Category Archives: Links

Snarfology

Posted by melydia on January 11, 2011 4 comments

My sister suggested I write about how I got into Markeroni and what I like about snarfing*.

I think we can safely blame Cookie for this one. :) Actually, I’d known about Markeroni for years before joining, as its founder is a BookCrosser. As part of a BookCrossing-related fundraising effort, she ran a pretty good sale on her book, a travelogue about her solo motorcycle trip to the 2005 BookCrossing Convention in Fort Worth, Texas. In it she includes a few side trips to visit historical markers. In early 2009, Cookie joined the annual history release challenge and invited the rest of us to join her.

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea why I signed up. I didn’t participate in the release challenge and the kind of history printed on roadside signs doesn’t interest me much. Looking back, I suspect it was just another excuse to hang out with my buddies. It also opened up new wild release opportunities and excuses to visit new places – and a little friendly competition with a good friend.

These days I use it as a way to satisfy my wanderlust. I’ve been known to just pick a town and make a snarf map for it. Were it not for Markeroni I would have never thought to visit places like Waterford or the African American Civil War Museum. When I get a cabin fever my husband will actually suggest I go snarfing, because he knows that getting out of the house would be good for me, but only if I’m actually doing something. One of these days I want to combine Markeroni with SketchCrawl but I haven’t figured out how to make that work yet. Maybe I need somewhere with a bunch of markers within easy walking distance of each other. Maybe I’ll try it out when I’m in Asheville, North Carolina this autumn.

*Snarf, by the way, is a rather complicated word: as a noun, it means the actual visit to a historical landmark. As a verb, it is the act of hunting for these landmarks. My friends and I also refer to the landmark itself as a snarf.

Blogging Tips

Posted by melydia on October 25, 2010 6 comments

A while back, a friend asked me to critique her fledgling blog. She wanted a larger audience and wasn’t sure how to get one. So I, having a loyal readership of maybe half a dozen people, decided I was clearly qualified to help her out. Then I realized that maybe those same six people might like to increase traffic to their own blogs. And thus this post was born.

First off, I’m going to assume you’ve already picked a blog theme, hosting service, and layout. I can’t help you with any of that anyway, since my blog has no theme, I host my own blog, and my layout is intentionally sparse. But before I get started on more of the nitty-gritty, here are my two main pieces of advice:

Read blogs with a theme similar to yours, and comment regularly. Note that I do not mean commenting just to ask people to visit your blog. Comment on the content of the post like you would anywhere else. Repeatedly advertising your blog is a good way to get people to avoid it.
Link to other blogs, especially individual entries. Bloggers often check out their trackbacks.

Seriously. If you link to them, they will come. People can’t visit your blog if they don’t know about it. Telling all your friends is fine, but sooner or later you have to actually join the blogging community. The more you link to others, the more likely it is they will link to you. Most of the new blogs I find are through other blogs.

Here are some other tips, in no particular order. I tried focus on things to do, as opposed to things not to do.

Participate in blog carnivals and community blogging efforts like Bloggiesta, Blog Action Day, NaNoBloMo, or Blogtoberfest.
Go through the steps outlined in 31 Days to Building a Better Blog from ProBlogger. (That site is full of good information, actually.) For more, check out the challenge inspired by the original program.
Join blog directories such as BlogHer. Chances are there’s a Ning group aligned with your blog’s theme too. Likewise, add notable (and related) blogs to your own blogroll. I have, on several occasions, visited every single link on the blogroll of a blog I enjoy, and ended up subscribing to a few of them.
Practice your elevator speech. That is, if you had to sum up your blog’s content in a sentence or two, how would you do it?
Post often and consistently. I schedule posts so I only have one a day, which offsets the annoying tendency I have to write a bunch of posts at once and then nothing for weeks. By spreading them out, my posting habits come across as more consistent without flooding anyone’s RSS feed. My husband, on the other hand, has a set content schedule: a new comic MWF, new art on Tuesdays, new music on Thursdays, and at least one other post sometime during the weekend. Pick something that works for you.
Write a few back-up posts to use when you’re out of ideas and/or too busy to write. I also keep a running document of ideas and fragments, many of which are later expanded into full posts.
Add your blog URL to your signature on email and forums.
Use tags and categories to their fullest extent. Not only does this enable your readers to quickly find posts related to the one they’re reading, they also provide extra keywords for search engines to find.
Remember that every post could be someone’s introduction to your blog. Never start a post with an apology for not posting. If you have a set schedule, try to announce ahead of time if you will be missing a day.
Make it easy to share your posts, whether via an AddThis widget or something else. Add your site to places like Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit.
Add RSS feed options and make them obvious. FeedBurner is a handy site for things like email subscriptions. Since I’m already active there, I also have a LiveJournal feed.
Respond to the comments you receive, and visit the sites your commenters link to.
Consider interactive posts: open threads, guest posts, blog tours, interviews of/by other bloggers, giveaways, etc.
If you get stuck for content, respond to blog challenges and memes, and then leave a comment on the original post with a link to your entry. (Do this sparingly. Too many memes drive readers away.)

