As many friends have reminded me, I haven’t blogged for a while.

Here’s a refresher on what I wrote a while back about why I blog.

And here are a few reasons why I haven’t been blogging for a while:

• Scrubbing
  I had to prepare my apartment for a parental visit. ‘nuff said.

• Traveling
  I visited Seattle, Ottawa, and Toronto… which involved preparing presentations, doing my first-ever TV interview, filing expense reports, escalating/acting upon tons of awesome webmaster feedback, recovering from staying in a tiny room above a Mexican restaurant (which cost nearly $150 a night!), helping a friend break up, and beforehand personally booking plane rides, train rides, hotel rooms, and more.  Trips are a lot of work, especially those that combine business and pleasure.

• Recovering
  I spent time recovering from having many bits of glass fly into my head.  This was associated with an accident involving me, my parents, my new car, and a very, very stupid and/or suicidal skateboarder who ignored a stop sign at a busy intersection and collided at high velocity with my slowly-moving vehicle.  While my parents and I are thankfully all healed up, I’m still dealing with financial and legal ramifications… and my car is still in the shop.  Upside:  I’ve been getting lots more exercise from walking and jogging and have lost two pounds of fat .

• Practicing and performing
  I recently performed on stage at the huge Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California.  What a scary and exhilarating experience!!!  I hope to have a recording that I can post here in the near future.

• And yet more travel-planning
  I’m planning trips in the remainder of this year to Dublin, Seville, Louisville, Los Angeles, Chicago or Las Vegas, Viernheim, Mannheim, and Caracas.  I’m excited but stressed about this, as you can imagine.

• Working
  I’m heading up two major events at Google, taking on new responsibilities, attending Search Engine Strategies San Jose in August, and much more.

• Apartment searching
  Though this has been temporarily put on hold while I’m carless, I have been scouting out a new place to call my own closer to the Googleplex to eliminate the generally-comfy-but-time-consuming daily commute from San Francisco to Mountain View.

• Facebooking
  Facebook has both taken time away from my blogging and has dried up much of my drive to blog.  With Facebook, I’ve been able to share what’s going on in my life with friends, highlight interesting articles, ask questions and get answers, show off music and photos, and learn what’s going on in my communities, in my friends’ lives, and so on.  Still, though, Facebook isn’t (yet) a complete replacement for self-hosted blogging as I see it, so don’t count on me shuttering BLADAM just yet .

  * * *

  I always have tons of stuff I want to share… continually have blog drafts bouncing around in my noggin.  But now you understand why those have remained mental drafts for the last months.

  So… no promises that I’ll blog more often—sorry.  But be assured that I’m not just belching in front of the T.V.

   

  ---

  - Blathered by Adam on Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 19:49 Permalink
  - Filed under Personal
  - Commented on by 51 folks so far. Visit the full entry page and join in!

They say the meek shall inherit… and I’m hep to the jive!

So, yes, Terry, I did have to go ahead and blog this (it’s one of the damn coolest birthday cards I’ve gotten… thanks!)

[e-card below, via Plaxo’s neato ecard offerings]

In case you're interested in stalking me and/or knowing what my thoughts are on various online presence / networking / bookmarking sites I have tried, here's a (completely unscientific, wholly biased, unabashedly uncomprehensive, and generally of questionable use) list

FYI, I'm findable via my full name on the services below unless noted otherwise.  And sites owned/operated by Google are indicated by [g], as a brief disclaimer/reminder since I work for Google (but not on any of the products or product-types below).

Happy Googleversary!

As I was getting ready to board the Google Shuttle home recently, a colleague (who started at Google on the same day I did) poked me and jokingly wished me a "Happy Googleversary!"  Right then it hit me that, yeah, I had been at Google for a full year.  Wow!

Also in the last few weeks, coincidentally I presume, many folks -- particularly fellow alums -- have been e-mailing me to ask about what it's like at Google, how they can get a job there, etc.  I will be e-mailing all of them back (sorry for the delay!), but in the meantime it's prompted me to do something I've been planning to do for a while:  write a few (okay, maybe more than a few) words on how I ended up at Google and what my thoughts are about working there.

