Sent from my iPhone

Sent from my iPhone

So I didn't make the choir.  The director informed me that my voice is too "pop singer" oriented and that I need to work on my rhythm sight seeing.  It all totally makes sense, because I haven't done anything but pop singing for 7 years or so, and I KNOW that I botched the sight rhythm part.  I'm just proud of myself and excited that I had the opportunity to audition.  As much as I'd love to take part in a choir again, I'm probably better off joining a band if I want to indulge my musical side.  I really don't have the time for another weekly commitment though anyway - I barely have time to spend with my horse.

Luke's birthday is this weekend and we're going out to dinner and then probably to play Vampire at Game Empire.  He's going to make me a deck and I'm going to play my first ever game.  Normally I just sit there and watch the geeks geekout, but now I am actually going to give it a try.  Hopefully I kick everyone's ass!  That would rock.

I need to remind myself to get a passport.  My mom invited me to come on a 3-day cruise to Mexico in March, and I won't be able to go unless I have a passport.  Anyone know how long it takes to get one?  I might be SOL anyway because March is only 2 months away.

I am simply loving Posterous.  I think it's fantastic and it makes me want to blog 300 times a day.  I think I've used it long enough though to be able to put together a feature request list.  Here goes:

• Customizable themes.  I like how my blogs here are simple, but I'd rather be able to at least look a *little* unique.  I've heard that customizable CSS has been planned since the summer, I'm interested to see how it's implemented.
• Ability to post to multiple blogs and be able to choose which one.  For example, I have a Wordpress blog that is gaming related.  I want to be able to specify that my gaming related posts get posted on my gaming Wordpress blog and Tumblr, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc., and that my personal blogs get posted to every site except the gaming Wordpress site.  I guess I could do that my saying posterous+tumblr+flickr+facebook+twitter@posterous.com every time I wanted to post, but that would probably get annoying.  It would be nice to be able to use 'minus' signs.  Like post-blog@posterous.com would post everywhere EXCEPT the blog.  Right now I use two different accounts to do this.
• A "bookmarklet".  I want to be able to send to Posterous from anywhere on the web - but the problem is that it is going to need to let me pick which blog/account to send to.  Right now I have 3 posterous blogs spread across 2 Posterous accounts.  It should let me pick from a dropdown where I want it to go, and which external sites to 'autopost' to.
• An iPhone app, although this is priority B for me because I have an email client on my phone which is good enough :)
• Private group blogs.  I want my company to be able to submit to a group blog but have it be private so that we are the only ones who can see it.

That's about it for now, and that's a lot of work for 2 people.  I love Posterous so much that I want to see it succeed and want it to have all the features I want so I can love it even more :)

Prewarning: typing this blog on my iPhone so expect typos!
 
It's my last night here at my parents' house in Minnesota. The trip was as good as can be expected. It was nice to see my parents and great to see my friends. This trip really showed me something though: for the first time in a long time, I finally have a home.
 
I've never been a believer of the house one lives in as being their home. Since 2002 I have moved into nine different homes. That's more than one per year. In 2007 alone, I lived in 4 different places, two being in a completely different state from the first two. It didn't feel erratic to me at all, I just became accustomed to moving around and never really settling down anywhere. Now, I really miss being home.
 
Home to me right now isn't the cute little condo that I share. It's not my bed or my kitchen. It's pretty much everything else in my life. For the first time in my life, I wake up looking forward to whatever it is I have to do that day. I look ahead to the next day, to the weekends, to the evenings. I finally know what it feels like to be comfortable in life, to be satisfied, to feel complete.
 
This last year of my life has been an uphill climb of better and better. While I've never been and done exactly what my parents had hopes their only child would be and do, I am so happy that I made my own decisions based on my personal happiness. While they don't necessarily always approve of who I date, I now understand what it feels like to be independent and happy. I know they want me to be happy, and I'm excited to one day show them that I am capable of making excellent choices for myself.
 
Luke has completed me, he is my other half. I can't believe that at one time in my life, I honestly considered being tied down to someone who wasn't him. I still marvel at how simply everything has fallen into place, how perfect everything feels. When he looks at me, I can tell that he loves me. We are equals together in all things and I really feel like we are "doing life" together. I don't think there is any challenge that we couldn't beat. It's really awe inspiring - it's like the fairytale that I've always wanted. I can't imagine being any happier than he makes me every single day.
 
My career is another bright spot in my life. It feels so great to have a plan, to have an industry, to feel a future ahead of you that has some semblance to certainty. I enjoy my work immensely. Everyday I get to immerse myself in something I truly love to do. My very first position in the game/web industry is actually working with a product that I am passionate about. I feel like I am good at what I do, I take a personal interest in my company's well-being, and I am always working in my mind even when I'm not at the office. I have an end goal and milestones in my mind for personal advancement and I'm working with a company that cares about them and helps me work towards acheiving them. This is all so new to me.
 
My hobbies keep me busy and happy as well. I still have my wonderful Bella dog who is a piece of my old home, who keeps me entertained with daily antics and hilarity. I have a new horse, that although has many health problems, has been a nice project. Seeing his progress makes me feel great, and whatever happens I am going to know that I improved his life. The beautiful San Diego weather makes every day bright and promising and motivates me to be active, optimistic, and energetic. I love life.
 
I sure don't feel like I have it all figured out yet. I'd like to reach a few goals this year at work, i'd like to have some savings because buying a house is a very real possibility for the first time ever. I'd like to be more artistic and cook more. I'd like to pay off some debts I owe and get my finances under control. But mostly, I just want a year that compares with 2008. 2009 is going to be another amazing year. Our year. Man, it feels good to say that.
 
Happy New Year.
 
 
 
Sent from my iPhone

So..

The combination of using Posterous (one email address sends to all my social networks and blogs) and then using Tumblr + Friendfeed to aggregate them all into one blog is freaking sweet.  I'd love if the two combined, but that's in a perfect world.

Example:

I send an email/blog to post@posterous.com.  It gets posted here to cuppycake.posterous.com, goes to my cuppycake.org Wordpress blog, blasts out to Twitter, posts the full blog to Tumblr and Livejournal, uploads any images to my Flickr account, and tells everyone on Facebook that I did it.

My Tumblr page (www.tamibaribeau.com) pulls in every one of those Posterous posts, and my filtered FriendFeed stream, which includes which videos I favorite and upload on YouTube, what I add to my Amazon wishlist, what movies I watch and rate or add to my queue in Netflix, etc. 

The combination of the two makes it stupid easy to post to everywhere at once, and stupid easy to have one website (the Tumblr) display all the information in one convenient place.  Love it.

FYI, I bought this.

Laugh it up.  I'm going to be warm while you are cold. :)

I hate Old Navy during the holiday season....

Sent from my iPhone

Somehow, 2009 is creeping up on us (as in, it's just over a week away).  I never did get around to making resolutions last year, so I can't see how I fared.  But 2008 was a great year, and therefore I'm looking forward to making some goals for 2009 and trying to stick to them.

So, without further ado....

1) Start being more active.  I want to get outside and enjoy the beautiful weather more.  I want to spend lots of time riding my horse, doing more surfing, going to the dog park and the beach, and just anything outside of the house.  I'd love to get a SD Zoo/Wild Animal Park season pass this year and go there more to see the animals.

2) Blog more.  I really enjoy going back and reading my blog posts, but in 2008 I really slacked with the blogging.  My main gaming site was lucky to see one post a week.  My personal sites saw a bit more, but I switched around what site I blogged at so much that I never got into a good rhythm.

3) Move to a new place!  Our lease is up in March, and Luke and I have goals to move closer to downtown - somewhere with a younger atmosphere, closer to shops and restaurants, closer to Balboa Park and the beach.  Pretty soon, my blog will be filled with posts about our moving process :)

4) Research!  I feel very confident and good at my job as a community manager, but I've wanted to be known as more of an 'expert' in the industry.  I want to do a lot more research about virtual world and gaming history, and broaden my knowledge about process and work towards a career in production.

5) Along with #4, I want to read more this year.  So, to combine with #1 - I want to have a nice patio area or place to read outside.  I want to get my ass off the computer (when I'm not at work) and be more productive.  I have so many series' that I want to read!

6) Delve further into photography.  Luke has a Nikon D50, and I want to buy a field manual for it and take some classes and really start doing some hobbyist photography in my free time - particularly of horses and animals. 

