling it’s going to be a long weekend with NAB coming up on Sunday…and I’ll be blogging my brains out (assuming there is anything interesting announced at NAB).

So, for those of you that have been wondering when I was going to post something new here…well, this was it…disappointing, or what?

Thinking about things from my days in school, I was reminded of just how lucky I was to have the amazing teachers that I did…and if not for them, I don’t think I would be doing what I’m doing today. I don’t think I would be the person that I am today, and for that I will be forever endebted to them.

In Junior High I was lucky enough to get into Mr. Forrester’s History class. The man had a passion about history that made it much more entertaining than it had ever been to me before (and that stuck with me, I love the History Channel, history books, and history in general). He made history really exciting to learn about…but it wasn’t just world history or US history that he taught me.

At that same age, I also got into comic books…and Mr. Forrester was into comic books too. The first comic book I ever purchased on my own as Spawn #1. I started comics in the era of the rockstar artists, the computer coloring, the high quality paper, the loose morals, and the low quality story. If I’d just seen the Image books of the time, and nothing else, I don’t know if I would have stayed with comics as I got older…but Mr. Forrester was a comic book historian as well…and he showed me everything from the early days of comics. The early DC stuff mostly, where I learned about the Crisis on the Infinite Earths, the days of the Earth-2s, 3s, Primes, and more…all the way back to the original Green Lantern and Flash…and ultimately, the beginning of Superhero comics with Superman himself.

This was important for several reasons.

1) He showed me where comics had been, and introduced me to a history and legacy that I still love to learn about to this day.

2) He was an adult…and he liked comics, and he liked cartoons. He showed me as a kid that it was completely fine to be an adult and love comics and cartoons. I have never felt the need to “grow up” like so many other people do. I have never felt like I was being a “kid” because I was into these things…and now as an adult I play with my 3 year old with Voltron toys, Ninja Turtles, and Barbie dolls…just like the other kids, and that lets us have a special relatioinship that lots of other parents don’t have.

He also treated me like an adult, even though I wasn’t. That’s something that has always stuck with me, and something that I apply to raising my own kids. I treat my little girl like she’s an equal (to a point) and I think it has helped her be as advanced as she is.

It turned out when I was in the 8th grade, Mr. Forrester moved up to being an 8th grade History teacher…so I was lucky enough to have him twice. I truely think that if I hadn’t been in his class, and he and his wife hadn’t been my friends, that I wouldn’t be the person that I am today. My experiences with them are only one of the many things that have helped shape who I am as an adult, but it’s an invaluable piece that I’m grateful to have.

I struck gold a second time with History class in high school. A teacher of mine named Mr. May was also a huge comics fan (I don’t know what it was with history teachers and comics in my town…must have been something in the water), and was, and still is, a good friend. He showed me some different and interesting ways to learn in class…and he was also my friend, even going so far as to pick my comics up for me at the local comic store (which was 40 miles away) and helping to feed my comics habit. I have managed to turn my comics hobby into a career with Forevergeek.com – so I am eternally grateful to Mr. May for continuing to show me that being an adult, and loving comics was ok.

I don’t want to make this post too long…and I have more teachers to write about…so I’ll break this one into two parts…next time…the English Teachers…

I don’t know exactly why that is, but it has been the case numerous times in my life. There are very few fiction projects that I have seen through to the end. Most of the time, learning the end of the story for myself has been enough. I wonder why that is?

Well, I got back from the Dallas Comic Con Fan Days event a little while ago. There wasn’t as much there as I’d hoped there would be, but I got some good stuff that you’ll see on Forever Geek.com, including an Official word on Ghostbusters 3 from Ernie Hudson.

I didn’t get to talk to everyone that I wanted, and as really surprised by 1) the size of the show (much smaller than I thought), and 2) the number of people there (it was INSANE. I could barely move through the crowd on Sat).

I saw 300 in the Imax on Friday night. I can’t really say that it was any better than seeing it in a normal theater. The “Imax Experience” was completely lost on me. Still a great movie, and I was glad to see it a second time…I just wasn’t impressed with the Imax itself.