What it really comes down to is giving people a reason to visit your blog, and that starts with letting people know it’s available to visit. You’ll notice that I blithely disregard most of these tips in my own blog. And I know it. But that doesn’t make it bad advice.

Any other tips from the peanut gallery?

And no, “blog” doesn’t look like a word anymore, why do you ask?

Notebook Perfection

Posted by melydia on September 23, 2010 None comments

NoteBook Stories, which is probably my favorite stationery-themed blog (and yes, I subscribe to quite a few), started a discussion about the perfect notebook. I’m chatty, so I decided to make it a separate post.

When it comes to diaries, which are my primary use for notebooks, I require it to be hardcover and spiral-bound. I will use hardcover/book-bound or softcover/spiral, but they are not my preferred style. The more pages and the more narrowly ruled the better. I write a lot, so it’s not worth it to me to use a diary with only a couple dozen lines per page – and my handwriting is too messy to write multiple lines of text per line on the page.

I am still looking for the perfect art notebook. Blank (that is, unruled) journals are uncommon at stationery stores, though I haven’t checked any art supply stores. Mostly I use sketchpads, but those are too large to use on travel. I was pleased to find that the blank notebooks from CafePress worked quite well as my travel journal for my trip to Japan earlier this year, and I will probably purchase more of those for future trips. The paper isn’t suitable for pencil, but a simple ballpoint writes like a dream.

Speaking of travel journals, I used this style of journal for my trip to Amsterdam, purchased from the BookCrossing supply store (but, alas, no longer available). The paper was lovely but the size was weird – it only barely fit in my purse and fresh pages didn’t always want to turn properly.

I have yet to try Moleskine except as a planner, but I’ve had trouble with the ink smearing when I write with a gel pen. It’s not a huge deal, but I think it would bother me in a regular journal.

What do you use? Do you have any preferences?

My First Moleskine

Posted by melydia on August 13, 2010 2 comments

I love office supplies. Sometimes my husband and I will browse Office Depot for no reason at all. Whenever we’re at a store I have to walk down the stationery aisle, just to look. But while I am fascinated by pens and paper shredders and industrial-strength staplers, my true love is notebooks. Notebooks, journals, planners, diaries – call them what you like, but I have a real love for bound writing spaces. I’ve kept a diary since 1991; I drag beat-up old spiral notebooks around with me all the time, and I even keep a notebook in my purse, just in case there’s something I want to jot down. Despite using online calendars from Outlook and Google, I can’t let go of my paper planner. I absolutely love filling in a new planner each year. My only hiatus was during grad school, when I used a clunky old PDA. It was perfect for someone who spent so much time at the computer but also needed to be able to take her planner with her. The to-do list was great for long-term assignments and the repeating event function was essential, as I actually forgot to attend class on a couple occasions. (Seriously.)

After I finished school the PDA was less necessary, as I suddenly had no homework to worry about, almost no repeating events, and a new reliance on Outlook for meeting notices. My PDA also was getting old enough that it would blank out and delete all my data from time to time, meaning I had to restore from the last time I synced with my computer. So I switched back to a paper planner. After a few years of waffling between weekly views and monthly views, little cheap ones that fit in my purse or larger ones that lie flat, and other such weighty matters, I settled on a single brand. For the last two years I’ve used planners from time.mine. I like the wide margins for lists and the space at the top for general week-related stuff (though I wish it wasn’t titled “my time this week” because that doesn’t make any sense to me). The spiral binding is handy (I cannot stand planners that don’t lie flat) but sometimes it gets a little bent and the back cover tries to escape from its mooring. The corners of the plastic cover are rather annoyingly sharp. Also, being 6″x9″ means it doesn’t fit in my purse, so I very rarely look at it outside of work. Which is silly, since all my work-related obligations are on my work computer.

