1000umbrellas.com

My wife and I just bought our first house, and have spent the last few weeks packing, moving, unpacking, and even cleaning an inordinate amount. I haven’t been posting to this blog, but I will get back to it as soon as we are settled in. We finally got Verizon FIOS installed earlier this week, and so far, it is awesome. That is all for now. Cheers, everyone!

I’ve been quiet on my blog for the past few weeks for two critical reasons. First, my wife and I are closing on a house, and the bank has made us miserable with their exhaustive and ill-composed requests for information. Second, I’ve had to work on a crazy assignment for the state of California. My group tries to stay out of the papers, but you might read about my work in the next few weeks without even realizing it. It’s been stressful. Now that spring is here, though, I feel much more optimistic and productive.

I redesigned my site tonight. I hope everyone likes it!

This blog was always meant to be little more than a personal web site, which would be updated periodically, and a bit haphazardly, too. It’s evolved over time into a collection of recipes, some essays about things I like (primarily in the technology world), some family photos posted on my Gallery2 site (which never integrated with the blog as well as I’d hoped), and some recipes, most of which are self-created.

I want to push the site in a new direction, and include posts that are in between a 140-character Tweet and a full-fledged essay. The idea is to be more timely, and to prod me to produce more content. I’m going to experiment with that for the next few weeks.

I doubt that anyone cares about the Twitter Digest posts that have been automatically posting on my blog. Therefore, I decided to relegate them to a “Lifestream” sub-blog on my site. I actually installed another instance of WordPress on my site, but I’m sharing the same database as with my main blog. It’s kind of a hack, but it will help keep my main blog clean, while still capturing my lifestream content on my own webspace.

You can find the Lifestream link at the top of my site.

My blog was hacked this week, and I was locked out of my WordPress admin pages. Soon I plan to put up some posts about baking and the house that Allyson and I are about to buy. It’s been a big and busy month!

I have been under the weather the past couple weeks, so I have been lax about posting new content to my blog. I will be posting new things soon, though. I have a bread pudding recipe in the works, and will soon put up some of my writings, and also a video of my Brandeis  play. Please come back later!

Personal web pages, blogs, and Twitter streams are all about one thing: marketing. I’m not ashamed to be contributing to the web with the goal of self-promotion in mind. I learned from a good friend of mine from business school the importance of personal branding. He got me into social media a little over a year ago, and I finally get it. Now, I’m on FaceBook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and I’m replacing my stale, old personal website with a WordPress blog. It’s about time.

I’m a consultant who works in the insurance indusry in the regulatory capacity. This blog, along with my microblog (which cross-posts to Twitter), are public broadcasting, so please understand that I will remain vague about anything sensitive to my company or clients. I will, however, write about some of the tasks that I’m doing, the software that I am using, and  various aspects of my life.

I am finally starting a personal blog. I tried blogging about a year ago about my business school, the University of Connecticut, but I gave up on it fairly quickly. This time, I plan to be more deliberate about it, and keep fresh content rolling. Stay tuned!