My new apartment

Just a quick post - more to come. I am moving into a studio at Duboce & Church this weekend. I've basically been calling it "the heart of the gay". Already, as I walked home from picking up the keys, I was thrilled to see the gay boys on every corner. This is one of those romantic visions I moved to SF for.

My new place is small but it's really bright and the kitchen has a full-sized gas stove, a bigger fridge than I've had for the last 6 months, and built-in shelves. There's room for my table & chairs, plus room for a nice chopping board island that I've been coveting. Though it's technically a studio and I will have to put my bed and couch in the same room there is a HUGE closet. It's about 19 feet long, walk-in, 3.5 feet wide, and the back wall (all 19 feet of it) is covered in built-in shelves. Plus the ceilings are close to 10 feet high and I can put a second level of storage up at about 7.5 feet.

Pics to come as I work on moving myself in and taking advantage of all that space. I love vertical space.

To-Do list #1

Now that I'm not on Facebook anymore, I've been noticing when I get the urge to share information. Thoughts that pop into my head, interesting things I find on the internet, blog posts I want to write are starting to pile up and I don't currently have a lot of time to pump those out. So I'll start small. Better to start small than not start at all.

Sidenote: When I first started videoblogging, there were several great clients for subscribing to people's vlogs and I used to start/end my day catching up on a select roster of people's posts. I wonder if I will go back to a model like that eventually or if I will come up with entirely new ways to get daily content. Currently I get links and interesting tidbits of information (like Dio's death) from Twitter and IRC conversations with co-workers.

Back to the first to-do list. I'm sure there will be many but this is the stuff I think I need to start with:

1) Re-do my website in order to host all my blogs in one place and get off of the .blogspot namespace. This will also have the added benefit of cleaning up my web portfolio and having a better showcase of what I've learned and done with Wordpress in the past year or so. I originally set this up in my last semester of school as a requirement for a class because we needed an online presence. Funnily enough I now help lots of people have online content and yet completely ignore my own.
2) Set up a feed reader - either Google reader or some similar option - and subscribe to my favourite blogs and online magazine content
3) Move away from Go Daddy hosting - I need to get my own server up and running and learn how to manage it instead of using the McDonald's of web hosting.
4) Keep a list of blog post topics that I want to cover and make a habit of writing at least one of those posts per week.
5) Vlog more, vlog often.
6) Build a dog house. I'm putting this here because I've read that you never do the last thing on your to-do lists, and I'm okay if this one doesn't happen.

Leaving Facebook

My friend mhoye covered everything I would say about why I'm choosing to leave Facebook (and then some, he gathers all the privacy stuff well!).

I'm really hoping that by leaving Facebook I will be reclaiming some time and creative energy to revitalize this blog, make more vlog posts, re-do my website so that it's up to date, and generally enjoy intentional communication over the deluge of lazy input that Facebook provides in spades.

There was a time when it seemed that in order to learn what was going on around town you had to have a Facebook account but now that feature has been drowned out by so much publicity that I don't even look to the events anymore. I expect my friends to tell me when there's something awesome going on. I will look to the local papers if I'm desperately seeking an interesting night out.

Living without Facebook will be hard at first because I'll probably fear that I'm missing something. I will most miss the casual posting of media that my friends are so good at doing - the links, photos, videos. I'll be encouraging people to blog, to email me, to post on flickr or other content sharing sites. I'm also going to trust that when I see the people I love in person they will whip out the baby/trip/food photos.

I'm doing this in a conscious effort to become a creator again. I've been sitting back and consuming too much.

Having been a part of Facebook since the "early days" when you had to have a university email address to join, I've enjoyed watching it grow. At one point, I applauded Facebook for being a great teaching tool on privacy because I believed that it was teaching average internet users more about granularity and control over access. Now they have gone too far. I was originally planning to stick around to bear witness to whatever the next violation of privacy would be, the one after that, and the one after that. Instead I'm going to lead by example. I will have a full and media-rich life on the internet without Facebook, and I will happily discuss the awesomeness of this with anyone. I will actively encourage people to try it out for themselves, just as I love to encourage people to quit smoking, eat more salad, and learn to run.

See you 'round here more often. Don't be a stranger.