Hi again!
Hello! Thanks for visiting On The Bright Side! As you can see, things are looking a bit different around here. I am in the process of moving all my stories from my iWeb/MobileMe site to this new Word Press platform. While I loose a little on unique design, I gain a lot of functionality and performance.
I’m adding all of my recent entries, since I’ve been back in the US, and will continue to back-post those from Vietnam, my world travels and my five years in Japan. I’ll work to put up photo galleries and some of the great features like a page devoted to my favorite sites, Linkalicious.
Thanks so much for your patience. I’ll post again when the migration is complete. I have a lot of work to do!
Until then, hope you have a wonderful holiday weekend. Happy 4th of July!
Cheers!
Welcome to Tweetville
As I am developing my website, tweaking design elements and adding lots of different features, I am also expanding my efforts within the world of social media. I’ve been inspired the last couple of weeks, particularly with Twitter.
I’ve gone through my account and actually did some housecleaning this week. I unfollowed social media “gurus” because quite frankly, no one is a guru in this field. We are all learning as we go and we all have a lot to learn. I did away with people who had 50,000 followers and who follow about the same amount, because they really don’t have an interest to connect with me and won’t miss me anyway. I did keep Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) though, because he is really good as using Twitter and everything he tweets about is appealing, entertaining, educational or really funny. Actually, he might be a guru.
One piece of advice I did take from all my research was to only follow people who share your interests. Some dude in farmville who has a love of tractors may choose to follow you, but if you’re not interested to read posts about tractors, there should be no obligation to follow back. It certainly feels flattering when someone is interested in what you have to tweet about, but I have quickly gotten over feeling obliged to follow everyone who follows me. And in the same respect, I don’t care if the person I follow adds me to their list. I certainly was happy to see that @MariaShriver chose to follow me, but I don’t expect that @Oprah will make me #20 on her list of people she follows.
Another important note I read was that it really doesn’t matter how many people are following you – in the sense that you don’t need a bazillion gillion followers to be considered “successful” in Tweetville. I do feel happy when I see that more people are following me (I’ve gained over 180), but I hate to open my list of followers and see @succezstwittey who doesn’t have a clear connection between their bio and tweets, and who appears to just be “collecting” people or is perhaps even an automated account. I also don’t care to earn money from tweeting or buy a list with 50,000 followers. I think these things are just plain weird. Not my reason for participating.
The aspect of Twitter I have enjoyed the most is opening up communication with a few individuals. If I have a new follower and they meet my interests, I will follow them and thank them for signing on. If someone posts an interesting tweet, I’ll make a comment back and am pleased when they respond in kind. For example, yesterday I noticed that @AliAdventures7 was tweeting from an airplane. And after a brief exchange learned that Delta has in-flight wifi available for a fee of $13. I find that pretty cool and led me to look online and find an article like THIS. Also found THIS if a bit dated article on the race to install wifi inflight. Good stuff to know for someone who travels as frequently as I do. What I couldn’t find was an article which rates how strong the wifisignal is from 35,000 feet!
I believe Twitter could stand to offer some features which help a user like me better organize the people I follow and the people who follow me, but this need has prompted me to investigate sites like Hootsuite and Mixero. I’ve already got TweetDeck, but I’m not love love loving it. Do you have a preference for a desktop application like these?
If you’ve made it to this paragraph and have no idea what I’m talking about in terms of followers and why I’ve got an @ sign in front of a user name, then I encourage you to get an account on Twitter and try it out for yourself. If you feel lazy or simply want some suggestions as to how to get started, you can just follow me and also everyone I follow. Especially if your interests are in writing, travel, food&wine, living abroad, news, humor and inspiration. If you are interested in bobsledding, you may have to search a bit to find people who are tweeting about your hobby…but I’m sure there is someone out there!
My friend Lilli asked me recently why I am so interested in participating in Facebook, Twitter and the like, and for me I just love connecting with new people who have similar interests or fascinating lives. That’s also why I love to live in different parts of the world and travel. I love people! Some of the people on my travel list have truly amazing stories and I am learning from this group of tweeters all the time. If you do log on and you want to see what people on my travel list have to say, take the time to follow:
@traveldudes, @velvetescape, @nomadicmatt, @abigailking, @BreathDreamGo …for starters!
