The Cure for Writer’s Block Is You

You may have noticed the slight drop in the frequency of my writings.  I have been having major writer’s block.  Twitter is partly to blame since it is great for putting out thoughts, impressions, ideas in a quick sort of way so as a result my blog has suffered.  Furthermore I have spent more time on Twitter lately finding folks to follow and reading what they have to say that I have not bothered to write.

I can not say that I have really suffered from writer’s block in the past since usually I have had blog ideas saved up and so when I run out of ideas I put my saved ones out there. That is how the last two-parter about The Music That Made Me came about. I had been sitting on that one for a while.

I am at a point now where I feel I have said all I could say about most of the subjects that interest me. By now everyone knows that I am a Trekkie, love Macs, distrust the federal government, hate taxes, bought a new car, have 4 cats, listen to Christian artists only, consider Back to the Future my favorite movie, and have a particular disdain for MySpace.

So I want you, my readers (if there are still any of you left), to help break my writer’s block curse. What’s something you have always wanted to know about me? Leave a comment letting me know what it is and I will write a blog post about it. It can be something simple like “why don’t you own a dog?” or something grandiose such as “Do you believe God has placed a specific call on your life and if so what is it?” It can even be about a habit of mine that annoys you; I promise not to be offended. Now to keep things fair, you can not use either of the two questions I mentioned above. They have to be original. But if you really want to know the answer to either then let me know I suppose I can try and answer them.

So help a brother out. Leave a comment and get me out of the writer’s block funk (that sounds like a song title).

You Won’t See Me For a Few Days

My Macbook, which had its screen busted earlier this year, will finally be getting repaired. Today I sent it off to Mission:Repair in Olathe, KS to have the LCD screen replaced. By my estimation I will be without it for about 3 to 5 days.

In related bad computer luck, earlier this year my Mac Mini desktop was hit by lightning and so it is not able to connect to the internet. So I have to have it repaired next. All that is to say that while my Macbook is being repaired the only means of internet connectivity I have is my wifi-capable iPod Touch. However it is useful for many things but is not very conducive to blog drafting. So you may not hear from me for a few days here at the Smoak House unless I decide to post some of the articles I have saved in drafts and just haven’t seen fit to publish yet. We’ll see.

But anyway, my Macbook is off to surgery. Here’s hoping it is back safe with us in short order.

Josh H.

Post Count Celebrations

Well since having celebrations and giveaways over the number of posts one has published seems to be popular among my blogging friends, let me take this opportunity to say that this is my 232nd post. Yes, that’s right I have officially written 232 posts.  Granted, they average about 2 comments a piece (but who’s counting….besides me?).  But that’s not all folks. Today, also marks the two anniversary of The Smoak House. Two years ago today this blog made first contact with the blogosphere.  Hold your applause until the end please.

I want to thank all of folks who have made this possible.  I want to first thank my wife for allowing me so many hours on the internet to get my site and my posts just the way I want them. Many thanks Kev for answering just about every possible question imaginable.  Thanks to Ray for his help with design ideas. Thanks to Stephen for providing my new tagline. Thanks to Matt for getting mad about it (you’re hilarious, dude). And to Heather, Saige, Jason, and everyone else, thanks for reading and commenting and keeping things interesting.

Sorry, I don’t really have anything to give away. However if you’d like to commemorate this day, leave me a comment and tell me your favorite color. Mine’s green.

Josh H.

Back To Basics: or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the .Com

You are probably noticing one of two things right now if not both. First of all the most obvious is that even though you went to the usual Smoak House URL, now that you are here the address bar of your browser lists a different URL than what you probably typed in or clicked. Haven’t seen that in a while have you? So what gives?

Blog Taglines

Many of today’s blogs have catchy, sub-title taglines. For example you will notice the catchphrase of SKOS is “The World Is Full of Stupid; We’re Just Here To Document It.“ Heather’s Hodgepodge defines itself with the tagline “an unorganized collection or mixture of various things.“ (which is quite creative because that is indeed the definition of a hodgepodge. I once toyed with the idea of starting a new blog about modern, indie music that I was going to call “The Philosophy of Sound: Music In the Modern Era”.

I have been thinking about something for The Smoak House. So far the best ideas I’ve come up with are “The Smoak House: Smoak ‘em if ya got ‘em!” and “The Smoak House: Electric Boogaloo”. Actually that first one’s not bad. But seriously folks neither of these really captures what I’m going for. I need something pithy that conveys the fact that this is a place where one man, from his humble digs, pontificates on many subjects great and small as though he were an expert on all of them. However all of that won’t fit on a header image. “The Smoak House” Amateur Pontification At Its Finest”? I don’t know.

