The rules are simple. Write seven things about yourself and then tag seven people, link to their blogs and ask them to do the same.

1. I have a hard time feeling loved. I mean, I know people love me, and I believe in their love, I just don’t feel it. I think this may be one of the main reasons I don’t believe in God.  Loving other people I have no problem with.
2. I value loyalty in friendships and relationships more than any other trait or attribute.
3. I hate the process of writing poetry, although I love having the poems when I’ve finished writing them. I’m my own favourite poet.  I used to enjoy writing when the result didn’t matter to me as much. Since I’ve been pushing myself to improve, turning towards danger and risk in my own writing, the process has been draining, wearing me out.  I started writing again in earnest at around the same time I started exercising and eating better.
4. This isn’t really a secret anymore since I’ve started the Clean Livin’ blog, but I’ve lost 87 pounds since mid-June 2008 (so far) and the kicker is that I really haven’t been trying that hard. If I’d known it would be this easy, I’d have started sooner. I guess I shouldn’t oversell the “easy” of it, because it’s a lot of work, but it’s not difficult.  It’s so simple, in fact, that I can’t believe I’ve been this overweight for so long. By this time next year I won’t be a fat guy anymore (although I’ll still have some weight to lose, I suppose).
5. I try to be honourable whenever I can.  Honour isn’t something that we value as a society, or even think about often, but for me it goes beyond doing the right thing and further towards being a right thing. I like to think of myself as an instrument of good in the world. I’m still working on this one because it’s so much easier to take the path of lesser resistance much of the time. Honour can be unpleasant.
6. I’m pretentious in a lot of ways.  I use British spellings for words like colour, honourable, favourite.  It’s a matter of personal style. Hell, I have a u in my name where it doesn’t belong either.  I used to read books or watch films that I thought I should be reading, or that would make me sound cool to be knowledgeable about.  In most other ways, though, I’m pretty down to earth.  I have no “guilty pleasures” because I’m not ashamed of liking things that I genuinely like, such as music or films.  “Top Gun” and “Roadhouse” are two of my favourite movies, but they’re not guilty pleasures – they’re movies that I enjoy watching.
7. I don’t know what the purpose of my life is, if I even have one, but it’s something that I think about often.

For the past four months I’ve been on the path to getting healthier, losing weight, and exercising regularly.

To help me stay focused, and to document the process, I’ve started a separate blog dedicated to my heath and fitness routines, workouts, nutritional knowledge, and thoughts and goals on my way to getting into better shape.

I titled it Clean Livin’: How I Got Healthy, One Day At A Time. Give it a read and let me know what you think.  So far I’ve lost over 60 pounds and already feel a huge improvement (even if my weight loss isn’t as readily noticeable as you’d think after having lost 60 pounds).  I still have a long way to go, but I’m confident that I can do this.

Thanks to everyone for their support.

On 26 April 2006 I’ll turn 30, which is not such a big deal, although I am not a millionaire as I had planned, nor do I have throngs of beautiful women trying to clutch a piece of me as I walk to my limo (at best, there are like, four women, who mostly keep their distance and at worst go through my garbage).

Anyway, I mention it only because it seems like a milestone, and because I was informed earlier this evening that I don’t update Jough.com enough.

I have a new fad web project launching on Mayday, so I’ll try to post something here when that goes live. It’s no big deal, just something strange and fun that the kids can play with. My poetry can be a bit… dark… and my other web projects tend to be pretty stolid and austere, so this one’ll be a fun change (as was the t-shirt store).

I’m trying to be more disciplined with my web development so I can make re-useable modules which will enable me to build new sites faster. And in the wings are also more tools for writers, and other back-burner projects that I really should have finished long ago. I am only one man, despite rumours to the contrary.

I looked around for various stylii to fit in the little slot on my device when I saw a review for the Montblanc Touch Pen – a gold or platinum plated stylus made especially for my handheld model, the Palm Vx!

I searched for a deal and found one for just $5.00. I got the platinum-plated one not only because it looks silvery-er and cooler and better matches the blue-hued Palm I have, but also because platinum is a more valuable metal than gold.

“The new designer Palm stylus bestows the style and prestige associated with Montblanc’s traditional fine writing instruments against a new category of high-tech products,” says Marion Davidson, vice president of marketing at Montblanc.

Indeed.

It has a nice heft to it considering it’s mostly made of brass, and that little Montblanc star just looks up at me while I tap away.

I’m telling you, I feel more prosperous just holding this thing.

Well, finding accessories for a four year old Palm model was tough enough, but I was surprised to find that it really hadn’t come down in price that much.

Immediately I searched eBay for Palm IIIx memory and of course found all of the listings for my handheld. Used ones were going for around $20 (some more, some less, depending on condition). Yoinks! I did find a few Palm IIIxe handhelds, which were much like my IIIx but with twice the memory. The price was right, so off we go, right?

Well… not so fast. While I was there, I figured I’d check out the pricing on the next model up, the Palm Vx. It too has 8Mb of memory and is a much sleeker “executive” model which won many awards for design, etc. The Vx came out about six months after I got my IIIx, and to be honest, while I liked the IIIx, I’ve wanted a Vx since they hit the shelves.

So I found one on eBay for less than I could get a IIIxe. And get a load of this: the ones I found are NEW.

How is this possible for a 3½ year old model?

