16 Pages In Thirty Minutes At Stumbleupon

I like my job. I really do. Nonetheless, all jobs involve well, WORK. Even when you like what you do.

I’m a writer and I love to write and I love that I get to write about education for the car donation program known as Kars4Kids. I like it because I know I’m helping kids and their parents with this work. My work offers meaning beyond the satisfaction of a job well done, not to mention it pays the rent.

Still, I love it when the day is done and I get to goof off. One of my new fave things to waste time on after a hard day at work is stumbleupon. I um, stumbled upon stumbleupon while looking for ways to shamelessly self-promote my blogs.

Screenshot of Stumbleupon

I share my blogs on my Facebook timeline, on my Facebook author’s page, on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and tumblr. I even created a board for my articles on Pinterest. But all those other share buttons on the various blog interfaces I use had me intrigued. I began exploring some of these other venues and stumbleupon was one of the happier experiments I enjoyed in checking out these various social media networks.

Stumbleupon is FUN. On the other hand, it won’t be much use to me in my profession. I’ve shared about 10 pages on stumbleupon, but don’t really expect them to play well there. Stumbleupon is more about fun and delightful games and graphics than education, politics, and other serious stuff. But fun is good too, right? I mean, within reason.

So the interface is fairly simple. You’re shown a webpage. If you like it, you click the thumbs up symbol. Don’t like it, click the thumbs down symbol. Ready to move on? Click stumble and a new page comes up.

Or Be Brave

By voting thumbs up or thumbs down, you offer stumbleupon a way to refine your preferences and show you more of what you like. When you sign up (yes, it’s free), you check boxes next to all your interests. If stumbleupon sees you clicking thumbs up for many pages within one interest, a window will come up asking if you want to add a related interest. You can always say no. Or be brave and say yes.

I wanted to show you what it’s like to play on the stumbleupon playground (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) so I went through 16 pages today to show you how I use it as well as my reactions to what stumbleupon chooses to show me.  

The one downside to stumbleupon is that not every webpage is accessible outside of stumbleupon which makes sharing kind of difficult. I linked to all the pages I came across today that CAN be accessed on their own. The others, well, you’ll have to sign up with stumbleupon to see them. Sorry about that.

1) Collected Quotes from Albert Einstein. Meh. email forward. Seen it 100 times. Thumbs down.

STUMBLE

2) Crafts I'd never do. Toilet paper roll finger puppets. Seriously? Thumbs down.

Screenshot from website

STUMBLE

3) Gorgeous 360 degree interactive August sunset in Moab, Utah. THUMBS UP.

STUMBLE

4) Takes a long time to load but NEATO. It’s an interactive scene the nature of which I don’t want to spoil for you by telling you about it here. It takes a while to figure out what you need to do to get the neato stuff to happen. Once it does, it’s so cool it’s almost overwhelming. Very, very creative.  Thumbs up.

STUMBLE

5) Gosh. I don't LIKE the art here, but it is so lifelike and realistic and drawn from CHALK, yet! I have to appreciate the artist’s amazing work in spite of my dislike. Thumbs up.

STUMBLE

6) Oh definitely. These are still pictures with embedded gifs so that the pictures move in only one or two small areas of the scene. It’s an extremely effective device. The dice. The cat's ear. I couldn’t figure out what was moving in the photo of the woman standing at the railing, though I looked for a long time and I’m a fairly observant person. That was disappointing. Still: Thumbs UP.

STUMBLE

I get a message from Stumbleupon: "You’ve liked the animation pages several times. Would you like to add graphic design to your interests?"

I choose yes.

7) A black and white photo of apartment building windows during a sideways blowing snowstorm at night. Okay.

Screenshot from Stumbleupon

Not wild about this particular photo, but in general, I like photographs and want to see more, especially black and white photos, so I'll click thumbs up.

STUMBLE

8) Hmm. Thumbs down, though I feel guilty, since it's Winslow Homer and all. Just don’t like this particular painting.

STUMBLE

9) Prank video. Australian guys rig up buddy's plumbing with BEER. Hot and cold running beer from every spigot in the house. Web cams set up so the friends can watch. They must really love their friend to go to all that trouble and expense. FUNNY! Thumbs up.