You might become interested in a good charitable cause from these folks:
@candoorg, @shesthefirst, @PeruvianHearts or @BakingforGood …a small sampling.
The possibilities are endless, so get online and get on Twitter! If you are already on twitter and would like to leave me your link, please add a comment. If you are using other forms of social media that you have really come to love, please share by adding a comment. There so much fun stuff out there! Let’s share the goodies!
Conversation Starters
In light of my last blog post, and in light of the fact that I’m about to release a new design for OTBS, I wanted to include an interactive feature where I can hear back from more of you. Because I use iWeb, I cannot install a guestbook feature, which I would have loved to have done. But actually, this new blog post idea “Conversation Starters” may actually be a better feature to focus on.
So my question to you is this, and I ask this with the hope that many of you will leave a comment with your answer ~
“What’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you?”
I look forward to hearing your responses.
Will you negotiate with me?
I read this article on my plane ride from Singapore to Hanoi today and enjoyed it enough, I wanted to post it. Borrowed from the Weekend Journal of the Wall Street Journal
In 1972, on a park bench in Birmingham, Ala., Garner Lee Green’s father proposed to her mother. The proposal came out of the blue. She said yes.
“That doesn’t happen to people anymore,” says Ms. Green, who is 30. And it certainly wasn’t the way her husband asked her to marry him several years ago. The two of them talked for a long time about how and when the proposal would happen. “I was ready before he was, so we had to come to a meeting of the minds about a time frame. The negotiations lasted about six months,” Ms. Green says.
She is not the only one who missed what used to be a classic big moment. Those romantic tales that get passed among friends and relatives—”One day he just showed up with a ring! I was completely surprised!”—are vestiges of the past. We’ve gone from popping the question to a long conversation, hammering out the details of when and how the engagement will happen.
To read the rest of the article, click HERE.
My own memory…
It was a quick romance. We shopped for the ring together. And I knew exactly when he was going to propose. I was 24. The surprise came on a Tuesday night, three months after the ring. We broke up. Actually, he broke up.
If I won the lottery…
I couldn’t help but notice THIS ARTICLE in the news about the store clerk who won the $258.5 million dollar powerball jackpot. While I might consider some dental work myself (and heck, why not go to Disneyland?) I certainly would NOT keep my job!
Shaw said he needed a few days to decide whether he will keep his minimum-wage job at the store where he has worked for just three weeks.
There is no question that I would take the money in one lump sum.
He also plans to seek advice “from people who know about money” about whether to take the jackpot in 30 payments over 29 years or the lump-sum amount of $124,875,122.
But after I quit my job and got my big fat check, I would do almost exactly what I’ve been doing for the last eight years. I’d travel travel travel. I would simply plan to explore every corner of the world possible and soak up as much knowledge and as many life experiences as humanly possible. And I’d do it wearing my jeans, black t-shirt and flip flops!
I might buy a house or two in the places I really like. I might even buy my own plane so I don’t have to go through strenuous security checks and customs. I would certainly treat my friends and family to vacations. And within all of that, I would more often volunteer my time where needed. I’d help out along the way and give back as much as I could.
What would you do if you won the lottery? How would you spend your money?
Twitter me senseless
I’m really starting to love the internet. Oh, I’ve always liked it, but in the last couple of weeks, I’ve researched a bit some social media outlets and become more active on twitter and am acutely interested in the new Facebook “Like” features which we will see peppered through the internet shortly.
I’ve always been a pretty open person. It started with the weekly emails I sent when I was at City Club. I’d list the events of the week or of note and at the end, a little personal comments about what I did over the weekend or a movie review. Once I moved to Japan, I started writing regularly. At fist that was also a group e-mail letter. Then I got my Mac and created newsletters. On December 27, 2005, I started On The Bright Side blog, via blogspot (which I am now migrating here). I loved posting regular stories, photos and even a “guess” contest. It was a good lead-in to my current website, which you may have gathered, I really enjoy maintaining.
