Category: Blogging

Voenix Rising may be…unavailable…for a while. I’m going to attempt to move it to a new host because GoDaddy sucks.

…this seems to be the attitude of the majority of the people I know in real life.

So much for my break from blogging. That certainly lasted, didn’t it?

I think now that I wasn’t so much burnt out on blogging itself, but rather on the expectation that certain things would be posted on certain days of the week.  For that reason, I won’t be doing any more of the scheduled weekly “theme” posts.

But there will still be political and social commentary, a healthy dose of snark, and more than enough hot menz to keep you pervs satisfied.

Spontaneity! That’s the ticket!

I’ve been amassing have a lot of stuff over the past week that I want to share, so don’t be surprised if a dozen or more posts appear in the next few hours.

I’m burnt out on blogging. When I first started doing this thing eight years ago it was a way of venting my frustration at the direction the country was going, but lately it’s just become an excuse to bitch about life and repost pictures of men in various stages of undress.

I’m over it. I need a break.

I don’t know how long this will last. It may be days, or weeks, or even months until I’m fully back into it. I may still post occasionally if I happen to run across something online that I think is share-worthy, but the scheduled features are done.  I may pass on some interesting tech tidbit I happen to run across, or opine on politics now and then, but even there I’m suffering from severe outrage exhaustion. At this point I can’t even go through all my politics feeds without hitting “mark all as read.” The level of stupidity infecting this country on all levels has left me emotionally and mentally drained.

So keep checking back.  I may surprise you.

[polldaddy poll=5720717]

My feeds don’t seem to be updating consistently, so those of you who read Voenix Rising through some kind of RSS reader (Google Reader, Reeder, etc.) are probably missing some posts. Apologies to anyone affected, but at this point I’m not even going to try and troubleshoot it because I do enough of that crap at work and I don’t want to mess with it at home too.

…if Voenix Rising goes dark for a few days.  The monthly payment for my hosting account is overdue and I do not get my first full paycheck for another week.  This ought to be interesting…

While it is true that I’ve been wanting to refresh this blog for several months, it’s not entirely true that it was done just because we’re moving to Colorado.  It’s because I did something very stupid (proving I am not immune).  I sent off emails to a couple headhunters I’d been working with in Denver that had a link to this blog embedded in the signature line.

Oh shit.

While I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve posted here over the years, much of it was definitely NSFW and considering the amount of ranting I’ve done about work lately it probably wouldn’t make the best impression on someone trying to present me as a potential employee to one of their clients.

That led to the knee-jerk reaction of blasting away all my previous posts.

But as we all know, anything posted on the internet lives forever.  And anyone with the slightest bit of curiosity and know-how can find it. Some rather snarky comments I left on a discussion board nearly a decade ago about people stealing images for use in their eBay postings from a long-gone hi-fi website I used to run are still available just by Googling my name. Scary.

This made me realize that—for better or worse—Voenix Rising has become my brand and merely deleting a few years worth of blog posts is not going erase my presence from cyberspace. Not even close to it.

And you know, that’s okay.

If someone doesn’t want to represent me to a prospective employer because of my sexual orientation, political views, or the fact that I (like every other working person on the planet) occasionally bitch about my job, it’s better to know it up front.  Because for every headhunter out there who takes issue with these things, there will be another who will not.

I am reminded of an interview I had about a dozen years ago with a placement firm in Palo Alto for a position the company had been having trouble filling.  The headhunter really liked me and thought with my experience I’d be a great fit, but she had an issue with my pierced ear.  She said that the company she wanted to send me to was extremely conservative and I would be advised to remove the stud before the interview.  I looked at her and said, “Seriously? This is 1997, the Bay Area and you’re asking me to take out an earring? If they’re that uptight, why would I want to work there?”

Honesty—something decidedly lacking in public discourse these days—is always best.

And the blog really did need to be cleaned out…

In honor of our impending move to Denver, I thought it might be a good time to wipe everything away and start fresh.

I may also be taking the blog in a different…direction.  Stay tuned.