Document your life

Figured I’d at least try to write a post of some depth and thoughts. First, this is a trackback from Jason Lamberton’s entry on Chaos and Order.

If you could scroll down to the end of a fairly long entry, he said he is in the process of becoming a Deaf professional blogger. A professional blogger is someone who blogs daily and able to earn a living on ads profits, donations, or sponsorship with media companies like About.com or Weblogs Inc. One well-known professional blogger is Jason Kottke.

Well, I’m proud to say that I was the one who came over his place and helped him set up a new blog (that shall be unveiled later whenever Jason decides to). I suggested him to use WordPress so that he’s in complete control of his own work instead of being stored on other servers like Blogger. Jason and I went back a long time ago—wow I can actually start saying “A long time ago…”—when our mothers were classmates at Illinois School for the Deaf before his mother moved to California when she was a junior. We didn’t meet first in person as we were one of the early members of AOL version 1.0 I think they’re up to 9.0 now or something? Finally, in 1994, we came to visit the family and that summer, I broke my ankle while playing basketball. It was awful and I was stuck in a cast for 8 weeks but I could walk not too bad without the aid of crutches. Anyway, that’s how we met and fast became good friends. I remember we loved to play NHL 95 on SNES. We managed to score more than 30 goals in one game, heh.

A lot has changed since we played that game on SNES. We’d play together on the floor hockey team when he was a goalie and I was a forward during my freshman year at Gallaudet. Recently, he was studying to get a Phd but as you can see from the entry, he dropped out of the fellowship program. Now, his goal is to become a professional blogger. Let’s help him!

We’re at a point where we really need to decide what we want to do with our life. That’s what we talked about the most when I was over his place. We both realize that it’s important to document our life because when we’re gone from this place, nothing is left except our shit. No one is going to crack our skulls open and read what’s inside our brains. Jason said there is a kit that allows you to print your diaries and put them in a notebook for archives. For now, we could save our diaries on a server but what if something chaotic happens? No proof to show we did exist. I’m thinking abt printing all of my entries and put in a binder so I can reflect and remember.

One thing I learned while chatting with Jason was how he doesn’t want to be affiliated with anyone. He doesn’t want anyone to be telling him what to do and he has tons of ideas he desperately wants to see to happen. So, we were discussing how blogging can work out for him so he could share his ideas, document his life, and earn something out of it. He has this idea about vlogging. It’s a way of using ASL to document ourselves instead of just typing words. The only way to “print” ASL is to videotape ourselves signing. I think it’s a cool idea and I’m thinking abt using my webcam to record my signing. Never mind, I’m gonna do it now… *turning on the webcam and signing to myself for vlogging*

*update* – that didn’t go well as I thought—need to work on compressing video from 10mb. I’ll need to find a decent video editor. But if you got a big bandwidth, see me on vlog here.

You should see windows media player embedded in the webpage (sorry mac users) and you will need to wait a few minutes before the video shows up.