I was talking with a friend today, and the subject of oceans and lighthouses came up. I was born and bred on the New England coast, not right on the beach, but, until I was in my 30's, never more than a couple of miles from the nearest coast. I am, right now, some 90 miles from the nearest coast, and it's the Gulf of Mexico, not by any stretch the Atlantic. Anyway, I thought to share a couple photos from home. Enjoy or not, as you will.

Photographer friend

Be sure to follow my friend at Wildwynd Photography! Beautiful photos, some of the best I've seen!

Wildwynd Photography

Communication

A co-worker just got a Twitter account, and her first (and thus far only) post was one I thought strange...

I am trying to figure out why people think they need to keep up with what everyone else is doing. Mind your own business.

Seems a weird thing to post to Twitter, a site whose whole reason for being is to answer the question, "What are you doing?" We had spoken earlier in the day about Twitter, as she was new, and I'm still a noob, but have been there for a couple of months, follow and am being followed by half a hundred users, so I could speak with some experience, if not authority. I showed her the Everybody page on UberTwitter, and she couldn't understand why so many people were posting such dribble.

I thought about this tonight, while I was IM'ming a new friend online, and we were chatting about nothing, really, just sort of getting to know each other, and I had Tweetdeck in the background, with the Tweets rolling in about Walter Cronkite's passing, and maybe, just maybe, I thought, people feel a need to keep up with what everyone else is doing simply because we're people, and we need to feel connected to other people.

The Swing of the Blog

I opened this blogger thing on a whim, actually because I had seen someone else's and wanted my own, not for any particular reason other than to have one. I have noticed, in a lot of the blogs I've read in the last weeks since I started mine that they are very specific. This guy's a SQL DBA, and that's what he writes. This guy builds furniture with hand tools only and that's all you see talked about. What about diversity?

In the weeks since I wrote my first, albeit near worthless, blog post, I have built a new Access database for a company plant manager to track his staff's KPI tasks, I have rewritten another for a department to record their production, I have written several Stored Procedures in our company's SQL Server, I have worked on fendallhall.com, the website I run for, you guessed it, Fendall Hall, I have worked on a dresser I am building (with both hand and power tools) I have painted my kitchen and nearly finished painting my porch ceiling. Not to mention keeping my teenagers on track and the cat properly attended to.

My point is, I guess if there is a point in this post at all, is that diversity is key, keeping interests alive while paying the bills make life worth living, and I don't know how people can keep their posts on one subject for so long. I don't want this to be a forum where you read that I finally got to the laundry this week, after dinner was cooked this time, not before, but I also don't want it to be how to get that particular database table pivoted just so on this particular column and then spew the results to an Excel table (though those are both things I've done in the last little while :) I guess if I want anything, I want this blog to be about me, whether you are interested in that subject or not. I hope to come up with the chutzpah to post more, maybe even on subjects someone might find interesting, maybe someday be like @BrentO, with his incredibly interesting SQL Blog, or The Wood Whisperer, or any of the other big bloggers out there.

Until then, it's just me.