7) Cook more!  Late this year, I did make an effort to start eating more homemade food rather than going out to eat all the time - and it was fairly successful.  I just want to learn to make a wider variety of healthy food and make food more often even though we don't get home from work until late.

8) Continue to change my eating and exercise habits and lose more weight.  While I did lose about 14 pounds or so, I want to lose at least another 25.  I know that this is going to take a substantial change in the way I eat and exercise, so I'm making it a goal to do that this year and drop those pounds.  (As soon as the holiday cookies are gone....)

9) Spend more wisely.  I'm notorious for buying every little thing I want and not budgeting my money.  This year, I'm putting myself on a strict spending budget so that Luke doesn't make me get rid of Finnegan (my horse), and so I can actually save some money. I really need to keep a list of luxury items that I want, and not buy any of them unless it fits within my budget.

10) Learn more art.  I've been taking a little CD course about Adobe Illustrator, and I'd love to learn to make vector art.  It's always been a dream of mine to be able to make something awesome enough to have it framed and hung on my wall.  So, I'm going to be doing a lot of tutorials and practice and try to get my skills to a point where I can be proud of them.

11) Join a choir and do more with my music skills.  I'm auditioning for the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus on Jan 6th, and I'm hoping that I get it.  I really miss singing in a choir, and I know I need to get back into it.  It will be a great way to meet people as well.

12) Go to more shows this year.  Not just bands, but more plays and musicals as well.  That was always something I was big on, and I'm hoping that when I live closer to the 'action' I'll be able to attend more events like that. 

So there you have it, I'm sure I'll add more as I come up with them!

So a month ago I started out with a microblog on Tumblr.  I really really have enjoyed Tumbling.  I find that on my Wordpress blog, I always feel like I need to compose these awesomely written blog posts that have deep and meaningful thoughts on gaming.  It’s kind of daunting to stare at the empty Wordpress text editor.  Twitter is always fun for conversations and short little blasts of information – but Tumblr gave me a place to really say what I want to say, as short or long as I want, as often as I want, and as low-quality as I want.  Nobody really reads it and it’s a nice little place where I can just be me.  Sometimes I post cooking recipes, or pictures from my phone, or interesting links from the internet.

I’d heard of Posterous too, but I am just not sure exactly where it is going to fit in within my daily life.  The good thing about Posterous is that everything is via email, and since I’m connected to email 100% of every day (thank you iPhone) it works out great for getting virtually anything to the internet whenever I want to.  The benefits over Tumblr (that I’ve found so far) are:

• Quick feature turnaround – it seems like Tumblr is rather stagnant.  Looking at Posterous’s dev blog makes me feel like they really have a lot of momentum going.
• Integration with other sites is better.  The Posterous site can hook into my Flickr and auto-upload all images to there, it can autopost to my LiveJournal, or to a Wordpress blog, or even to my Tumblr!  So, if I can do everything through Posterous and have it show up on Tumblr, that sounds like a done deal right?
• You can set exactly where you want the content to go.  Emailing flickr@posterous.com will send the images right to my flickr.  Flickr+twitter@posterous.com will go to both.  You can combine however you want and even add tags right within the email, which is awesome.
• Easy ability for multiple people to contribute.  Give them the email address – like post@metaplace.posterous.com and it would let our entire company autopost to the blog.  They could even make it private for quick and easy image uploading.  It’s pretty rad.
• Good integration with Facebook and Twitter (doesn’t seem like it will be too annoying)
• Comment system is built right in, no need to add Disqus like Tumblr requires you to.
• No real need to ever go to the actual website.  You can just do everything from your email or SMS – which is totally awesome.  I like knowing that things are just going where they’re supposed to.
  

The only real reason to keep the Tumblr is because it looks fancy, has better themes, and has a bookmarklet for posting content (which Posterous says they’re getting soon).  While I like the look of my Tumblr better, the formatting of the Posterous is more like a blog – it reads better.  And I’ve never cared for the reblogging thing in Tumblr, it just seems so incestuous and not interesting.  And while Tumblr has a much bigger marketbase right now, Posterous just got a hefty round of funding and seems to have a team that’s pretty passionate about the product.

I’m going to try it out for a bit longer, and if I continue to be impressed, I’m switching over my tamibaribeau.com domain to the Posterous instead of the Tumblr – and then probably removing the tumblr altogether.  Nice work Posterous!