I also was reminded of how much I hate cities. I’m a country boy, more or less, and the town I grew up in had 253 people in it. The town where I went to school had a 7,000 people in it…and the city I live in now has about 100,000 people in it. That’s enough. I don’t think I can take anymore than that.

Too much concrete, too many people. It’s just not my thing.

I was going to watch The Holiday or Casino Royale tonight, but I think I’m just going to go to bed. I have to type a few things up, and get this stuff posted for tomorrow, but I’m just beat from driving.

Novel writing is a very solitary profession…which is one reason why I don’t think that I’ve ever gotten past the third chapter of a book (and boy have I attempted some stinkers). I’ve had a much easier time completing screenplays (not that they’re any good, or that you’ll ever get to read them) but I think that was partially because others were always going to be involved in the productions, so I was passing it along to them to get their feedback as I went. Now granted, I have had a lot of false starts with those as well, but I have completed a few screenplays and a handful of comic book scripts…but never a full work of prose.

I don’t consider my blogging to be the same thing, because it’s reporting, speculating, and commenting, but not creating a story from scratch (at least, the blogs I write aren’t). There is no beginning, middle and end to Apple News (at least I hope not)…and there will always be Geek Stuff to talk about….but as someone who writes constantly, and has written constantly for at least ten years (and I’m only 26 people…that’s a long time for me) there’s a certain satisfaction from writing fiction that I don’t get from the blogging that I do…on the other hand, there is a satisfaction that I get from blogging that I will never get from writing fiction. So, I’m thinking about starting a fictional blog to blog a “novel” on.

It wouldn’t need to be updated multiple times a day or anything, but it might be a way to scratch that novel writing itch without staring at a blank Open Office page with no chance of feedback. At least by blogging it, a few people might be interested in reading it. Right now my audience for something like that would be limited to my wife who really doesn’t have time to read my crap anyway.

I don’t know…I’ll probably start it, and never finish it. Who knows…

I find myself increasingly frustrated with digg, although I still find it to be a very useful resource.

Digg, aside, several of the “A-List” blogs have picked up the little joke that we put together (special thanks to Ahmed from Tech SoapBox for getting the random rumor generator going), and so far I haven’t seen any real backlash from Apple fans.

I don’t expect any “backlash” from them, though. I think we all enjoy speculating to a degree, and I think it’s fun to predict, and it’s fun to entertain rumors…but there are sometimes when Apple rumors just drive me nuts. I don’t think the sites that report them are making them up…but I do think more fact checking should go into reporting these things.

I’ve been guilty of getting a rumor in an email and running with it (that whole “illuminious” thing…yup started at Apple Gazette), but that was from someone I’d received into from before. I don’t plan to run too many rumors on the site, unless I think there is some credibility to them. I don’t want Apple Gazette to be an “Apple Rumors” site. I want Apple Gazette to an Apple news site. I want the readers to find information and entertainment about their Macs, iPods, and iPhones. I hope that shows.

I fully intend for Apple Gazette to be driving force in the Apple blog-o-sphere for many years to come. We’re working on it, and I think that, in time, we’ll be able to build a level of credibility that other sites might not be able to, just from NOT reporting some of the more “out there” rumors just because it’s a slow news day.

I hope that comes off in the posts that I choose to make, and I welcome as much reader feedback as you’re willing to give. I’m interested in writing about, and reporting about, what you’re interested in reading. I’m working on some cool things that I hope to announce in the next week or two, that I think will help take Apple Gazette to the next level.

I hope you’ll be there for the ride.

Problem is, I can’t really find anything that I think will do a better job than just using the web-based interfaces of these two blogging platforms.

I looked at MarsEdit for Mac, and it was kinda cool, but I had such a hard time finding where to edit the timestamp on a post that I just gave up.

I looked at iBlog for Mac as well, and I didn’t care much for the interface.

I haven’t looked at the Performancing plug-in for Firefox yet because, frankly, Firefox has been giving me grief on my Macs since version 2 came out. I’ve really stopped using it all that much, and have mostly switched over to Safari or Shiira.

If you’ve tried any desktop blogging software on OSX and have had success with it, please let me know, I’d love to try it out.