Mandaris Moore

This is a simple test of my system to see if things are still working.

I just want to see things work like I'm expecting.

I just wanted to write something.

I haven't written to my blog in while. I think it's partly because I've set up so many barriers in front of myself.

High expectation on my writing and just attempting to make the blog look just right.

I'm tempted to give myself a challenge of creating something for the next 30 days to get back into my writing.

After a couple of months of not doing anything with it, I went back and got MultiMarkdown Composer beta to work on my system again.

Today for my creative challenge, I'm going to write 250 words!

I was sending and tweet to Matt Gemmel (a developer who has transitioned to being a writer) asking what kind of exercises does he do to improve his writing. He stated that he writes about himself in third person and then does some fan fiction as well.

I'm going to do something similar to that because I have some desire to be a little bit of a writer as well.

Of course it was part of a dream that I've given up, but I think I should at least work on making it an option. Being able to express my thoughts, feelings and ideas can only help me interact with other people.

Sometimes, I get lonely and I don't know if anyone feels the same way that I do about a lot of things. If I write about what I think, I might find others like me who feel the same way about it.

Or even better, I can understand my own feeling about something and work towards getting a grasp of it. Understand it and do something about it if it is negative.

One last goal is to be able to write for another publication. I feel that I have a unique way of seeing things sometimes. Some of the reports and snippets that I see on the internet are about 250 words and if I could write something that length easily than it would open a lot of doors.

Last night, I spent some time doing research on how to work with exercism.io so that I could create a little video tutorial. From my home computer, I saved the individual webpages into evernote and than made sure that my laptop did a sync of the pages before I left the house.

I think this will work well going forward for my research materials, but¹ it doesn't help me when I come up with new outlines and mind maps on my phone.

I have mixed feelings about this problem. On one hand, I have a point of friction. On the other, I'm moving! I'm doing something and this will ultimately be something that I can work on as part of this whole challenge.

This time, I set out to see how quickly I could make a video of a simple animation. I managed to put it together in half an hour, but in the rush I can see a horrible delay in the middle of it. I feel it is because I don't really know the controls of the time line and that I was rushing to create something more than a blog post about the challenge that I'm doing.

Perhaps I'm fortunate in the fact that I only have half of my self allotted time to create something today. I got caught up being productive at my job¹ and the place that I usually set up for this kind of work had the desk and chairs removed.

In fact, that got me thinking of whether I should count things that I make for work as part of my challenge. I think I'll say no at this point because I want to be able to show my work to the outside world and I'd like to keep my job².

I did a little more animating with CrazyTalk Animator 2. I just wish I could create more more characters but it seems like something like that takes time.

Well, I've been wanting do something with CrazyTalk Animator for a while and I thought that this was a great time to look into it because the latest version has come out.

Today, I spent some time making a picture of something that I'm planning on selling on Craig's list. I took some pictures with my iphone, but didn't know how to remove the exif data.

I think the picture came out really great and it gave me something to create.