Well, as it turns out, a mobile modem manufacturer named “CreSenda” put together a wireless package to sell to realtors that would come with a CreSenda modem, real estate software, and a CreSenda-branded Palm Vx computer. Instead of the silvery aluminum shell of the usual Vx this one came in a cool-blue tinted titanium shell. Very slick.

Evidently, this package didn’t sell very well, and CreSenda sold off their inventory to wholesalers when they went under. Their loss is my gain.

I got this in last week from my eBay auction, but it was DOA – the screen was shot, generating random clicks and not responding to the stylus. Ugh.

Luckily I bought from a dealer who had more than one – this guy was great – I sent the broken one back to him on Monday and I got the replacement on Friday (yesterday). This time it was missing the stylus, but hey… the dealer said he’d send it to me, and he’s going to reimburse me for shipping it back, too. Great deal.

The really nice thing about getting a 3½ year old model is that the accessories are really really cheap. Ebay is just a treasure trove of brand-spankin’-new Palm gear.

Good stuff all around. Now I’m off to bid on accessories which are $5.00 or less…

I’m still no grandmaster, but at least I’m slowly moving up, making progress, etc.

To follow my progress, you can track my rating at the Official USCF Ratings page.

And many mooooooooooore!

Now all I have to do is finish writing my shopping cart and work on accessing the payment and authorization gateway. Whee-ha!

I’ve been feeling sick and wheezy the past few days, actually going on over a week now. Maybe I have “consumption.”

Meanwhile, things are moving slowly forward with a number of projects on which I’m working…

Projects
In the works are many many wonderful things. I’ve mostly been working on Plagiarist.com, my poetry site, of late, because that’s where I receive the most visitors. At this time I’m in the midst of working on a customer login system (I should say a secure customer login system) and a way then of session-tracking to re-verify a user over multiple pages of the site once they’re logged-in.

Okay, I’m also working on a shopping cart to groovify the PoetryNotes™ catalog, and make it easier for people to place orders (not that it’s all that difficult now using PayPal) and snazz things up a bit.

Then of course there’s content. Besides my newfound commitment to my web journal, I’m also getting things ready to begin accepting submissions to The Plagiarist: A Magazine of Poetry and the Arts, and of course there’s new poetry submissions to process (which, depite my submission form, really doesn’t make things easier on me). Then I have to track down poets, publishers, and agents to acquire permissions to re-print things, and answer e-mail, and sort through and add submitted comments, etc.

Then there’s another aspect of my day: writing. I haven’t been writing much poetry lately because I’ve been so busy writing about poetry. If I’m not writing PoetryNotes™ eBooks, I’m busy writing two other eBooks – one on “How to Write a Research Paper” and another on “How to Analyze a Poem” both of which should be useful to people.

On top of that, I committed to writing a series of technical articles for SitePoint about standards-based web design using my favourite acronyms like XML, CSS, and XHTML. Although I’m looking forward to that.

I’m looking forward to all of it – I just tend to bite off more than I can chew, take on too many things at once. I won’t even get into the languishing Joycean.org or the as-yet unfinished (i.e. barely begun) Open Poetry Project.

I just need more time in a day. Fifty-two hours oughta do it, if I pass on sleep.

But before you dig out the violins and strap on your pointy hats for my pity party, just know that this is what I do for fun. I swamp myself with an overabundance of work and then rush to complete it all. Then I fuck-off for several days and watch DVDs.

Man, it’s a good thing I don’t have a job. Where would I find the time?

It didn’t seem pointfull to re-archive my old posts that focused mostly on a site re-design or just mentioned that I switched web hosting companies and if you’re seeing this post, you’re seeing the site at its new server, etc.

Even with the posts that I skipped, it’s pretty obvious that I’ve been rather lax with posting updates to my personal (this) site, and the reason has mostly been that until now it’s been a major hassle to post new entries.

Hopefully by employing this new system that will change. It’s not that I don’t want to share with “the world” or don’t like to type – I send a tonne of e-mail every day – but the steps I used to go through included:

1. Open “TextPad” to edit the appropriate XML file.
2. Type my entry by hand into the XML templates I cooked up for myself, including the XML tags and link URLs and titles.
3. Fire up “WS_FTP” and upload the XML file.
4. Upload any images I linked in the entry.
5. Proof my entry in a web browser.
6. Make changes in “TextPad” (there were always changes I wanted to make).
7. Re-upload the XML file(s).
8. Check again in a browser.
9. Close “WS_FTP”
10. Close “TextPad”
11. Take a rest!

Now, granted, that really wasn’t that much work, but it was tedious enough that I didn’t make many entries.

So the idea now is that I’ll post here at least as often as I post to various bulletin boards (like Web Hosting Talk or DVD Talk or the Plagiarist Poetry Discussion Forums) but probably not as much as I send e-mail.

I may start to “double-post” though – if I send something interesting to someone in e-mail I may cut and paste it here, and likewise with posts on BBs.

Anyway, this post has been a post-about-posting, which is necessary from time to time but mostly self-indulgent, as I suppose all “blogs” (web logs) are.

I’m not sure I’m the blogging type, but it’s been too long since I’ve updated the site, and after all, no one’s really going to come to Jough.com except to read things about me. So to those whom I’ve abandoned for so long, get ready to be happy.