No ands, ifs, or butts—this titilating title and content isn’t just a naked attempt to get a leg up on my subscriber numbers.

I normally keep this sort of thing close to my chest, but when Vanessa Fox invited me to bare all my reasons for blogging, I felt bound to oblige.

Ironically, just the day before, I was asking myself the very same thing (no, not why didn’t I pick a more sexy blog name… okay, that too!… but primarily, why DO I blog?).  Seriously.

And what I came up with at that time was this very-honest list:
1. I don’t know.
2. I don’t know.
3. I don’t know.
4. I don’t know.
5. Honestly, I don’t really know.

That, of course, may go a long way towards explaining why I seem to average about a whopping post or two a month nowadays :-(.

But, to avoid disappointing Vanessa and all 42 of you others who read my blog, I did some more soul searching and came up with a decidedly more interesting list of reasons why I blog, or at least why I think I do.

I don’t usually participate in bloggy memes, but two folks I like and respect (Aaron Shear and Aaron Pratt) have invited me to take part in a viral “Tell five things about yourself that few people likely know about” thingy.  So I will

1) I’m more introverted than folks suspect.
Though most folks see me as oft-smiling and reasonably social, I actually quite dislike large crowds, and am especially unfond of very large, loud parties.  I’ve gotten better at meeting people and making conversation, but I still much prefer small social gatherings (birthday parties, movie nights with 5-20 people I am comfortable with, long dinners with a handful of friends, and so on).  I also quite value my alone time… to read, think, rest, etc.

A few years back, I had some free sessions with a personal trainer at my gym, and one of the most useful takeaways was this:
Unless you write stuff down, it’s too easy to “fudge the facts” in your mind.  How much pushups are you doing with good form?  What are you eating each day?  We tend to maximize the former, minimize the latter, and that’s not good.

For starters, he made me write down each day *everything* I ate and drank, along with estimated calories associated with each thing I put in my mouth.  Boy, that was a depressing but enlightening shocker!

Well, I decided to go one better and start my own personal health chart (in Excel), daily noting my progress on several fronts (weight, body fat percentage, pushups, etc.).  Alas, after a few months, that kinda fell by the wayside, so I picked it up again a year later.  And, once again, that only lasted a few months. 

I’m trying yet again, and—now that I have the regular routine of a full-time job—I’m hoping it’ll somehow be easier to keep up the list.  For the very curious, I’ve included below exactly what I’m measuring:

I’ve had the good fortune to travel a lot over the last years (mostly for fun, not business, though that’s shifting) and also am blessed with many fun and photogenic friends.

With no further ado, here’s a sample of photos I’ve recently uploaded:

Talented Tjapukais

A sexy swing dancer

Watery wires

Korean combo

Gregarious Greeks

A fab flower

Here’s the entire list of my photo sets on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thatadamguy/sets/

Enjoy, and comment away!

Tomorrow night I’m heading off on a plane to once again attend a camp for swingers.  As you can imagine, posting on my blog and sorting through my t-shirt drawers will be far from my mind.

Take THAT, Lisa Barrone

Anyway… if you’re interested in all the details (including lots of photos!), visit Swing Out New Hampshire’s Web site.

See y’all in a week or two

[Added to reduce chances of some folks having a heart attack:  It’s a swing DANCE camp, people.  Lindy Hop.  Jazz music.  Sheesh… such dirty minds ]

So, what do you do when you’re home alone on a Saturday night, you don’t feel like going out, and you also aren’t in the mood to be very productive?

No, not THAT .

Why, you optimize your t-shirt drawers, of course.  Exactly!  And so far, I’ve determined that I have:

• 13 Google t-shirts (fewer than half gotten since I became a Googler, interestingly enough)
• 13 dance-related shirts
• 13 other somewhat-decent shirts that I may actually wear (okay, this is weird… I had no idea my t-shirt collection was so bad-luckedly symmetrical!)
• 5 [whew!] remaining t-shirts that I don’t want to be caught wearing, so I’ll donate these to Goodwill (:cough: unoriginal and oft-oversized swag)

A sampling of some of the stranger ones: