Literally actually! I’ve been shooting at Medium to Large format lately with my 350D. And it has come to the point where I’m losing hard disk space.
I’m in the market for an external drive in the 100GB++ range. Right now I’m thinking of a LaCie brand external HD mainly because it sounds cool and also because I seem to have a bad affinity with Seagate throughout my geeky years – they always break down.
For the budget, I am also considering a generic desktop HD with an external casing. The drawback is that it doesn’t look as cool.
I will be filling the drive mostly with all my media – songs, pictures, movies — all of these are really cool (the best of Kenny Loggins — what could be cooler that that??? :P) so the drive must look cool too!
I’m jealous of lifestyle journalists. This is because they get invited to soft openings of retail stores that can afford to give away something to everyone, as compared to tech journalists who need to go through a raffle to being home something really nice. I guess this is because lifestyle products are generally cheaper – clothes, shoes, accessories, CDs … as compared to tech products – laptops, mobile phones, a legitimate copy of Windows Vista …
Lifestyle events = everyone takes home something
Tech events = raffle off one really nice prize
If you are in the loop regarding the current payment schemes of network bloggers, you will know that there are around three basic types of payment:
the revenue share scheme where you earn a cut from network advertising
the blogger salary scheme where you are paid a fixed rate per month
the pay per post scheme where you are paid based on the number of posts you make
If you are being paid on a pay per post basis this will definitely spell trouble when you want to go on a vacation. You can’t simply stop your routine – because that will lessen your earnings for the next month (if you’re working on a profit share basis, then this is not a problem).
To remedy this, you will need to do some double time scheduled posting. So let’s assume you do five posts per day. If you are going to be away for one whole week, that would amount to at least 25 to 35 scheduled posts which you need to do several days before you actually leave. I guess it is the same for corporate folk that try to file a leave but need to finish work that they were supposed to offset.
Unless you are a content magician, it will be really tough to try to pull off posting this amount in one go. Some tips that I have learned include:
do listings (new year resolution list, Christmas gadget list)
highlight previous posts and build on them
highlight the top posts you made in a certain category
do a top 10 of something – where each item is one post and another post for the intro and another post for the summary
greet your readers during the holidays in the form of a post
Do you have other ideas on how to ease the ProBlogger posting marathon?
In our office we get a mix of personalities visiting the editorial area .. from chefs and food stylists for our food magazine, to gadget geeks to musicians for Burn and golfers for Golf Digest Philippines.
It’s the golfers that are the most animated as they can all relate about how challenging hole number 6 was or how there’s this new technique for getting gigil with the club and ball, to the politics … the list goes on. Unlike gadget talk, golf talk can go on non-stop. When you’re finished talking about the equipment, you start talking about the clubhouses. Then you start talking about the caddies. Then you start talking about the tournaments. Then you start talking about the swing (the longest topic ever). It never ends! And worst of all, no one else in the room can relate.
And then it made me realize how a lot of professional bloggers suffer the same fate: like how we talk about blog politics as if we knew the people involved personally (the same manner how we all talk about how Jennifer Anniston shouldn’t have left Brad Pitt because he was such a nice guy — like we really knew him), how we talk about SEO techniques and page views vs unique visits, about ad placements .. and yes — the people, the bloggers themselves are pretty colorful.
I mean, I haven’t been to a single blog meet where the name Mike Abundo doesn’t get brought up (see Mike, you’re famous!).
So there. Blogging is like golf because we take two simple concepts to the NEXT LEVEL – hitting a ball into a hole in the woods and writing a journal entry. It’s pretty absurd, but don’t we find the greatest joy in the most useless of things?