STUMBLE

10) Sesame street alien puppets discover computer. Weird. Pointless. Thumbs down.

STUMBLE

11) Dumb, dumb, dumb joke. Thumbs down.

STUMBLE

12) Stylish mommy blog. Boring. Thinking: people who stumble upon my blogs on stumbleupon will be thinking the same thing. Gulp. Thumbs down.

STUMBLE

13) Laser cure for Alzheimer's that can distinguish between healthy proteins and toxic amyloids "So simple,

Screenshot from website.

it's incredible." Medical breakthrough dated only yesterday. Cool, if not fun. Thumbs up.

STUMBLE

14) Neatoooooooooooooooo! Canvas Pinball, a game of pinball set up as if on the page of a spiral bound

Screenshot from Stumbleupon

notebook. You use the arrows on your keyboard. Several balls in play at once add a surprise element. I like it. Thumbs up.

STUMBLE

Worried about the artist's diet. (screenshot from Stumbleupon)

15) Drawings of liquid by a Chinese artist. Amazing but um, yuh. The eyeball thing. weird. You wonder if the artist needs a change of diet and you wouldn't want to um, meet him. Oh all right. Thumbs up.

Screenshot from Stumbleupon

STUMBLE

16) Last but not least: a wikihow on how to escape from Handcuffs. That should be a right handy thing to know if I should ever decide to commit a crime. Thumbs UP.

The end.

Noshing My Way to Solvency

ome of you may have noticed I haven't been writing in my blog on a regular basis. That, my friends is a GOOD SIGN. It means I am employed.

It's only a temporary work situation, but let's not look a gift horse in the mouth. Work is work. Work is WONDERFUL.

Maybe you've already figured out this particular facet of my personality: I seize on things like a dog with a bone. When I have work, nothing else exists. All my energies go into the job.

That is why I completed my first assignment a full 14 days ahead of schedule.

Actually, that may have been the nosh.

 
The first day on the job, I found myself in the junk food aisle of my local supermarket, struggling not to take items off the shelf.

I did not succeed.

Here are the items I have purchased to fuel my creativity over the past 12 days:

Those Danish butter cookies that come in decorative tins (a two-fer).

Oreos (for the kids, so they wouldn't ask me for the butter cookies).

Apple chips (to give the illusion of not eating calorific foods). These were the first food item on which I'd ever seen the Halal symbol displayed, which made a funny juxtaposition with the Badatz Kashrut symbol!

Lotus Original Caramelised Biscuits (more about these soon).

Orbit Drops Nature Mint Flavor (I chew these with abandon making everyone in the vicinity plug their ears. The sorbitol causes me horrible IBS symptoms and I eat the darned things anyway).

The last two items are repeating items. I find myself restocking my supplies every day or so.

The Lotus biscuits are the best plain cookie for dunking I have found in Israel to date. I discovered them when my friend and costar from RYS, Avital Macales, brought them as a bread and butter gift when she came for a meal on Shabbes. When I saw my kids fighting over them, I knew they had potential.

They have this wonderful crumbly texture. They melt in your mouth. Bliss. Sheer bliss.

I tell myself that because they are individually-wrapped, I use up calories in peeling off the wrapping. But actually, all I'm really doing is contributing to the landfill problem. *sigh*
 

The noshing is a problem for me. It seems to be something I need to do when I sit at my computer working. But since my work is sedentary and I nosh, I can just about see my middle-aged waistline expanding on a daily basis.

I've had to come to terms with this one fact: carrot sticks just aren't going to do the trick. My nosh needs to feel rewarding. Carrot sticks and the like feel more like a punishment than a privilege.

I did buy myself a package of rice cakes at one point, using, as my rationale, the same idea as for the apple chips, but luckily, Malka, my 18 year-old ate them before I managed to get to them.

Eventually, I'll get the noshing under control. Probably when I feel my job situation is secure...

Are you an on-the-job nosher? What's your preferred nosherei?

