Weather Station 1: Year One

Today marks the first anniversary of the launch of Weather Station 1. Over the past year, I have written 700 posts about stupid people, rock bands, movies, politics, television, my kids and myself. Some of them were pretty good. Others made me wonder why I’d ever written them. And in that time, I’ve had readership that has now stretched into six figures. That’s pretty cool.

My top five posts, in order: The Killer Power Ranger, Crystal Defanti, Colin and Jane Moyle, Jason Leroy Savage and Meh. I don’t get that last one. There are posts on this site that took me hours to compose, and they’ve attracted a handful of readers. That one about Meh was a five-minute knockoff, and thousands have read it. I guess I just don’t understand modern readers.

Wait, of course I don’t understand modern readers! I’m in the newspaper business! Well, I was.

I began blogging in the mid 1990s via a service called Delphi, which is now gone. I was working as a newspaper reporter and columnist, and I wanted an outlet for the things I wanted to write about, not the things I was paid to write about. For a couple of years, I maintained a sarcastic web journal called just Weathereye. When Delphi shut down, so did my journal (the word “blog” hadn’t been coined yet). A while later, I had a Geocities page which served the same function, but I didn’t stick with it. Life got in the way, and it was a couple more years before I launched a new blog, this time via Blogger, called The Waystation. Then I joined MySpace and did some writing there, calling the blog The Weather Station, and then Facebook, until last year, when I decided I wanted one central site for the all the crap I had on the go.

When Weather Station 1 launched, it was on a really bad site called Blogdrive. See, I’m the kind of guy who likes to explore alternatives to the big guns, so I automatically said no to WordPress and Blogspot and LiveJournal. I spent a day formatting the blog and setting it up, discovering along the way that Blogdrive requires blog names to have both numbers and letters in the title (which makes zero sense). What the heck, I decided, and The Weather Station became Weather Station 1. Because of the alliteration.

I lasted about a week on Blogdrive. It was horrible to use. One night, bored, I opened a WordPress account and started playing with it, and realized how much easier it was. So I closed down Blogdrive, imported some old posts from earlier blogs, and on Sept. 2, 2008, Weather Station 1 was launched with one little post and a lot of bells and whistles, most of which have been pared away.

My stats for that day show two visits, and I know who those two people were, and so do they. A few days later, I told the world about the site, and I’ve been having fun with it ever since. On the down side, a lot of people found my site by Googling “topless weather.” Sorry to disappoint. On the plus side, a lot of my friends read it, and a lot of strangers. I sometimes wonder if the people I’m writing about in the Today’s Moron series read what I have to say about them. In fact, I hope they do. I’ve also had certain of my posts featured on trekmovie.com, The Huffington Post and other fine sites, and there was even a plagiarist a few weeks back who lifted my work for his own site. That’s flattery. And also stupid, and I let him know that.

I should point out that I am no prize myself. I have made some serious boneheaded mistakes in my time. But I still love writing about other people’s stupidity, because I think we all need to smarten up. If I can draw attention to the ridiculous things other people do, maybe someone else will learn how to behave, and our world will be a better place. See? One man CAN make a difference.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you keep coming back. Year Two promises to be even more fun.

Mystery Photos: Life and Death

Do you recognize these guys?

My friend Steve found a memory card full of photos in Toronto, and he’s pretty sure someone wants them back. I’m going to let him tell the story (he posted it on Facebook tonight):

“… The electronic photo album starts the same way as countless others, with a single airplane wing framed by endless blue sky, shot through the window from 20,000 feet.

The small Kodak memory disk unfolds predictably – four friends posing on the plane, shots of the landscape, pictures of the bedrooms they’ll sleep in over the coming days or weeks.

It ends on a more jarring note – pictures of family celebrations give way to somber pictures of a man on his deathbed. A feeding tube comes out his nose, his lips are battered and bruised. An open casket, a flowery grave.