I need help from you, my friends and readers (who are actually one and the same). Leave me a comment with your best ideas for a catchy catchphrase for this blog. Submit the best one and in return for your wit and originality I will reward you by…using it.

Josh H.

Five Favorite Things (sorry, Heather)

Several days ago Heather tagged me with this five favorite things meme and I had been meaning to get around to it, but you know how it is. Web site acts up, you’re trying to remodel your bathroom and well, one thought drives out another as they say.

So my apologies to Heather and here are my five favorite things

Public Service Announcement

Okay, my wife tells me that sometimes I explain things too much and that it seems as though I doubt the other person’s competence in the task at hand. But I can not help it! I want to make sure people properly understand me or the thing they are supposed to be understanding. So if I am telling you some no-brainer information, please forgive me.

I want to nip in the bud some potential misunderstanding in how this blog works. Now without a doubt the best way to keep up with when I post (or when comments are posted) to the Smoak House is to subscribe via the RSS links to the right. There are a number of great RSS readers that can help you keep up with when your favorite blogs are updated. If you need help let me know.

However if you choose to simply just go and check all your favorite blogs each day to see if they are updated then I want you to be careful in how you interpret the Smoak House. The “Featured” article is not necessarily the newest. It is simply a way for me to highlight a particular article. If you scroll down below the Featured article you will find regular articles. I may post a Featured article and leave it up for a week but during that time I may post 3 or 4 regular articles but you have to scroll down below the Featured article to see those.

I was just noticing that my featured articles often got comments whereas my regular ones did not get as many (basically only the people that I know use RSS readers were commenting on the regular ones). Of course maybe my regular posts are less interesting or interesting to fewer people. That’s always a possibility.

So my apologies if I have insulted any one’s intelligence, but I felt that I needed to mention this just in case anyone was confused by the whole Featured article thing.

Josh H.

Put a Little Avatar in Your Heart

Yay! I have finally got Gravatars on my comments. Now to some of you that first statement sounded like some Josh H. gibberish. Allow me to explain.

An avatar is a small picture or image that forum and blog users have that displays beside their names whenever they post a comment or a forum thread. It serves no real purpose other than just being a nifty custom identifier. Some people use actual photos of themselves, some have pictures of their pets or kids and some have avatars featuring their favorite band.

Rear Window Ethics

Let me be the first to tell you about a new website. It has a clever name that recalls one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films. The content is interesting and the topics are well thought out. I am talking about Rear Window Ethics. The design of the site is also really intriguing (almost as good as the writing). Oh and did I mention the author and administrator of this wonderful new site? Why, it is none other than my wife Lyndsay Horne. So check out her new blog, at RWE to your blogrolls and comment, comment, comment!

Josh H.

Writer’s Block, Blogger’s Burnout, Call It What You Will

I am by no means a hypochondriac but something’s up.

I decided back in August that I would begin writing some blog posts for money. Then I got the bright idea to save up this money to purchase a new Macbook laptop. My goal was for the money I make blogging and some money I have from “other sources” to add up to enough to purchase a laptop by April 2008. In order for this to happen I would have to submit at least 5 posts to Associated Content. This would be assuming of course that all of those would be accepted. Well the funny thing is for the first 2 and half months it worked. I constantly had new material and I had a pretty good acceptance rate. I made $100 in the first two months from blogging alone.

However something has happened. I have submitted two (count ‘em), two articles to AC in the past three weeks. Actually, make that four weeks. I can not come up with a single good idea. The problem is AC is very particular about the type of content they accept and I have learned what they like. The problem is I simply can not come up with anything that might be AC worthy. And I have tried tapping into my other sources of blogging income, payperpost and bloggerwave. Those have proven to be dead ends. There’s only one conclusion: my awesomeness is running out.

I am not sure how to handle this because in my almost 29 years on this earth this has never happened to me. I mean, I have always had enough awesomeness for most any occasion. For heaven’s sake, I was in a rock band for four years! Do you realize how awesome you have to be to play lead guitar? But perhaps that is what has happened. I have heard of guys who lived the rock n’ roll life in their younger days and then they experience negative effects later. Those who do drugs I have memory or nerve problems later. Those who drink too much have liver trouble. Those who played music too loud having hearing issues. Now granted, I was in a Christian rock band so we didn’t experiment with drugs or hit the bottle after shows. But still, maybe there is another post-band ailment that haunts even Christian rockers: awesomeness loss.

Josh H.