matt shelton

For six years (1999-2005), I maintained a blog that was, for a portion of its existence, highly personal and unfiltered. A bit too long after this became inappropriate for both my personal and professional lives, I archived the site and stopped blogging for a couple of years.

Every so often I flip through the thousand-ish old entries and find a few that are still relevant now. In that vein and that vein only, I am going to sprinkle a few of them in here and there, whenever it makes sense.

For instance:

On blogging

Originally posted to the old blog: August 12th, 2005

“God, no. What I do is far worse. Trust me, preserve your innocence.” – dooce

Recently, the Dragon Naturally Speaking team at Nuance launched their own blog – Speaking About Dragon. I can’t resist reading (and sharing) a well delivered blog and based on the type and frequency of their posts as well as the resulting dialog, it seems like the Dragon team is finding this new social media outlet to be really useful. They also launched a Facebook Fan Page a few days ago, and it’s getting off to a fair start.

Starting organic conversation with “the masses” is fascinating to watch, both as a consumer and as an employee. It will be interesting to see if this market encouragement causes any additional forays into social media for the Dragon team or other business units here. I try not to blog or tweet too much about work, but our products really are quite awesome, thus the plug.

Is it a bad idea to say “My awesome speech recognition software, let me show it to you!” ?

I think not.

And, in case anyone was wondering, no, this post was actually not dictated using Dragon Naturally Speaking. DNS does rock, to be sure, but I recently re-imaged my laptop and haven’t had time to install it just yet. I’ll get there.

For a couple of years, I’ve been trying to set aside some time to read regularly. I’d set goals. I’d put a stack of books next to my bed or desk and hope it would just happen. Nothing really worked.

I’m not 100% certain I’ve figured out the best way to get past my inability to act just yet, but I’m going to give it another go. This year I’m aiming to read a book a month. To motivate me, I’ll post on the 1^st of each month which book I plan to read, and whenever I finish it, I’ll post about that. Yes, I’m a little late this month. Since it’s, well, a bit later than the first, and I’ve actually already finished a book this month, I’ll claim marginal success and be encouraged to succeed next month!

I read The Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch. I’d been thinking about how best to re-implement my church’s web site (which isn’t quite done — the link is to the current, and not new, design) and wondered if blogging would be a useful tool or not. I’ve always been a big proponent when it’s the right fit, but my church isn’t that big or that technologically advanced; it would be a big step for them. I’m still not sure it’s the right time, but I’m going to put the tools in place to let them get started when and if they decide it’s the right next step.

The Blogging Church helped me to put some ideas about blogging and its ministry applicability into better perspective. It was an excellent read, and certainly a very timely one as I’d just started the rebuild project when I received the book.

I’ve been thinking about blogging for a while now, but it’s been busy these days. During these busy days, however, I stumbled upon the blog being run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). My wife tells me that it’s been commonly known of for a while now, but digg.com seems to drive most of what news I read, so somehow I missed this one.

Nevertheless, I’ve been finding it very interesting. Two recent posts about the troubles that passengers have recently had with the new MacBook Air was very enlightening. It was also the perfectly appropriate response to the complaint. The average MBA user is probably the same demographic as the average reader of blogs, so it stands to reason that the most appropriate marketing channel is the TSA Blog. Kudos to that. I’m also curious to see how/if they’ll post about the article which hit the wires today about a Texas woman being forced to remove a body piercing with a pair of pliers to be able to board a flight. The article was somewhat sensationalist, but that’s the mainstream media for you.

Edit at 8:10pm: And it looks like they did.

I leave you with italic kittens, which is both entirely irrelevant to this post, and quite geeky at the same time:

I’ve started playing around with Chyrp, a new blogging engine. The test site is here.

First impressions are positive – it seems to deliver what it advertises, though I’m not having any luck with the video posting feather. I’ll toy around some more and post any interesting findings.