On the Charleston Beat

Another lame post directing you to some other blog! Yay? Anyway, I have been tasked with breaking down the Charleston scene, neighborhood by neighborhood. This is quite a task for someone who sits at a desk all day, stepping outside only to tell children to get the hell off my lawn. Regardless, I have accepted this challenge, and consider it a really good way to get to know this weird little town where I am shipwrecked my adopted hometown. So, here is the latest article highlighting this, that or some other aspect of life in Charleston. With limited experience, some intense Google-ing, and the help of Yahoo Maps, I break down the cultural, dining and retail adventure that is Upper King Street.  Take a look…  um, HERE.

Current Example of Blogging Awesomeness

Hey gang, my latest blog post is up on the Charleston site. This week we highlight the renovations to the White Point Gardens gazebo, and its implications for Charleston wedding season. Check it, yo!  This link is good for the next week, after which you will have to scroll down, because the blogging software is CHUNKY!

Dramatic Reveal!

General, in all my years of covering top secret discoveries with sheets, I’ve never dramatically revealed anything as shocking as this! Dun-dun-DUNNN!

As I may have whined earlier, the type of work I have been doing lately has really cut into both my time and my desire to blog.   This is primarily because much of that work has been of the social media genre – blogging, article writing, posting to Digg and Reddit, tweeting, tweeting and more tweeting. And also tweeting.

Additionally, a large part of what I was doing was developmental in nature.  Since early October I have been writing for this pretty cool “everything Charleston” website that covers dining, shopping, history and real estate.  We have been slowly stocking the thing with content – monthly articles, weekly blogs and daily tweets.

Well, I guess we have reached an acceptable minimum level of content, because finally we are ready to dramatically yank away the sheet from our top secret discovery (or something.)  Anyway, it’s called PremiereCharleston.com and…oh, sorry. Let’s back up.

Dun-dun DUNNNN!!  it’s called PremiereCharleston.com and it’s really shaping up. And since it has sapped my will to live blog, I figured I would start excerpting some of my stuff here, starting next week.   Oh, and visit the site, dammit!

the psychodots!

I waited for my ship to come in ‘til I passed out on the beach.
It seemed the one true love in my life was way beyond my reach.
And even though I tried so hard I felt my heart might burst.
I gave it everything I had but someone else got there first.

Feeling a bit of the old Cincinnati nostalgia this morning (maybe because its 22 damn degrees in Charleston!)  Anyway, it is definitely a small pond, but here is the best of Cincinnati pop-rock: the psychodots. Enjoy!

Motivation

I would love to know how other bloggers find the motivation to keep it up. Let me clarify – I don’t mean model train enthusiasts, or movie fans or music aficionados who blog about their particular passions. I mean professional writers like me who also blog. These are people who spend all day researching, brainstorming, writing and rewriting. How do they find topics to write about, let alone find the energy to do the actual writing?

For the millionth-billionth time, I will tell you that I began this blog in order to drum up some Google wonderfulness in this new market of Charleston SC.  I didn’t have any compelling urge to write about copywriting, nor did I think I had anything in particular to say.  What I had was a need for exposure, and time. Lots of time.

So, for the first two months or so I wrote every day. Every day! I can’t imagine. And as I did it, I began to like it. I began to feel the urge to write about copywriting. And I realized I did have something to say. And slowly the blogging, combined with tireless cold calling, led to more and more work. Subsequently, I had less and less time for blogging.

You may say, why not blog about the various projects you work on?  And I do. But again, success is the death of variety. I have been blessed to find regular gigs with the healthcare newsletter, the “everything Charleston” consumer website, and the web marketing agency in Charlotte. They chug along nicely, but I have already told you as much as I can, other than the fact that two of those three gigs also involve blogging!

I don’t have the answer. But I am determined to figure it out. And I would love to hear some suggestions! Oh, and Happy New Year!

Helpful Holiday Hint!

If you’re like me at Christmas, you spare a good bit of no expense to provide nothing but second best the best for the guy whose name you picked out of a hat your loved ones. In that helpful spirit, here is how you get out-of-print songs that you don’t own off of the internet and onto your knock-off brand X mp3 player!

1. Download some cheese-eating audio editing software… like the one that rhymes with “Shmaw-dacity.”

2. Get a mini-to-mini audio cable (stereo.)  It helps if you swiped a bunch of these from the place you used to work. (Sorry, I left that out.)

3. Connect the audio out from one laptop to the mic in of a second laptop. (Oh yeah, you need two PCs. Dang it!)

4. Find the song on YouTube or something.

5. Record the song into the editing software.

6. Save As something remotely usable, like .wav, instead of whatever goofy proprietary file extension they give you.

7. Load the song into Windows Media Player on the first PC.

8. Burn the song onto a CD. It’s better to get ten or songs before you do this. (Again, sorry.)

9. Rip the songs BACK into Media Player, as .wma’s this time.

10. Sync the song to your cheesy brand-X mp3.

11. Repeat until exhausted, or until mp3’s become obsolete.

In all seriousness, Audacity is a little chunkified, but I have used it a lot to get my old LP’s (look it up, kids) into my mp3.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Remember, friends, Christmas can be a time of frustration and deep family weirdness…

…oh, were you expecting a “but“? I thought you knew me better!

