Ben the Blogger

In an attempt to improve my skills as a writer and to focus my thoughts on something I am held responsible for, I have decided to team up with the gentlemen at the Digital Media Zone.  Josh Pollard heads up a website dedicated to bringing you content about Microsoft entertainment products and digital media.  While I am grossly under-qualified and light on blogging experience, they saw some potential in me and I thank them for that.

My first post came out last week on Tuesday.  Bent on hazing, Josh initiated me with the task of writing about Paul the Male Matchmaker, a Hulu original.  While not the most thought provoking idea to discuss, I made the best of it with a little humor and cynicism.  My second article gave prudence to Kinect for Windows Media Center and its connection with higher household medical spending.  This article actually has a poll in it, which is pretty sweet.  Most people are responding the way I thought they would.  No one really wants to wave around at their TV like Minority Report.

While my career as a blogger is infantile and petty (and free at this point), it is headed in the right direction.  In addition to my work on the DMZ, I am continuing my work on SimplPixl to chronical the ups and downs of a small bootstrapped startup company.  January saw a lull in my tech life, but February is definitely turning out to be the beginnings of ultimate domination.

2005 Here We Come!!

Ben is a geeky techno-sexual.  Ellen is a health junkie.  Mervin is... stinky.  Well, that's it.  I don't need to write anything else right?  Being that I am a emotionally stunted, introverted engineer with a god complex, this is all you really need to know.  However, my wife and the people we know and love deserve a little more than three, five word statements that may or may not accurately reflect three creatures, their journey through life so far and where they are headed.  Hence, the reason for beginning this blog.

Reasons
If you are not moving forward, you are moving backwards.  Someone said that sometime, I'm sure, and when they said it, it had a lot more impact than when I say it now.  Since this is the year of domination (FYI if you didn't already know), we are running up the hill, not just walking.  So we are going to capture that battle with this blog.  That way we can see where we have been and use it as fuel for where we are going.

We have dreams.  Lots of them.  Ellen wants to build her own non-profit organization.  I want to start my own tech company.  Ellen wants conquer iron mans.  I want to climb every mountain above 5000ft (that's high enough to exclude hills).  We want to live in New York and San Francisco.  We want children.  Writing these things down in an electronic CMS gives us a definitive vision and mission to work towards.

Blogs are a good way for us to show our pictures to the family.  We can also relate what is going on with us and our lives.  People can learn about our family vacations or how one of us is doing in the hospital or what horrible deadly non-food Mervin ate this month that would cause us to spend a Sunday night at the emergency vet (its always something weird and always on a Sunday night when it is the most expensive...).

Keeping it Regular
Sometimes there will be three posts in a week.  Sometimes there will be seven.  Sometimes there will be none.  All I can say is that we will probably update a lot the first couple of months, but eventually it will fade.  Unless we get into a routine.  Posts will come from Ellen or I.  Mervin will try to post, but usually his drafts get thrown out in edit...

Keep in mind that I am not a writer, nor am I very creative.  So my posts will be fairly dry and contain copious amounts of grammatical and spelling errors (unless they are edited by Ellen).  Ellen's posts will be calculatedly direct and a lot better than my posts.

Stay tuned for more.