Times Are Changin'

As Roxy Blue says, "Baby, I know times are changin'." And if you don't know who Roxy Blue is, that is probably because you aren't into obscure hair metal bands that only produced one album of any significance at all with a scantily clad female on the front cover that is no longer available for purchase.

Anyway, the Half Bad Boy Blog is coming to an end.

Yes, I am a little concerned about my readership. Hopefully both of them will see this post and follow me over to blog.mvryan.org, where the blogging will continue, hopefully a bit more free-form. See, the problem with having a themed blog is that it makes it hard to write about what you really want to write about. I want to write about whatever interests me and not a theme - even one as cool as half-badness.

I realized this in a couple of ways. The first was that I was feeling constrained in what I would blog about. For example, I might want to blog about technology or politics, but it didn't fit the theme. Lame! Then as I started poking around at other people's blogs, I found a lot of other themed ones, that seem really interesting in the beginning but after a while seem like they are just saying the same thing over and over again. Either that, or they really start to scrounge for stuff, like "Seven Tips For Reducing Stress In Your Life" (tip #1 - stop stressing) or "How To Simplify Your Life" (such as not using any technology at all - but this does not apply to the blogger who must use technology to produce the blog, etc.).

Uninteresting. The interesting blogs to read, if there are any, are more personal than that. And the interesting blogs to write are about whatever topics I care about, because by definition the categorization of something as "interesting" by my brain is entirely subjective. Suddenly my blog becomes the most interesting of all! If I can only cut loose.

Which I'm doing. Eventually. Not right away. But if you agree that stuff I may choose to blog about could be interesting enough for you to care, you should change your bookmark, or feed, or whatever to blog.mvryan.org instead. If, on the other hand, you are incorrect and don't find this stuff interesting, why are you even here? You should stay away. No offense. It isn't that I don't want you around. I'm just afraid I will have to moderate comments from people who wrongly think that my interests are not interesting. I believe I've made myself clear.

So. blog.mvryan.org. In case you missed it.

A Surly Ad

Coolness is seeing an ad you created on Google (highlighted):


Here's a close-up of the ad:

We did this one also:

An E-Commerce Experiment

Some of you know that I am the President of Vice of SR Investment Group, a company that so far specializes in not making money. Not content with the current rate at which we are not making money, we decided to try to find a different way to not make money.

So we are starting a new e-commerce website, Surly Jack's Outpost, at http://www.surlyjacks.com. It will sell outdoor stuff. I was going to describe it better, but hey, I don't care enough.

Surly Jack is a fictional character we made up as the fake owner of the store, by the way. Don't let him offend you, he's actually not that bad a guy, really.

Surly Jack's was going to open today, but there were just too many things that needed to be done to make it by today. It should be opening up within the next few days. But the real evolution will come later, as we continue to revise the look of the site and make it look, uh, non-cookie-cutter. Yeah.

Anyway, check it out. You can follow Surly Jack's blog and/or twitter to stay informed on the status of the web store. Or go to MySpace and become Surly Jack's friend. Believe me, he can use all the friends he can get.