A couple of talks and encounters related to jobs and careers lately got me thinking on where, in that area, I was actually going.

Some who'd give my resume a cursory glance might think I started off with a plan, got sidetracked a bit in a call center, then got back into new and better forms of writing.

I'm probably lucky (or unlucky, depending on your perspective) enough to have had jobs that were all relevant to the career that I seem to be most suited for.

But the thing is, I still don't know what that career, exactly, is.


Let me break it down, for all our sakes.

Writing is
- what I can do well,
- what I like to do, and
- what I can get paid to do.

But here's another skill I have that meets all three criteria -
Talking to people.

I've done it in customer service,
I'm doing it in internet marketing,
I can probably do it as a virtual assistant once I complete the necessary skills of being the equivalent of an online secretary. (Yes, there is such a thing as that nowadays...)

It's just that writing has a stronger pull on me.
The most ideal situation for me is to be able to do both within a job context.
Just talking to people or just writing will feel too imbalanced for me in the end, I've realized.

Here's another dilemma I'm facing with my writing future:

If I were given a choice on what writing career _exactly_ would I want to pursue,
... I wouldn't know.

Sure, being a fiction writer would probably feel more liberating.
But it has higher risks, and most likely less money.
And I'm not ashamed to say I like money.
I probably wouldn't mind not getting recognized for my awesome prose until the day I die, but I'd like it more if I wasn't starving until the day I died. You know?
(Despite my saying this, though, those short stories and NaNovels will end up getting edited and polished sooner or later, because it's just plain fun and nobody will/can stop me.)

And what about the kind of writing I've been increasing my experience on, in four jobs out of five?

Right now, as a company blogger, it's fun, but I don't really see myself doing it forever.
Or at least, doing it _for someone else_ forever.
I'm just sticking around until I learn the ropes, and can finally call myself an expert in social media, marketing, SEO/SEM, etc.
So I could do it on my own, for myself.

I could also keep up writing reviews for magazines.
Or writing copy for websites, articles for newsletters.
Heck, I planned to try out all kinds of commercial and professional writing on my online portfolio. I'm that curious, and that good. (Fwahaha. YES.)
But, I will always be looking for a place/area where I can write for myself.
But when I get there, what kind of writing will I write?


I was sitting on a bus staring at space when I was thinking like this. Then this strange stream of thought just hit me.

All these blogs I'm reading about writing, blogging, marketing, mediating.
Aren't they all, basically, about talking, communicating?
Just basically getting on a one-on-one conversation with your fellow man.
Eye-to-eye, face-to-face, preferably with no sugarcoating or BS involved.

And then this other train of thought, which has been choo-chooing at the back of my head for as long as I've become of Buddhism, screeched;
"When/How/Why have we all become so complicated that we have to _study_ how to talk plainly to each other?"


I'd like to think that, though I have very poor chances of fulfilling my young dreams of becoming a reclusive, super-intelligent scientist/researcher/important-person-who-gets-cited-in-books now, that through my daily experiences, I am still getting my slice of awesome science.

I can take this whole marketing bag - PR, company blogging, business ad and all - as a means to understand and observe human behavior in a personal way, especially from a unique perspective; that of the moderately misanthropic.

I may not be able to share my discoveries and experience formally and in MLA format, but I can still share them anyway. My ideas may proliferate in the form of Facebook statuses, blog memes, internet quizzes, radical thought movements, T-shirt designs. I don't care. All I'd care about is that it gets spread.

And maybe a brighter apple will be able to build on my theories and ideas, scatter _that_ stuff across the world, and hopefully let that make its way back to me.

But, hey. I love libraries. I may not be able to get too technical on it, but new scientific discoveries can get me excited. I could watch Discovery Channel or National Geographic all day.

But I am also equally interested in the latest memes, trends, slang terms, UrbanDictionary definition. In which artist's creepy backmasking techniques the new thought movement is coming from. What these people were thinking when they made this website.

Because I'm all about thoughts. Ideas. All that ether hanging just above people's heads.
Talking. Communicating. How it doesn't have to be restricted to people like me, who're interested in doing it for the rest of their lives. Because we're all just supposed to do it naturally.

So we'd grow, and learn, and all be better for it.

So that it doesn't have to be just people like me who'd worry about what to say and how to say it.

I've been doing a lot of stuff other than my office work. Things mostly related to my bands. It's been quite a while since I got busy writing chords to songs and practicing them on the studio. It's been really difficult trying to squeeze the time.

videos
As for now, my youtube videos (cover songs and tutorials) are on hold. Maybe I could get back on December with some new tutorials. I really really would want to start my php programming tutorials. I wonder if theres a good handful of audiences out there that would want screen cast-type lectures.