The dead man looks an awful lot like one of the travelers smiling at the start of the trip, one of the revelers who drinks beer with long-forgotten relatives and sings along happily as someone plays a guitar. But it’s impossible to say for sure – the eyebrows aren’t quite right, and the dying man’s face looks traumatized.

The person who took these photos intended to keep them for an eternity. Instead, they somehow ended up in my grocery bag. I called the grocery store – the Metro on St. Clair West in Toronto – but nobody has come asking.

I posted one of the photos on Twitter, we’ll see if the social-networking service is as miraculous as everyone hopes. I put an ad on Craigslist. And finally, I posted this note on Facebook.

I don’t know anything about the man who apparently lives, fights to live and then dies frame-by-frame on my computer screen. But I do know that someone is dying to get their hands on this disk, so if you see anything you recognize do let me know.”

Steve’s on a mission, and I’m helping out. Email me or message me via this site if you know who these guys are. Let’s get these photos back where they belong. I don’t know about you, but as I’ve been scanning and archiving old photos over the past few weeks, it’s become apparent that a lot of my photos are missing. As you may know, there is a house fire in my recent history, as well as some general disorderliness, and that’s a shame; I’ve lost a lot of pictures I would like to see again.

Maybe Steve can help these people see their pictures again. Fingers crossed.

Facebook Works For Me

My friend Sissillie, who is from the US, not Australia, and teaches in Korea, has tweaked her blog a bit. The new version is very nice, and she has a neat new post about Facebook games. You can find it here.

Oh, those Facebook games.

I played Scrabulous like mad when it launched a couple of years ago. And that was strange; I have never enjoyed board games, and my Scrabble experience was really limited. But the ripoff Scrabulous caught my fancy; I guess its turn-based structure worked for me. At one point, I had close to 30 games on the go. Now, nothing.

Most of my Facebook applications are gone. No Scrabulous, no Flixster, no music player, nothing. The bloom is off my Facebook rose. The initial novelty is long gone (you can thank my mother for that; when your mother joins Facebook, all the fun dies, and hey, I’m 40). Now it has become, for me, what it was meant to be: a communications tool.

All this time later, I still marvel at its structure. Photos, notes, updates, links. The chat feature added last year actually has me chatting online, something I said I would never do. And now I’m Mr. Chat.

It’s easier to use Facebook than email most of the time. The photos application is the best on the web; I have more than a hundred albums, and continue to add photos.

Which brings me to my point. There’s a lot of buzz going on right now about the terms of service, and a recent adjustment that seems to give Facebook rights in perpetuity to anything you post. Many people are upset about this. I am not.

Let’s look at the things I have posted on Facebook:

• Original music
• Photos of my family
• Fiction
• Commentary
• Reviews

If Facebook really wants these things, that’s fine. Facebook wants to use them to promote itself? Fine. I’ll get something out of that deal: Attention. Oh no, Facebook used my photos for promotional purposes … wait, no they didn’t. That isn’t the way Facebook works. And I knew this when I posted those photos. Because I knew, going in, how to use Facebook, and the Web, to meet my needs. I understood privacy settings and Facebook’s excellent controls. The information I gave to Facebook was the information I was comfortable with the world seeing. It’s my spin on my world. Trust me, if I uploaded every photo of me to Facebook, I would have about three friends.

I’m very aware of my presence online. Facebook, Simply Syndicated, MySpace, Twitter, podcasts, the Weather Stations … there are multiple versions of me out there in the digital ether. Person 1 has my voice on his iPod. Person B has my photos on Facebook. Person C is reading this now. They may not line up exactly. That’s the nature of the web and Web 2.0. It’s called social media for a reason. It’s about reaching out and being social, but it’s also about presenting a version of yourself to the world that makes you comfortable.

If you’re uncomfortable sharing information online, then unplug. Write letters and shoot Polaroids. Otherwise, dive in and rock on.

Meanwhile, Sissillie’s blog post makes me re-think my stance on Facebook games. Some of these look pretty good.