Three things:

1.  My pop and chips fast – broken but not forgotten. As I mentioned elsewhere (maybe once here too, but I honestly forget if I did or not), I started to make a couple of health changes by giving up pop (or soda, if you like).  I made it 143 days without pop (Diet Pepsi being my former soft drink of choice) before trying it again this weekend.  I haven’t eaten any potato chips in about 110 days.  That’s not to say that I’ve been eating an extremely healthy diet, but it has been a bit better.  Giving up these two foods was an exercise in developing some will power and in building good habits.  I had Diet Pepsi three days in a row and I can honestly say that it doesn’t hold the same appeal that it used to have.  Back to water.  Thank goodness.

2.  I turned 40 on Saturday, May 30. I was fretting about this.  Then it actually happened and it wasn’t that big of a deal.  I don’t feel any different, nor should anyone really expect to feel much different when one day changes to another.  Life goes on.  Thank goodness.   Onward.

3.  Did I mention a third thing?  Yes, I did.  But I’m going to put off writing it until my next blog post, because it’s a significant development (a health issue) that deserves its own post.  So stay tuned for another update – soon!

Ten things I'm not going to do today

Image by Howdy, I’m H. MichaelKarshis

Here, in no particular order, is a list of ten things that I’m definitely not going to do today:

1. Teach you how to increase your Twitter followers by15000%
2. Play football (or soccer, depending on where you are)
3. Fly down the Death Star trench and fire torpedoes (especially not without the targeting computer!)
4. Throw myself at the ground and miss
5. Place long stemmed flowers in gunbarrels
6. Get adamantium metal bonded to my skeleton
7. Photosynthesize (after all, it isn’t easy being green)
8. Join any causes or cause any joins
9. Clean your room
10. Publish a serious blog post

How about you?  Are there any things that you’ve definitely ruled out for the day?

I have written over 8600 Tweets on Twitter. Let’s say that I’ve averaged 15 words per Tweet. That’s 129,000 words.

If an average book has 250 words per page, then those 8600 Tweets are equal to 516 pages of printed matter. Or, if you like your print squished a bit tighter, at 500 words per page, then that’s 258 pages of material.

You can argue words/page, words/Tweet, and so on, but given the magnitude of activity out there, it seems pretty clear to me:

I’ve written enough Tweets to fill a book.

This is a sobering thought for me.

On one  hand, I’ve connected with a number of interesting people via Twitter (more than 3,150 as of the moment that I’m writing this post.)

On the other hand…  I could have written a book in the same amount of words.

Which course of action would have been better?  I don’t know:  I can see advantages and disadvantages to both paths.  I also know that it’s one thing to string together words 140 characters at a time and quite another thing to write a larger document that’s cohesive, useful, and interesting to read.

The main lesson that I take from this is that it’s quite possible for a lot of small effort over time to amount to something much larger.

What do you think?

A couple of small technical notes:

I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1. I had been on version 2.5 for a long time and resisted upgrading because of a previous botched attempt.  Today, for some reason, I decided to go for it, after consulting with a local guru.  Success!  It worked!  I used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plug-in, which I’d recommend to anyone.  W00t!

On the (slight) downside, my comment counts aren’t working correctly on the Broadcasting Brain homepage.  They look like they all say 0 comments, which is incorrect.  (I use the DISQUS commenting system on this blog, by the way.)  However, if you click on any of the permalinks for the blog entries, the comments are all there.  Weird.  Anyone got any ideas?

EDIT:  OK, the comment counts appear to be working now.  Go figure.

That’s it for now.

So, if you’re wondering why I’m not posting here as often as I once did:

Most of my recent writing is going into a little hardcover journal that I bought a few months ago.  I’m tracking some of the minutia of my life in this book, including some habit changes that I’ve been working on.  I seem to go through paper journal writing phases in my life.  If memory serves, it’s been about ten years since I last maintained this kind of journal with any kind of regular activity.

Why a paper journal?  Easy:  it’s portable and private.  It’s not that I’m writing a lot of confidential stuff in this journal (well, OK, maybe some), but what I’m writing is mainly personal and of limited relevance to anyone else.  Writing by hand (and this is cursive writing, not printing, for the most part) seems to activate certain mental pathways that typing doesn’t, which is important.  Plus I don’t have to fire up my computer to do this.

So, while getting a D on the revered social media “transparency” exam, I’ll take a B+ for meeting my own needs.  Or does the “transparency” stuff actually only apply to organizations and not to people?

Between this new journal writing habit, and a series of other routine, thinking, and schedule changes, my focus on blogging, or any other kind of writing, is at a two year low.  I do have things that I’m still interested in writing about, but right now I’m not trying to live up to some kind of daily posting schedule as I have in the past.

I do want to take a moment to tip my hat to the many folks out there who do seem to be able to keep up the daily posting routine with a high level of quality and professionalism.  Where there’s a will (and some talent) there’s a way, no doubt.

Onward.