Sports
Our company is now having its yearly SPORTSFEST and I'm on the badminton team. Well I can't play basketball 'cause I really don't play it XD It's just sad that the bowling competition isn't pulling through T_T

It's Manny Pacquiao's fight this weekend against Cotto. Go Manny!!!

Music
Yeah as I said I've been writing the chords to the songs that we're performing. Since tabs and chords of certain songs aren't always available on the internet I kind'a got used to writing my own. PLus one of my bandmates (Arun of Moonspeak) taught me a technique to get the basslines of a song.

... use a program to alter the pitch of a song until you hear only the bassline LOL

I didn't really think of that but i worked! I used Audacity for my audio editing stuff and it works pretty well. The rest is still traditionally by ear ^_^

Officework
OUr client is getting kind'a cranky but still workable. I did learn many things on DRUPAL programming and it's making my work pretty much faster, more modular and closer to Drupal standards.

Health
I'm still having trouble inspiring myself to get out of bed early in the morning .. :-( also I'm trying to loose some weight :p yeah I've been trying to eat less during the evening. I hope it works. Oh yeah I have to exercise too I forgot about that LOL

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
5. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
6. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

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Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

My band(s) are performing on two gigs this month. That's why i wasn't able to do youtube guitar covers / lessons huhuhu T_T

November 21 - JCRUNCH at FREEDOM BAR (AsianChickenFest)

November 28 - U.P. Ame no Jidai (AsianChickenFest  Moonspeak)

4 songs each set XD well two are recycled but still very hectic whew! wish us luck ^_^



well if you want to see behind the pixelated image please watch us perform on those dates XD

it will be a blast!!!

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

What is it about October and November that makes me so lazy? I've noticed that trend whenever I look back on my journal posts of times long past. I'm so lazy I haven't even sorted the BL from the doujinshi from the samples of hentai I read. Note to self: when they said that once you've read hentai, you've read them all, they weren't kidding! ^^; After a while they all kinda blurred into the same comic. I'm still amused though - I mean, now when I make fanfic where Kaga starts talking about them I know what I'm writing about.

I just realized that the latter paragraph might be too much information to give out. orz.

Nothing to say about work, because work is hell as always. No cosplay for me because they just gave me work on weekends. O_o; I can mention that I'm speed typing what looks like a Weasley AU in between calls. I don't think while I write it, unlike all the unfinished HikaGo that needs focus to work on.

( a collective of pictures I may or may not have shared here before )

The empire strikes back

In recent weeks, we've taken huge steps towards blocking spam accounts on LiveJournal. In fact, we've suspended as many as 30,000 accounts in a single day! We've implemented several pre-emptive measures to prevent the creation of spam accounts, and we've honed our detection of suspicious content. Spam bots are a crafty lot, so we'll continue to refine our tactics and keep up the good fight to keep you safe from spam attacks on LiveJournal.

RSS feeds again

If you're addicted to xkcd_rss, icanhaschzbrgr, or other syndicated feeds, we're pleased to report that we've resolved the update error that was mucking up your RSS feeds. While content was being pulled correctly, it wasn't being posted to the feeds themselves. Late last week, we finally nailed down what we hope was the root problem, so content should post properly. We thank you for your patience.

Wii have killer CSI Deadly Intent contests!

c_s_i

If you're a gamer who loves CSI, have Wii got news for you! c_s_i is sponsoring killer contests. Simply post a question to a member of the CSI crew. The winner will get a free copy of CSI: Deadly Intent for Nintendo Wii (with a retail value of $39.99) and get their question answered by a member of the CSI writing team! There's also a fantastic monthly contest. To enter, join c_s_i, play the online version of CSI: Deadly Intent, and respond to a two-part query for a chance to win a Wii! Entries will be judged on composition and originality. Sorry, but you must be a U.S. resident and over 18 years old to participate. Check out the rules here.

Enveloped in postcards

Last week, we asked you to send in postcards to help us decorate our drab concrete walls. Here's a photo of the results so far! Thank you so much and please keep them coming! You can mail them to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be giving ten random users paid account credits.

Photos of the week

If you haven't visited our new LiveJournal photo community, you're in for an amazing visual trip. LiveJournal users from around the world will take you on a scenic journey to everywhere. Post your own pictures or kick back and enjoy at lj_photophile. You can view some of this week's awesome photos after the jump. Please start tagging with geographic location, since we'd like to track all the places around the world represented in this community. Keep on commenting too!
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