You can probably see I’ve made some adjustments to my home page here. I’ve added a twitter box so you can go find and follow me on twitter. I’ve also added a facebook button, so if you want to add me as a friend, you can do that from here too. I’m learning what features I can add to an iWeb supported site (like a sitemap and favicon), and so I’m excited to see what features I can use to enhance the “performance” of my site. I’m even linking OTBS with a Facebook Page so that the site will be more visible and you all can become a fan! (ok, it’s a bit dorky and nerdy, but I’m having a blast!)
Sometimes I do worry a bit about privacy. My post below shows you that not all happy, peppy nor bright people visit this site. But ultimately, I don’t post anything here which I don’t want to and I monitor my site and also my privacy settings on other networking sites religiously.
I’ve also been encouraging you all to get connected to skype. I talk to my folks nearly every weekend with skype. It’s easy, it’s free and it’s wonderful. If you don’t have it, you should. As with other applications, you can manage your privacy settings so that only people you add can call or chat with you. And you can decide to add or not someone who requests to be on your contact list. You don’t have to talk to anyone you don’t want to!
I hope to see you tweeting away, chatting with me on skype and perhaps sharing a new application you’ve discovered. It’s fun, it’s fascinating and it’s a great way to keep in touch. I can’t believe how many of our high school friends have reconnected simply because of Facebook. With me living in a place like Vietnam, it feels good to be connected to the outside world and to YOU!
Add a comment
On September 30, 2008, I posted this entry: CLICK HERE
Today, as I opened my iWeb to update my site, I noticed a few comments had been posted. I easily found the recent posts, but there was one which wasn’t obvious. So I scrolled and scrolled until I found this comment was made yesterday on my entry which was posted nearly two years ago:
Pissed
Shut the fuck up you communist. If you knew anything about anything you would know that competitive eating is huge in many other countries and relatively small in America. And I guess passing out a few Krystal burgers around the world is going to magically end world hunger. These guys train hard to do this and if they want to do it, then let em. They aren’t hurting anyone. Find something more reasonable to bitch about you miserable commie.
So, to be a good sport, I posted this:
The Author
Dear Pissed,
If you are one of my friends being sarcastic – ha ha, very funny.
If you are a random visitor who has spent enough time on my site to read all the way back to 2008 – Thanks for the visit! I appreciate your interest and thank you for your participation in the comment feature! Way to utilize it to the fullest!
If you want to support and applaud people who get paid to stuff their faces, then be my guest. I happen to feel differently. And just as I have the right to my own opinion, I have the right to voice it.
I should also clarify that I am not a communist. I happen to live in a communist country at the moment, but that does not mean that I enjoy it. As the author and owner of this website I have every right to delete your comment. If I were communist, then I would have.
Thank you for visiting On The Bright Side, and have a great day!
I’ve been spending some time recently researching social media outlets and interconnectivity on the internet. It fascinates me. And ever since I’ve been more active on Twitter, I’ve noticed a sharp increase in traffic to my website. And that’s great. That’s what I’ve hoped for. I like that we have methods of communication which allow us to express our opinion and share information, our ideas and opinions with others.
I can’t help but wonder who are the (at the time of this post) 14 Swiss, 6 Australians, 2 Italians and 1 Malaysian who have visited my site? I pretty much can guess who all the others are, but I’m curious to know who else has visited On The Bright Side. It’s exciting and I eagerly watch the flag counters now that I’ve added them.
But receiving a visit and a comment from some idiot who thinks I’m a miserable commie because I don’t like sponsored eating contests and who uses the lame-ass excuse of “they’re not hurting anyone” can simply find another website to peruse and blogger to harass. Hey Pissed – Thanks for giving me something more reasonable to bitch about. Go ahead. Add a comment.
Professional Eating Contests – Two years after my original post, I still think these contests are a disgrace and a waste of money. This photo sums it up for me. Gross and totally disgusting!
NOTE: Since I redesigned my site, the comments have been lost. But trust me, I couldn’t make that stuff up. Nor would I want to!
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