Black Belt Living

It's OFFICIAL!

My new blog and photo site is live at barbhoganphoto.com.  I hope you'll come on over and decided to stay there!  

 

Evolution

Neglect, that's certainly what this blog has been suffering from, that's for sure. I don't really know why I stopped updating it.  Well, yes I do and that's the good part.  

I stopped because I've thought for a long time that I need to change my focus and morph this forum into a better blog that's more photography oriented and better suited to what I'm doing right now. My photography business has really picked up, and thanks to the encouragement of a bunch of friends and some talented creative professionals, I'm ready to make that leap. 

So it's my pleasure to announce that in early June, I will be leaving this blog behind and moving to a new site that will serve as both my photography blog and online portfolio. I've been working on it behind the scenes for a few weeks now and I'm really liking how it's looking so far.  

In other big news, I started a new job at AI Software in March, as their project manager and social media specialist. We build websites for other businesses and provide social media management. I train clients on how to maintain their websites, do site changes and population, and do all the social media campaigns. It's such a fun job. I tell people that I get paid to play on Facebook all day. That's not entirely true, but it kind of is to a degree.

So since I'm now an official Social Media Maven, I figure that I should get my own act together in that respect and starting this week, I'm doing that. If you're not already following me on Twitter (and why would you since I rarely update it!), you can find me here and I promise to keep it updated and hopefully fun.  

Lots has been going on around these parts since I quit posting and when I roll out my new blog, I hope you'll follow me there and catch up on all the latest and greatest!

Finally, since no blog entry is complete without a photo, I think I'll post this one. I recently got an iPhone and have been trying to learn how to take creative pics with it using Instagram.  Here is one from Mirror Lake at Eden Park. 

Speaking of Instagram, if you'd like to follow my fumbling efforts and failures over there regarding my iPhone camera, you can find me on Instagram at bahogan.  

See you soon with exciting new updates! 

 

A Mosaic of Different Things

A friend sent me this the other day and I thought it was hilarious!  Make sure to check out the names of his "friends" and read the comments.  Clever!  I challenge you to not laugh!

If Bill Gates had a Facebook Page

Speaking of Facebook, a friend tagged me to do this fun photo mosaic yesterday and it was pretty fun. Fun with Flickr photos, that is.  You can try it too. If you're  a scrapbooker, this could be a good start for a fun and easy layout.  Feel free to add more questions for a larger mosaic.

Rules:
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search (http://www.flickr.com/).
b. Using ONLY the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into Mosaic Maker. Change rows to 3 and columns to 3 (http://bighugelabs.com/fli
ckr/mosaic.php).
d. Save the image and post it on this note!

The Questions:
1. What is your first name? Barb
2. What is your favorite food? Alaskan King Crab
3. What is your favorite color? Purple
4. Favorite drink? Wine
5. Dream vacation? Tuscany
6. Favorite hobby? Photography
7. What you want to be when you grow up? Retired
8. What do you love the most in life? Loved Ones
9. One word to describe you? Creative

Here's how mine turned out!

Have a good Friday. Do you have a busy weekend coming up? 

We'll be hosting a garage sale in two weeks, so I really need to spend a few hours starting to get organized for that.  If you're in the Cincinnati area, it's a neighborhood, multi family sale and it's an awesome event!  Saturday, 4/25/09 from 9am until noon (or later).  If you would like more information, email me!

Hey Mac Users - Are You Monolingual?

I was crusing a Mac Users forum the other day, and fond this software that can help you regain some of your hard drive space. 

 

It's called Monolingual, and it removes all of the bazillion different language versions of your installed software that you probably don't use, like Ajerbajani or Farsi and a bunch more. Just download the software (it's free!) and check off the boxes of the languages that you aren't fluent in :-)  then press enter.  

I have a lot of software on my Mac, so mine took about eight minutes to run, but it cleared - get this - FIVE and a half GB of memory on my hard drive! That's a lot of space for photos and music, people!

 

Download Monolingual

So there's your public service announcement for your Wednesday. Please pay it forward and have a great day! 

It's Really Is a Small World After All

When I was pregnant with Shannon, AOL was all the rage. One day I clicked on the message board forum and found a group of women who were all due at the same time I was. It was way cool. That's where I met Maggie, who I consider my first internet friend, who ended up becoming a dear friend for life. From there, I found another group of feisty women on a debate board and we all became internet buddies, including my friend Marla.