Memo from the Word Mill

Fingers are flying here at LivelyExchange. My indentured elves are busy milling words to within 0.003 tolerance while they fantasize about my grisly demise, and ways to make it look like an accident. Let’s take a look at the lineup of recent or ongoing print, web and video projects clogging the pipes:

• A regular blogging gig writing about Charleston dining, shopping, healthcare, real estate, tourism and history
• An article about Charleston real estate
• An article about all the holiday happenings in Charleston
• A daily Twitter campaign for a web marketing firm in Charleston
• Tweeting, blogging and press releases for a cabinet refacing firm in Charlotte
• Website copy for:
  • A Christian crossover girl group (known as a CCGG in the recording industry)
  • A commercial cleaning service in Charleston
  • A cardboard tube manufacturer in York SC
  • A Charleston residential REALTOR (why do they write it that way?)
  • A Charleston commercial real estate developer/brokerage/management firm
  • A home designer/builder in Rock Hill SC
• The weekly healthcare sales newsletter
• Print  copy for a healthcare brochure
• A print ad for a handgun manufacturer

And finally, I produced ANOTHER rendition of the Veterans Day video. That’s volume six in the increasingly ill-named “Veterans Trilogy!” Anyway, I have to run…an elf fell into the 2500-ton press. That’s the third one this month, and they are a drag to clean. The rest of you, back to work!

Much Rejoicing in the Land

Finally got the new laptop today. The old one, a Gateway I got in December of ‘04, was really showing its age in terms of speed and a weird, green vertical raster line that I KNEW was bad news. I did some research and got a good deal on an HP from OfficeMax.

And here’s the thing about OfficeMax: rather than THANK you for spending $700, they make you feel like CRAP for not spending $750 to get the warranty! “Hey, man…if you drop it on the way out to the car, or get hit by a truck, don’t think you can bring it back!”  Yeah, I’m sure that when I am pinned under a truck, my laptop would be my chief concern!

You suck, OfficeMax! Great price, though!

Just When I Was Mellowing on Facebook

Question: What’s more cynical than deliberately writing a post about Facebook because it is guaranteed to draw hits?
Answer: Facebook itself.

I hope you’re sitting down when you read this (we pause as a million chairs drag across the scarred linoleum floor of our global consciousness) …but retarded Facebook apps like Farmtown and Mafia Wars are cynical cesspools of personal information-gathering disguised as “community”…and worse. This according to an article in The Consumerist, inscrutably titled “Mafia Wars CEO Brags about Scamming People from Day One.”

Long ago I wrote a cranky, Andy Rooney-esque piece called “Putting the Grr! in Facebook,” in which I grumbled about the various idiosyncrasies of hapless users. This post is consistently my top drawing piece – even surpassing my scholarly (!) review of the film Lars and the Real Girl (my top post among perverts searching for Artificial Partners, wink wink.)

Since that post, I have mellowed out a bit and hooked up with all kinds of friends from the past. But a constant beef has continued to be all of the stupid apps. Jenny has sent you a hug! What famous dead composer are you? And a bunch of others I can’t recall because I “HID” them long ago.

But the games are the worst. I got as far as Scrabulous, meaning, I signed up for Scrabulous, knowing that it was nothing more than a scam for gathering personal information, but hey, I like Scrabble. But the first time I saw on  Facebook’s News Feed: “Michael has spelled the word INCONTINENCE on Scrabulous! Can YOU do better? Sign up NOW!” …I pulled the plug.

Trust me, I “get” Facebook. If you know anything about Web 2.0, this practice should not be a surprise. While everyone whines about the ads, I say “that’s why it’s free.” But you read something like “Mafia Wars CEO Brags about Scamming People from Day One,” …and you are looking at the epitome* of corporate cynicism.

*Epitome: The embodiment or precise representation of an ideal. Pronounced “uh-PIT-oh-mee”…or “eppa-tohm” if you’re from West Virginia (like me.)

Just in Time for Veteran’s Day

Photoshop presents a dude with some other dude's arm holding a picture he forgot to bring!

Well, we set out to honor America’s veterans, and to sell medical devices. I’m confident we did the honoring part. The selling? It’s too soon to say.

Despite a last minute freakout caused by someone watching an old rough cut and asking for changes that were made two weeks ago, the Veteran’s Day videos are up.

So HERE is the LINK. What you will see is a nice rah-rah about the Veteran’s Health Adminstration and its care mission, and how this healthcare manufacturer’s mission coincides. To drive home the point, the rah-rah is followed by interviews with employees of the manufacturer who also happen to be Veterans.

There are four videos at the bottom of the page. Sort of the donut effect, where the openers and closers are the same, with the interviews filling the donut hole. (mmmm….DONUTS!)

Anyway, check ‘em out (and I suggest you do it sooner than later – The client can be touchy about this sort of thing.) And Happy Veteran’s Day! That’s next Wednesday, commie!