HellaMike.com!

6,456 is the number of miles that I have flown between Tuesday and Thursday last week. Houston to an overnight in New York. Back to Houston. Houston to Los Angeles and back to Houston in a day with filming customer videos in between all the flights.

We lucked out and flew home from L.A. first class, a nice treat after all that traveling and work. Now I don’t know if you picked this up from my awesome blog title but I’ve never flown first class.

First off we had to run to the gate because we took a detour on the way back to the airport to try In-N-Out Burger which was a worthy risk. But I did miss one of the best parts of flying first class which is looking down your nose at the lowly peons as they brush past you in a huff to get into their teeny coach seats while you stretch out in an extra wide seat while shaking your empty whiskey glass at the flight attendant for a refill. The sounds of the ice cubes clinking the glass rubbing in your superiority even further.

Secondly, I thought that warm towel thing was just a joke in movies. It’s not. It’s so not. And the towel was so warm. So refreshing.

I rubbed it all over. Aaaaaall over.

Then came the dinner options. Yes, options. Wow. First option was some shrimp pasta thing. Second option was a roast beef sandwich. From what I could see the shrimp pasta thing had no pasta. Which I thought was weird. I got the roast beef. Which was as good as any kind of airline food-first class or coach. But the thing about this meal was that it was served on a tray complete with a table cloth, single serving salt and pepper (in actual shakers) and real honest to goodness silverware. Couldn’t that be used as a weapon for terrorists?

Lastly the flight attendant kept refilling my glass, (yes glass with an etched Continental Airlines logo) with Coke so I was all hopped up on sugar and caffeine all night and kept Ali up all night by talking about everything and everything and everything and everything and well… everything.

#1 I’ve set up a Tumblr. Yes that’s right. a tumblelog. Tumblr is an easy way to share things like links, quotes, photos, videos and more with friends. It’s very basic. There are no comments (unless you use third party pluggins, which I won’t). To me, it’s going to be a way to share. I hope to see some of you there.

I am going to try and post there once a day, at the very least 4 or 5 times a week. I’m still going to blog here, but there will be where I post the cool things that I see online.

#2 I’m a big fan of The Houstonist, which is, in their words, “a website about Houston and everything that happens in it.” Almost anything Ali and I do or go to in or around Houston, we found it because of The Houstonist (Discovery Green, Lucky Burger, and on Friday we’re going to Little Big’s gourmet burger joint). There are similar sites for several cities around the country and the world, I highly advise you to check into seeing if your city has one.

They have a Flickr group where members can submit photos to, and each day they feature a photo on the main page. They also use photos for various stories and blogs they post and they used one of my photos in an article about what’s going on around town for Obama’s inauguration. That’s pretty cool.

#3 A few weeks ago I gave my website HellaMike.com a pretty major overhaul. I am still tweaking various pages but I am very happy with the way it all came together. I am also starting on another aspect of my site which I am very excited about. I’m not going to go into too much detail about it right now, but I will let you guys know when it’s live.

#4 I went back out to the Obama mural on Travis and Alabama street in Houston today to get the picture I wasn’t able to get when I first went out there before the election. I thought that’d be a good way to end this blog on the eve of Obama’s inauguration.

"Hope" on Inauguration Eve

You can see the older ones here.

My website(s) have gotten a bit of a facelift in recent days. One site is HellaMike.com, it was the main site before Sunday. Now it is the portal to everything I have online. It links to my blogs (more on this in a minute), YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter.

HellaMike.com has been updated to version 3.  Version 1 (December, 2004 via http://web.archive.org’s Way Back Machine) was a place holder. I needed web space, but not a site, so I put that up as a joke, and it stayed until the winter/spring of 2006 when version 2 went live. It was a portfolio site, used to host samples of my video and graphic work. Web Archive’s Way Back Machine doesn’t have anything of version 2 which kind of sucks, but version 2 sucked.

Yeah, version 2 sucked. It was up from February-ish 2006 until last Sunday (November 16th, 2008).

Long live version 3! This update has been a long time coming. My portfolio site needed to be updated for a long time and I was either lazy or lazy so it never got updated.

The blogs (yes plural), there is the Danger Blog (this blog, dir) which is my personal blog, but for a while I’ve had a professional blog set up at http://www.hellamike.com/blog that I have hidden from most of you. Well, that’s not true, I just never told anyone about it. But that is where I post the things that I have created, whether they are videos, graphics, or whatever I am working on, that is the place to see it.

It is much easier for me to update my portfolio using a blog then when the site was HTML. You can subscribe to it if you want, but there really isn’t a need to unless you want to see my stuff.

I also want to give a shout out to Raymond Krause at CSS Tinderbox who created the template I used for the main page. I’ve edited it to suit my needs, and I think it looks awesome. He has a number of other templates on his site if you need one.

Remember when I said that my real life was killing my digital life? (Ali totally stole this topic for her last blog: My crazy life is fucking with my blogging.)

It still is.

I’m still Twittering like nobody’s business (GET ON TWITTER IF YOU AREN’T ALREADY!) My screen name is @Hella, join and follow me and you will be rewarded with tons of posts by me. Yes, that is a threat.

I just can’t get enough of Twitter. I have Twhirl open and it goes off whenever I have a new tweet. If I am not at home, I am reloading TwitterBerry on my BlackBerry every 4 minutes. I had to start following more people to get more updates. I may need help.

When was the last time I did a video? Oh. Christmas. Probably won’t be another one until June or so when we go to Jersey. And I’m not blogging as much as I would like to either. This blog about not blogging is so meta.

The craziness that has been going on is painting our apartment. Thankfully it’s over and done with. Check here and here on Ali’s blog for pictures. Speaking of Ali’s blog, she made me do another theme for her. Luckily this didn’t need much work. Check it out at http://www.tiaraclink.com (but you all knew that anyway.)

This weekend we are finishing the office. I should have an office chair to add to my new desk. It’ll be nice to use a computer at home at a desk. Up until now my desk has been our chaise lounge and I usually have a messy desk, much to the dismay of Ali.

Work is… Work. Busy, aggravating, same ol’ same ol’. I have two Planet gigs coming up, and those are always fun to do. I can’t wait for that.

This weekend we may be going to see Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band performed by the Fab 40:

Beatle enthusiasts David Blassingame and Steve Candelari hand-picked 40 Houston musicians to pay tribute to the Fab 4 with a live performance of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, something the Beatles never actually did.

From what I gather, it’s orchestral, so it’ll be pretty damn cool.

That’s all I got now. I promise I will try and blog and do more vidoes.

zmg I totally swear to blog. *shoots self*