For me personally, that was the start of technology making the world a smaller place. Now thanks to the wonder of Facebook, the world has become a much smaller place. 

I signed up quite a while ago, but never really discovered it until fairly recently. I had heard all the bad crap about teens and young adults making fools of themselves through the availability of services like Facebook and MySpace. I just wasn't into it.  Or so I thought.  

Then my group of feisty, debate loving AOL moms reunited in Facebook, and roped me in. And that was that. 

Since that time, I've reconnected with people that I haven't seen in literally decades, including:

• my oldest friend ever. When my parents bought a house when I was four, I became friends with Teresa, the girl across the street. That's a long time, people. I'm so happy to be in touch with her again.
• college friends that I havent' talked to in 25 years, including my "fraternity little brother"
• high school friends, including one who literally lives just a few miles from me

Most of my first cousins and some of my relatives are on FB and now I can actually see what's going on with them. They're really cool people, so it's nice to be in touch with them on a regular basis and see what they're doing in the world.  My dad recently had a little mishap and ended up in the hospital for a day (he's fine now!), and thanks to Facebook the word flew around the family in rapid fashion. I think my parents got a kick out of how quickly the word spread. 

On FB, I have lots of friends from the scrapbooking world. Recently, I found out that my friend Marla from above went to high school with another one of my FB friends that I know from scrapbooking. And these aren't people who live around here. They live in a totally different area of the country. Small world. Another friend, my friend Kristin, who contributed that yummy pasta recipe yesterday, recently met and had lunch with my friend Andy (another digital scrapbooking friend), and they don't live near me either. 

Then there are always the people that you don't know who ask you to be their friend. I don't know how I feel about it when this happens. I don't have too many of these, but I do have a few. I'm thinking that they must be blog readers or scrapbookers, because why else would they want to be friends with me? Well other than the fact that I'm fabulous...... One guy who asked to be my friend had a bit of a unique name.  I didn't know who he was, didn't have a clue. As it turns out, he's a well known professional photographer from Iceland and one of the country's experts on Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.  Go figure!  I'm glad he's my friend, he posts great photos and tips! 

It's a bizarre reality, really.  For years I'd lost track of so many people who had once been a big part of my life, and now they're not only back, but i can connect with them literally anywhere thanks to Facebook and my Blackberry.  Remarkable. And who would have thought a year ago, that now I'd be looking at how to use sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to not only connect with personal friends, but how to leverage these resources for business as well.

And remember that small world concept? Well that rainbow-like wheel up there is my "friend wheel". It draws connections between all my Facebook friends who know each other. To me, it's just amazing how so many of us are connected in so many ways. The only thing that bums me out?  There are two of my dearest friends (my best friend from high school, and my best friend from college) who aren't there. I sure wish they were because not a day goes by that I don't miss them and think about them.

High DUH-finishion

We retired our old television and stepped up into the world of high definition television on Black Friday of 2007.  It's a sleek, lovely piece of high technology, and it fits just perfectly in it's assigned space. 

I admit, however that while the picture is really GREAT, I figured I just didn't get, or maybe just didn't really see the difference, between the high definition channels and everything else. 

This past Saturday, we had friends stop by. We ladies were on our way out to go work at the hockey game, and the guys were staying home to watch football and maybe a movie. Our friend K wanted to show Andy and I a certain scene from the James Bond movie, Casino Royale. 

To play a DVD on our pretty not-so-new television, you have to get the multiple remotes and press multiple buttons and change some settings on the input. In the meantime, the Tennessee/Baltimore football game was on CBS.  

And all of a sudden....holy CRAP!  LOOK AT THAT! It looked like our television had gone 3-D without the need for those dorky cardboard glasses with the red and blue lenses!  

It appears that for fourteen months, we've been paying for high def channels, but not knowing how to receive them properly! This is by two people who generally consider themselves pretty technologically savvy.

Last night when we turned on American Idol and Ryan Seacrest was standing on the top of the Grand Canyon, it looked like you could literally step right off the edge (or push him off if you're so inclined). It's like we got a brand new really cool toy this week.

That was the Big Duh Moment of the Week for sure. 

I wonder what other really cool high tech things we could do but haven't figured out.