I guess I should update
I'm settling in pretty comfortably at the moment. So comfortably in fact that I forgot to write about it here (until now). ;)
Work is going well. I'm at two down, one to go, on big Matlab scripts for my primary job. After that I have plans to make a SQL database. I also attended a conference where I met back up with someone I knew ten years ago, and who wondered if I was interested in processing some of her data too. That'll be up to my boss, but I'm all for it. After that, I think I'm supposed to take over tracking the sensors - keeping them calibrated and etc., hopefully going on cruises. After that, I wonder if I'll be allowed to do anything with fish.
The workplace is also going well. I get a lot of free rein to do whatever I want, and just last week I was told to pick out and order my own office chair and a new computer. This sure beats having someone just hand me stuff without asking me what I need or want.
Roleplaying is going well. I'm happy to have found a local group that even thinks about playing something besides D&D - way more than I was hoping for. I almost got into a Star Trek game starting up pretty soon, but the time conflicts with the only yoga class I can realistically attend, and I'm not about to drop yoga. Meanwhile, the BPRD game (Savage Worlds system) is going pretty well overall, at least for me. Plus a new person just joined the meetup group that expressed an interest in running WoD.
Roleplaying on RPoL consisted of me cleaning out my Dark Ages game and deleting it. In the process I reread big chunks of it. Man, that was an awesome game. There's no way I can recapture it now, though - those moments are past and everyone involved has moved on. Although I did seriously consider starting up a new game. Probably won't do it though - I've got a lot of other stuff on my plate and roleplaying in real life, so play-by-post isn't as high a priority.
Writing ... still nothing on the fiction front. On the bright side though, inspiration suddenly came back a couple days ago, and I've been musing on Vengeance again. I am looking at writing the same park scene yet again, in yet another completely different way, which would make it something like the 6th version or so. One of these days I'll get it right.
As for nonfiction. Stuff hit the fan. :p Bright Hub has had a (mostly) transparent response to the Google algorithm change (called Panda; what I took to be two separate changes was actually the same thing, only broken down by nationally vs. internationally). There've been a ton of changes recently in quality guidelines, and I think it made sense when the top people came up with them, but a lot of the spirit still gets lost in translation when the freelance editors try to apply the letter of them. So I've basically been watching other people mutilate my articles, without the usual email notifications on a lot of them, so I'm slowly finding and fixing stuff as I stumble into them. They also finally did raise the pay, but not enough for me to get back into writing as much as I did before.
Meanwhile, eHow's response to the Panda smack was to tell all of us that we were getting evicted, and that they were going to stop paying for their use of our articles as of Right Now (while keeping them up on their site until the end of the month), but that a select few "lucky" people had the opportunity to sell all rights to our articles to them. I would've seriously considered selling some of my articles to them, assuming that the offer was at least five times the article's lifetime earnings. The offer I got was to buy the whole lot at an insulting price. So, needless to say, I spent an enormous amount of time last month moving all my articles off the site, all of which had to be done within two weeks (around my day job at that), because no way was I going to trust them to not screw me over somehow if I took too long. Their track record for that sort of thing is, shall we say, not good.
About a third of them ended up in Bright Hub's hubfolio section - the ones I think will do well there - and the rest got moved into my Misc Answers blog where they're very slowly being posted back up at the rate of one every other day (with plugs of Bright Hub articles alternating). I have no illusions of earning any more money off these but I still like them.
So, to sum up ... now the only content site where I have any articles up is Bright Hub. Everywhere else has been consolidated into there, or moved to that blog. I suppose it's simpler to keep track of only one. At the same time, I'm back to being full-time gainfully employed, so it's not that big a deal anymore. It's nice to get the trickle of pocket change but I don't feel any urgency in making it grow.
I think that pretty much covers the last month. Hopefully this month some fiction will ensue!
Work is going well. I'm at two down, one to go, on big Matlab scripts for my primary job. After that I have plans to make a SQL database. I also attended a conference where I met back up with someone I knew ten years ago, and who wondered if I was interested in processing some of her data too. That'll be up to my boss, but I'm all for it. After that, I think I'm supposed to take over tracking the sensors - keeping them calibrated and etc., hopefully going on cruises. After that, I wonder if I'll be allowed to do anything with fish.
The workplace is also going well. I get a lot of free rein to do whatever I want, and just last week I was told to pick out and order my own office chair and a new computer. This sure beats having someone just hand me stuff without asking me what I need or want.
Roleplaying is going well. I'm happy to have found a local group that even thinks about playing something besides D&D - way more than I was hoping for. I almost got into a Star Trek game starting up pretty soon, but the time conflicts with the only yoga class I can realistically attend, and I'm not about to drop yoga. Meanwhile, the BPRD game (Savage Worlds system) is going pretty well overall, at least for me. Plus a new person just joined the meetup group that expressed an interest in running WoD.
Roleplaying on RPoL consisted of me cleaning out my Dark Ages game and deleting it. In the process I reread big chunks of it. Man, that was an awesome game. There's no way I can recapture it now, though - those moments are past and everyone involved has moved on. Although I did seriously consider starting up a new game. Probably won't do it though - I've got a lot of other stuff on my plate and roleplaying in real life, so play-by-post isn't as high a priority.
Writing ... still nothing on the fiction front. On the bright side though, inspiration suddenly came back a couple days ago, and I've been musing on Vengeance again. I am looking at writing the same park scene yet again, in yet another completely different way, which would make it something like the 6th version or so. One of these days I'll get it right.
As for nonfiction. Stuff hit the fan. :p Bright Hub has had a (mostly) transparent response to the Google algorithm change (called Panda; what I took to be two separate changes was actually the same thing, only broken down by nationally vs. internationally). There've been a ton of changes recently in quality guidelines, and I think it made sense when the top people came up with them, but a lot of the spirit still gets lost in translation when the freelance editors try to apply the letter of them. So I've basically been watching other people mutilate my articles, without the usual email notifications on a lot of them, so I'm slowly finding and fixing stuff as I stumble into them. They also finally did raise the pay, but not enough for me to get back into writing as much as I did before.
Meanwhile, eHow's response to the Panda smack was to tell all of us that we were getting evicted, and that they were going to stop paying for their use of our articles as of Right Now (while keeping them up on their site until the end of the month), but that a select few "lucky" people had the opportunity to sell all rights to our articles to them. I would've seriously considered selling some of my articles to them, assuming that the offer was at least five times the article's lifetime earnings. The offer I got was to buy the whole lot at an insulting price. So, needless to say, I spent an enormous amount of time last month moving all my articles off the site, all of which had to be done within two weeks (around my day job at that), because no way was I going to trust them to not screw me over somehow if I took too long. Their track record for that sort of thing is, shall we say, not good.
About a third of them ended up in Bright Hub's hubfolio section - the ones I think will do well there - and the rest got moved into my Misc Answers blog where they're very slowly being posted back up at the rate of one every other day (with plugs of Bright Hub articles alternating). I have no illusions of earning any more money off these but I still like them.
So, to sum up ... now the only content site where I have any articles up is Bright Hub. Everywhere else has been consolidated into there, or moved to that blog. I suppose it's simpler to keep track of only one. At the same time, I'm back to being full-time gainfully employed, so it's not that big a deal anymore. It's nice to get the trickle of pocket change but I don't feel any urgency in making it grow.
I think that pretty much covers the last month. Hopefully this month some fiction will ensue!