Bony Fingers

ears ago, my piano teacher, Ralph Zitterbart, showed me the difference between my hands and his own. His fingers looked skeletal from so much piano practice, while mine still retained quite a bit of chubby flesh around the joints. Piano fingers are not very attractive. But I was struck by the idea that Ralph could see how much or how little I practiced piano at home just by looking at my fingers.

Vladimir Horowitz's hands

After that, I paid attention to the fingers of artists like Vladimir Horowitz and Artur Rubinstein while watching their televised concerts. I worked toward getting my fingers to look skeletal like the fingers of these virtuosos. I fantasized about some maestro meeting me for the first time.

The maestro's eyes would be inexorably attracted to the visage of my skeletal piano fingers. His eyes would fill with respect and gaze into my own eyes, which would reflect competence and the burning, passionate fire of the consummate artiste!

*sigh*

A young Artur Rubinstein

Bony fingers are the bees knees, thought I, back in the days when I dreamed of becoming a concert pianist.

Today, bony fingers are still to be desired. But instead of fingers bony from piano practice, I think of working my fingers to the bone through the tap, tap, tapping of a different sort of keyboard. I make my living through writing, but writing jobs have been few and far between.



Today was a great day in the annals of bony-finger days. Sunday may be a day of rest in the US and other parts, but in Israel, Sunday is just another work day. I finally nabbed a small freelance job, a bone thrown to my less-than-bony-fingers by a friend, the editing of a Powerpoint presentation for robotic software.

I was already thinking about setting my house in order to free me for the work last night, which is when I got the call to do the job. I right away set about separating laundry and making mental notes on how to fit housework and work-work into my day.

The job ended up taking only one and one half hours to complete, which is a pity. I enjoyed so much allowing my powers of concentration and creativity to overtake me. It was like being inhabited by a different, wonderfully purposeful body. I hated for the experience to be over.

It was a good feeling to not only throw myself head and shoulders into the work, but to order my entire day around this project. My whole day gained focus, flavor, and energy thanks to this little bit of work.

It was all over much too soon.

I always think I work too hard and need a vacation. But the truth is I LOVE work. I love it to bits! Work gives so much texture to my day and makes life seem that much more worth living. It makes me feel good to contribute to the household finances and to have and use my skills.

How do you feel about work? Do you wish you had more work? Less work? Do you long for retirement?

Oh the Irony, Oh the Agony

If you'll recall, I started this narcissistic venture as a way of jump-starting my career at a time I feared it was going into stasis. It was a proactive step. Something I could do when there was really very little to do except submit my resume everywhere and worry.

It was a good idea at the time and time has proven the wisdom of putting myself out here for everyone's perusal.

I write 100 web content articles a month and over time, I've created an impressive body of work. Alas, all of those articles are unattributed. So, though I've amassed so much work, I have nothing to show for it all.

This blog, however, is a different story. My name is right out here, front and center. Google me, this blog comes up. Which was kind of the idea in the first place. Get my name out there, show my writing, and maybe, just maybe, I'll get a nibble from a potential employer.

That time has come.

Dov got a new client, asked him what he did for a living, and then asked if by any chance they needed a content writer. What a coinkydink, they did. They'd contact me when they were ready to get started and discuss the idea.

Meantime, unbeknownst (why is spell check telling me this isn't a word, when Merriam Webster clearly says it IS?) to us, they googled me and found this blog. They liked me, they liked me, to paraphrase Sally F.

All you writers out there: start a blog. It pays. It gets your name and your work out there, even if people don't click on your google ads (I've not had a single click). But maybe don't be quite as brave as this writer and bear your kishkes (Yiddish for intestines) for all to see. Yes, honest writing is good writing, but in a moment you'll see what I mean.

Things are hopping with this job offer. And if it pans out, my actual name will appear on the website--for a change. But guess what? They asked me if I have an English name to use as an alternative to Varda--they love my blog, but their clients may not. Hmmmm.

They share my views, they like my work, but I have to go incognito? Dunno quite what to make of that. I could change my name HERE. I could close down the blog. I could use my English name with the company, or I could be adamant about keeping my name and the blog and risk offending a potential employer. ARGH.

Opinions?