So ... it's been, what, 3½ weeks since I posted in here? Damn.I have had stuff to write about. I even had pictures. The ones here, though, are pretty old at this point ... they were from a couple of weekends back when Ed and I headed down to the Chicago Flower & Garden show to schmooze about the worm business, and to shoot some video for the Green Tech Chicago blog.
While, on one level, I've been attributing my not writing in here to the disappearance of my little "sig" graphic down at the bottom of these (although, as you can tell, I've replaced it with one hosted on LJ - something I probably should have done years ago when LJ put in the Scrapbook!). Now, lest you think that this represents me mourning a somewhat trivial loss (although I also had several years of graphics and audio files for the blog that evaporated at the same time), the reality of this is that I have somewhere in the neighborhood of five thousand posts between this and
btripp_books which now need to be edited with the new image source URL. Even if it only takes 10 seconds to get to a post, open the post to edit, paste in the new URL, save the post, and move to the next (and that's a "lowest possible" ballpark figure), it will take me pretty much a solid day to make that happen ... with it likely filling the better part of a week. NOT something I have time to mess with at the moment.
In reality, however, my not posting in here probably has more to do with my having been manic on getting stuff up for the aforementioned Green Tech Chicago blog ... which we started a month or so back on Chicago Now. One of the "branding" things we've been doing with this is shooting a lot of little mini-interviews with folks we meet at conferences, etc. ... and we've had 3-4 of these over the past month, so there's been a LOT of video (both to feature in blog posts and for me to edit). This has been working out great so far ... and needless to say, chit-chatting with people about their "Green" projects is a heck of a lot more appealing that my previous gig over there doing The Job Stalker!Anyway, as to the pics, the theme of the Flower Show this year was "art", and they had some interesting installations, most notably (to me, at least), was this giant paint brush hanging so as to give the impression of having just painted a trail of flowers. Since we were there to make contacts (and not look at the vegetation), we spent most of the time there over in the "expo" part, chatting up various folks and getting a number of interviews (which are all up on the GTC blog). Some exhibits were pretty basic (a handful looked less polished than some of my 13-year-old's history fair project boards!), but some were quite tarted up, and this shot of a booth for a kitchen implement (I know, it's a step away from "flower & garden", but there was a LOT of stuff like that being featured) caught my eye (after all, if you're going to "tart something up", might as well go with Betty Boop).
I'd like to be able to tell you that I'll be back in here with regular updates (of course, now that I have the "sig issue" fixed, at least for present and future posts, I don't have that acting as an impediment), but between other projects, I'm spending a lot of keyboard time on things that have deadlines. Speaking of which, I had stumbled into a part-time paying gig with an old high school friend, which was providing me with about 20% of an income, and was something that I had been working on for the past few months. Unfortunately, we had massively different communications styles (they would pretty much ONLY communicate via texts, full of idiosyncratic abbreviations and short-hand that I'd not gotten familiar with), and they terminated the situation last week. Which sucks. However, another gig has come in, an agency looking for help with two projects ... one "ghost blogging" for one of their clients, and writing copy for another client's new web site. I have high hopes for this, as it sounds like they'll have writing needs on-going, but it's not explicitly as many hours as my old friend's project (and I'm still harboring some hope that something will come back from that), but is at about an equivalent per-hour rate.
Of course, if the "worm biz" keeps growing (and we're looking at getting some seed funding in the next few months), it might start actually paying me something, and if I can extract a full-time salary from that, all the resume-cranking and project hunting becomes moot. Ack. I miss having a job.