Changes in my career and social pursuits have given rise to a need for more room for notes and a more portable design. I didn’t want one of those cheapo checkbook-sized calendars you can get at the dollar store; my purse is far too chaotic for something that flexible, and the planners inevitably get all bent up. They also don’t stay open very well, meaning unless I have a flat surface to write on, anything I write in there is nigh illegible, even to me. (And that’s saying something, given the cryptic nature of my handwriting in general.) So I did some research and decided to purchase my very first Moleskine brand planner.

If notebooks can be pretentious, then Moleskine is the top of the heap in that regard. People swear by them, mentioning how they were used by Hemingway and Picasso. Entire blogs are dedicated to them. They’re something white people like. People go to great lengths to customize them. Prominent Life Hacking sites write about them regularly.

Somehow, I can’t picture anyone showing the same devotion to Mead.

I never had any interest in Moleskine products because they’re so pricey: a small (3.5″x5.5″) ruled notebook retails at about $12. That’s more than many books that are already written in! (And Piccadilly makes a fine notebook for a fraction of the price.) In my own years as a diarist I’ve always shied away from the super fancy journals because I’d be afraid to write in them. I also prefer spirals for my diaries so they’re easy to write in on the go. My requirements for a good diary usually go in the following order of precedence: spiral, hardcover, lots of pages, narrow ruled.

But when it comes to planners, I’m picky. I’m a very “I’ll know it when I see it” kind of person. And this time around, the Moleskine hardcover 18-month weekly pocket planner really appealed to me in a way no other planner design had. I like that there’s a plain sheet of ruled paper on every facing page, giving me plenty of room for notes and lists. The paper is thick so ink neither smears nor bleeds through. It lies flat. It fits in my purse. It stays closed. It has a bookmark.

I don’t see myself picking up any Moleskine notebooks any time soon – they’re still way overpriced for me – but I may well be sold on the planners.

The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas

Posted by melydia on July 30, 2010 None comments

I don’t think I’ve ever watched an episode of The Twilight Zone, but my mom is the queen of garage sales and managed to find a four-disc set of the radio dramas for fifty cents. I’m not sure how this set fits in with the rest since the stories are from different collections, but I enjoyed them nonetheless.

“The Lateness of the Hour” starring Jane Seymore and James Keach: The daughter of a scientist wants to send away their robot servants. Predictable and unintentionally hilarious at times, where the lines are altered to explain the sound effects.

“The Jungle” starring Ed Begley, Jr.: A construction manager is cursed for building on sacred land in Africa. Also predictable, but more fun since there are lions involved.

“Living Doll” starring Tim Kazurinsky: A talking doll says some surprising things. I’ve seen variations on this story several times and I still love it. Dolls are creepy, man.

“Mr. Garrity and the Graves” starring Chris McDonald: A man claiming to raise the dead comes to an Old West town where the dead probably ought to be left alone. The best part of this is the town full of yokels, praising their sherriff for his brilliance when he’s barely smarter than they are.

“A Kind of Stopwatch” starring Lou Diamond Phillips: The world’s most annoying man (I didn’t make that up – that’s straight from the CD jacket) receives a stopwatch with startling powers. I never expected to love LDP, but he is absolutely hysterical here.

If you enjoy melodrama in your radio plays, you will surely love these. They’re not at all scary, and even if you know the ending you’ll probably still have fun getting there. I sure did. Now I need to seek out the rest of these, but something tells me I’ll have to pay considerably more than fifty cents for them. (Dang.)

Dreams

Posted by melydia on August 20, 2009 None comments

I will be the first to say that most dreams are just brain junk: assorted thoughts and memories wandering around your subconscious that come out to play as soon as your guard goes down. Though I can’t usually make sense of the overall plot of my dreams, I usually can trace the origins of individual details to some event or train of thought within the last week or so. And since one’s memory more or less goes AWOL while dreaming, it’s not surprising that such nocturnal journeys usually only make sense until we wake up.

One thing I find interesting, however, is recurring dreams. I’m not talking about the kind everyone has – being chased, facing an exam without ever attending class, etc. – I mean the stuff specific to the individual. For me, two elements show up over and over again: darkness and bicycles. Though I’ve seen no evidence to support the prophetic qualities of dreams, I decided to see what various online dream dictionaries had to say about these recurring themes.

My dreams are usually quite dark. I mean that in a literal sense: the headlights on my car don’t work, the overhead lights in a room don’t illuminate anything, or I can’t seem to open my eyes. That last is the most obnoxious.

