Archive for the blogging tag
the surfboard quiver
Today marks four years since I’ve been living here in Mexico. If it weren’t my own life, I wouldn’t believe it. Has it been so long? Where has the time gone? Why isn’t my spanish better than it is?
A curious thing has happened along my four-year journey. I am no longer the person I was, when I packed up my stuff at the advice of my parents, put my life on hold and moved to Mexico. What started out as a “surfing sabbatical” of sorts became so much more – and more permanent. Mexico has changed me, probably in more ways than I am consciously aware of. If for some reason I where to move back to the United States, I’m sure I could fit back in to that existence with relative ease. But without noticing, the US has changed just as much as I have. It is no longer the place I left it.
I love Mexico – but in many ways I’m living in a country that is still not my own. I spend each day trying to immerse myself more fully into its magical culture but to say that I am fully immersed or somehow ‘mexicoified’ is not being truthful. I am still very foreign, which is not to say that I’ve failed at ‘becoming Mexican’ on any level – that was never my goal. It’s to say that I’m not quite American and not quite Mexican. The borders between countries are now slightly more arbitrary things, except in the hassle it takes when crossing them, the pleasant differences in language and culture, and the changes in infrastructure upkeep. I’m a citizen of both and neither, simultaneously.
Marcia and I are coming up on our two-year anniversary in December. In January we will welcome our son into the world. These are not indications of a temporary journey; these are milestones of the adventure of a lifetime. And so in some ways, the four-year mark is a fitting time to acknowledge that the “sabbatical”, as a temporary time and place, is over and the adventure is just beginning.
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On another note, this is my 2096th post on ‘Quality Peoples’. I crossed the 2000 mark some time in June, I think. I arrived in Mexico, in late August 2004 and started the blog proper in October. So, anniversary and celebrations all ’round.
Well, the secret is out. Yes, I’m an expat blogger with a keanu-style surf lingo writing style. This pretty interesting article comes by way of one of Mexico’s english-based rags The Guadalajara Reporter*. I was wondering why my hits had gone up two-fold this past tuesday, thank you cutnpaste…
Forget Lonely Planet and Fodors. Because at this moment, hundreds of English-speaking expatriates are not only enjoying new lives south of the border, but recording their ups and downs, travels and home life, good eats and unusual finds through digital journaling and photography posted on web logs for the world to browse. After a bit of web sifting, I’ve caught on to a few that really shine: the chosen expatriate blogs are easy on the eye, informative, and fun to read.
www.qualitypeoples.com
Ed Fladung lives and breathes surfing in Bucerias (just North of Vallarta) where he’s been, as his web/photoblog’s heading announces, on a “perpetual Mexican surf sabbatical” for the last four years. Fladung is about as güero as they come, with a shoulder length head of sun-bleached hair and a healthy beach glow. He occasionally appears in the vibrant, Technicolored shots of candid small-town Mexican life he posts — a click on the photography link in the upper right hand corner will send you to an online Flickr gallery which is like peering into a candy shop, sun-saturated rainbow colored pictures you could sort through for hours.
The photography is bright and entries light; his Keanu Reeves-esque surf lingo is endearing and readable. “OK, I’m off to go pre-book our hotels,” he writes in preparation for a surf trip to Bali. “Bummer, I was hoping to just roll up …” And of a boat captain’s suspiciously high fees, “I told dude that’s the gringo rate, that I live in Bucerias and I’d be willing to pay 300 pesos total. Dude said no.” Recent entries include movie reviews of a dozen or so films that passed through his “two horse town,” as well as an anti-Adobe Acrobat rant and several single photograph posts. Check the March 26, 2007 entry to learn how Mr. Fladung ran into members of The Whitest Boy Alive and Broken Social Scene at a local restaurant and witnessed an impromptu acoustic concert (with Leslie Feist on spoons and glasses).
Apparently, the article will fall behind a pay wall, after the issue leaves news stands**, so here’s a link to the full article, posted by Jillian and Malcolm from Dropped In, two firebrand ex-new york hipsters in overly designed eyewear (like myself) who’ve set up shop in the Yucatan.
I gotta say and the author is dead-on about the interesting phenomenon of dialed-in expats dropping out of the american fast lane, especially the twenty and thirtysomethings. There are some really killer blogs I keep noticing, Jillian and Malcom’s being one of the hippest, if for nothing else for their liberal use of dirty words.
and you know i love dem dirty words.
Edit: It turns out Meredith Veto, the article author, is a young expat herself and she has a blog. Go check her out, she has the beginnings of very cool blog and obviously well written.
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A new version of Tumblr just surfaced. Tumblr is a no frills, stream-of-consciousness hosted blogging app. It’s so simple and easy to use I’d switch to Tumblr if I didn’t like tinkering around with WordPress so much. For no coding, no web design skills, normal folk looking for an alternative to Blogger, Tumblr is amazing. The interface is so simple, and the user experience so streamlined it makes keeping a weblog much more of a casual, fun thing, like updating your myspace/facebook profile rather then adding to and keeping a tomb of past entries. Posting becomes a throw away thing, kinda like Twitter with video, photos, chats, quotes and links.
SimpleLog. A simple (and free!) Ruby on Rails weblog application. Gorgeously simple admin design. WordPress, I’m looking in your direction. [via Partially Blind]
After 3+ years of Bloglines, I’m finally getting fed up with its web based approach (images failing to load, repeated posts, no dedicated ‘clippings’ feature etc…). I’ve resisted NetNewsWire in the past, because of its inability to display several feeds at once, I think NNW refers to it as the ‘combined’ view (this is also why I don’t use NewsFire). Well, now that combined view is working, I’m testing NNW out to make the jump. There are a few nit picky things I can’t get past:
- While in combined view, the name of the blog is smaller then the titles of the post. This seams trivial but I’m stuck on it.
- It seems that the style sheet switching feature has no effect on combined view. but why?
- Do I really have to press command-k (mark all as read) after reading a folder of feeds? NNW doesn’t just mark them as ‘read’ after I’ve hit the bottom of the feed scroll pane?
- It seems the only way to delete a ‘clipping’ is by having to go to “News > Delete Clipping…” am I correct? and what’s up with the unnecessary “…”
Have any other tips for using NNW and integrating MarsEdit as well? drop it on me.
ps. For those of you using NNW in conjunction with MarsEdit (with WordPress), what do you do about wp tags, technorati tags and other custom fields?
The Gawker Media newsroom has a webcam. If you ever wanted to be a blogger, this will most certainly turn you off the trade. and messy desks, tsk tsk. But I suppose that’s what I look like right about now, sitting in front of this computer. [via fimoculous]
