A Blog on Blogging

I get the purpose of blogs – saying something to a wider audience and all that jazz – but these days while I’m simultaneously blogging here, on my photoblog, through video diaries for work, on our company blog, and occasionally through my old blogs (I seem to go through blogs in the same manner one goes through bars of soap – regularly and without much regard to them once I’m done.) I seem to have no clue what exactly I’m meant to be communicating.

Oh god my life is so interesting!

Maybe? Probably not. I’m sure other folks have much more interesting lives. Mine just happens to occasionally change location and those occasions seem a bit more frequent than some. (Though apparently not right now as for some reason I’m still in Bishkek without a clear departure date as I wait for my Kazakh visa extension to come through)

My photos are amazing!

Not really for that one either. Joy of the internet is you can find out just how many more brilliant people there are in the world – even if they aren’t in the same café, bookshop, restaurant or other common spaces with you. I might keep taking photos as a force of habit, and I like my photos in that selfish way that most people do like things they make, but they’re really not impressive enough to merit the “OMG! Look over here!” that is present in so much of shamelessly self promoting webwhorishness. (Proof this blog post is written for my blog and not work – that word would not be acceptable for school children, some of which may in fact read our blog)

My perspective is unique or my actions are interesting!

Once again, in the world wide web of human interactions – not really. In my immediate bubbles, I tend to stick out. But in my immediate bubbles that’s easy to do. Los Altos isn’t that big of a town. Santa Barbara is also a pretty small city. And after that I seem to have ended up in a pretty small company on a pretty big globe. In the grand scheme of things, I’m really not doing much.

My work today was in vain due to an internet café accidently terminating my internet connection 80% of the way in to an upload for a video that took far too long to make given its 1 minute length. And after an hour twenty – 80% was done and then made useless. Followed by returning to the office to log footage, run out of space on a hard drive, discover the disks for our external harddrive seem to be missing, wait on some emails, and attempt to edit footage only to discover it wouldn’t save properly due to the memory problem which can’t be resolved till we find the disks for the harddrives. All in all – I achieved very little. And yet here I am. And somehow when I left home everyone was patting my back and excited for all the things I would do on the road… like data management. Data producing is a thing I’m consistently good at whether through filming and photographing random items, events, happenings etc… but managing that data… oh boy. As anyone who was in my photos shot from 2007 to 2009 can attest – a two year delay in processing can and will occur. (Dear subjects of 365 Faces of the Year – SORRY!!!) On that note, I should probably go to bed soon. I have a long day of random errands (Today’s examples: Film a ride in a rickshaw through a Central Asian city and then paint a pipe black), data management (log said footage, edit into manageable videologs in FinalCut Pro), and other miscellaneous tasks (E-mail the director’s press card scans to Turkish officials to get permission to film, make some tea, call the web designer…)

All in all life continues on what seems like a standard for life living out of an office – scheduled entirely around work. There are definitely cons to having a bedroom across the hall from the main room of the office. Not sure how much longer I’ll be puttering around Bishkek (sometimes literally in the auto-rickshaw, most of the time just doing odds and ends in the office/around town) as there are some logistics holding us back – but I’m hoping we’ll be on the road sooner rather than later as I imagine fall and winter will only slow things down more. And outside of California they seem to have these weird things called seasons. Bizarre I tell you!