It would seem that I’m a failure, fearful, uncertain or stubbornly ignorant. Or it could just be my body telling me something: “Alternatively, your inability to open your eyes may be physiological in reason. When we sleep, our eyes are closed (no kidding). So in dreaming that you are trying to open your eyes, your mind may actually be telling you to really open your eyes to the point where you actually wake up.”

The bicycle is a curious thing. I haven’t ridden a real bike in years, and yet it is quite common for me to be pedaling away in my dreams. Or rather, trying to pedal: I find it extremely difficult to get the bike moving, as if I’m attempting to get up a steep incline. Often I’ll be driving a car in my dreams which will somehow transform into a bike that I can’t pedal. I’m not necessarily being chased or anything; I just can’t seem to get up any speed. I’ve tried to think of some bike-related childhood memory, but nothing comes to mind. Dream Moods says I need to find a better balance between work and leisure. The Curious Dreamer claims I’m not making enough progress in my life. DREAMS thinks I will have to make an important decision.

The funny thing about these dream dictionaries is that I feel like I could have written them. Darkness is scary and mysterious, so that must be what it represents in your dreams. Not being able to open your eyes means you’re refusing to “open your eyes” to some reality in your life. Bicycles require balance, so you must be needing that in your life. No wait, they also are a means of progressing, so they must have some bearing on the progress you’re making in your life. Or hey, if you put the balance and the progress together, it must mean you’re facing a decision!

Yeah. So I didn’t find these definitions especially illuminating. Well, except for the physiological reason. It makes the most sense. After all, usually when I finally pry my eyes open in the dream, I wake up.

BookCrossing in the Washington Post

Posted by melydia on August 13, 2009 1 comments

In This Club, Books Free to a Good Roam: A lovely article in the Washington Post from this past Tuesday (11 August 2009). BookCrossing shows up in the international media on a fairly regular basis, but this one is special because it’s about my local group, BC in DC. I wasn’t mentioned by name, alas, but I did meet with Ms. Ianzito. The woman in the photograph is our own crrcookie, one of the most prolific (and most organized) BookCrossers I’ve ever met.

Mr. Peep Goes to Illinois

Posted by melydia on July 10, 2009 3 comments

Howdy, Peep here. Recently my Markeroon melydia and I took a trip to central Illinois. (She calls me her mascot, but I’m the real brains in this outfit.) She was muttering something about visiting her parents or some such, but I know she really wanted to go so she could take pictures of me posing with historical markers. I overheard her telling her parents about a few signs she knew about, and they decided to take a little tour around town.

Me by the cattails

We started by Parkland College, where we saw the Champaign County Worker’s Memorial and the Tribute to Olympic Athletes. (One wonders why the apostrophe is so positioned, since they are presumably honoring multiple workers, but hey, whatever. I’m just the talent.) The weather was gorgeous, and mely couldn’t resist taking a photo of me by the bed of cattails creek.

From there we struck out into the unknown. Though melydia only knew of one other marker in particular, her dad was surprisingly enthusiastic and came up with several possible spots to check. The first was the oldest bridge in Champaign

Old Bridge

County, which unfortunately was missing its sign. It also seemed to be undergoing some construction. We found some rope, a computer speaker, and some car keys near by. Dad figured the rope could come in handy and Mom took the keys to return them to their owner (they had grocery store cards attached), but we left the speaker. I could have used it for my secret mascot rave parties, but melydia would hear none of it.

Me on the covered marker

The one other marker melydia knew of in the area was by the county court house, which has evidently been undergoing construction for some time. We found the marker, but it was all covered up. Here’s a photo of me as proof of our visit; melydia’s parents said they would return later, after the construction was finished, to take a picture. We then planned to hit campus, but first Dad suggested we first stop by the Urbana Free Library. The plaque was too small to accommodate me, and melydia’s husband somehow managed to “forget” me when taking a picture of a beautiful new statue called “Slow and Steady”. Hmmph.

Slow and Steady

Campus was a wealth of markers. We started at the Hallene Gateway, which is basically the doorway of old University Hall, which burned down or something in 1938. Evidently this part of the building was found in some basement somewhere

Hallene Gateway

and they decided to make a monument out of it. It was a good thing mely had the good sense to bring her parents, because she never would have thought to visit this gateway. Or the Morrow Plots, which is where we stopped next. The Morrow Plots are the country’s oldest experimental field, established in 1876. It had been plowed so many times the plants were growing in a little ravine.

From there we wandered around, looking for more markers. The University of Illinois had recently installed a number of markers to honor various scientific breakthroughs over the years. Melydia tried to obtain a listing, but it was unavailable due to the amount of vandalism. I don’t get that, personally. Street signs are one thing – they’re everywhere and relatively inexpensive to replace. But these are one-of-a-kind memorials. And more importantly, if there’s no marker, there’s nowhere for me to pose!

Multiphase Fluid Zzzzzz...

But it turned out not to matter much, as the markers were everywhere. Remember what I said about scientific breakthroughs? Yeah, it was Nerdtopia. Nerdvana, if you will. I fell asleep just reading the title of “Multiphase Fluid Dynamics,” but melydia seemed to know what it was talking about. (Nerd.) Thank goodness we stopped for ice cream after that, so I could take a rest from all this modeling. Being gorgeous can really work up an appetite. Melydia wouldn’t share, though. Something about “not having a mouth.” Whatever. She was just being selfish.

No ice cream for me!

The family was getting pretty tuckered out by that point, so after a couple more snarfs on campus, we stopped by the Cattle Bank (also known as the oldest building in town) and the New Orpheum Theatre (now a children’s museum). One of the

City of Champaign Landmark?

signs on the Orpheum designated it as a “City of Champaign Landmark.” Melydia was curious if there was a list of these local landmarks, but her parents and husband were tired, and since Dad was driving, they went straight home.

I thought we were done with landmarks for the trip, and I would be stuffed in melydia’s purse for the rest of the visit, but I was wrong. Dad had one more marker up his sleeve. A couple days later, we drove out to a cornfield near the tiny village of Bellflower to see a bit of glacier rock (that is, a rock shaped by a glacier) memorializing the generous donation of the Flanigons to the Bellflower schools. After a quick trip through the long-closed Chanute Air Force Base for a quick peek at the old planes, we stopped at Hickory River for some

Bonus snarf!

delicious barbecue. (At least I assume it was delicious. Once again, melydia wouldn’t let me have any. Oh well, I guess all great models have to watch their figures.)

So that was my trip to the midwest. I guess there was some other stuff too, like fireworks and s’mores and puzzles and stuff, but I was stuck in the purse for all that. This was just the important bits.

EXIT Stage Left

Posted by melydia on January 10, 2009 None comments

I’m not much for webisodes, but I’d like to recommend one anyway. It’s a comedy called EXIT Stage Left, about a guy struggling to put on a play and all the bizarre characters he has to deal with. I heard of it because it stars the lovely and talented Annamarie MacLeod, whom I know through her work with Sine Fine Films. I encourage you to check it out; it’s very well done – and quite funny to those who have worked in theater.

On that note, if you enjoy it – or any webisode, for that matter – be sure to nominate it for a Streamy, the new award for online video entertainment.

run run run.

Posted by melydia on September 5, 2008 None comments

It would seem that yours truly is getting into this whole running thing. Don’t get me wrong – it totally sucks and I still suspect the “runner’s high” is a total myth – but it’s free and it’s good for me, so I do it.

There is an ongoing debate in the running community regarding whether or not to listen to music while running. Some can’t go without it; others say if you’re not enjoying the run for itself, you shouldn’t be running at all. (As one might expect, most people fall somewhere in between these two extremes.)

I shunned music for a while, finding that inappropriate beats and the lulls between songs threw off my pace. Then I discovered PodRunner, an hour-long continuous mix of steady-beat tunes. Now, I can’t run for a whole hour (nowhere near!) but it’s nice to know that the music will continue the entire time I’m hitting the pavement.

That’s all well and good, but other than simply going regularly I don’t know how to improve my stamina (I’m not too concerned about speed). That’s where PodRunner Intervals comes in. Since I’m fat and slow, I’m starting with the 10-week First Day to 5k program. If all goes well, come November I should be able to run for a half hour straight. I might then attempt the Gateway to 8k and Freeway to 10k programs, but let’s take things one step at a time, shall we?

I track my progress with MapMyRun. With it I can tally my time and distance, as well as calculate my calories burned. I’m a fiend for journals of any type, so this is a good motivator for me. On top of that, I’ve linked my training log with Twitter, meaning that my friends know if I’m running or not. In lieu of a coach or run buddy, this keeps me accountable.

(By the way, the MapMyFitness folks have similar sites for biking, walking, hiking, and triathlons. All of them are interconnected; I have walks and hikes in my training log on MapMyRun. How did people train before the internet? I’m sure I don’t know.)

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