As you Frederick County folks probably already know, the Voltaggio Brothers from Frederick's own Volt Restaurant are appearing on Top Chef, and get this: the ladies over at the E! Channel online are swooning over the Voltaggios and not just because they know their way around a buerre blanc.
After chatting with some friends and reading a few articles today, I think this blog is going to be moving over to WordPress shortly, where it will be reinvented. Stay tuned...
Hello everyone out there in cyberspace who might be reading this,
I thought I would give everyone a quick explanation and also a little bit of an advance warning as to why I am ending this blog on Vox.
This page will stay up for a little while as I gather up those past blog posts I wish to keep as a part of my own personal journal, but soon I will be taking it all down and will cease all blogging here on Vox.
My reasons for ending the blog are multiple:
1. I started my own business recently, and it has started to consume my entire life. People tell me this is normal for the life of a business owner. I am OK with it for the most part, as I enjoy my work. The problem is at night I feel so tired that I just want to veg out and relax with a hot bath and a book. The business is going very well; that is not the problem. The problem is I sit at the PC all day working, so when the evening arrives I find myself more interested in reading or taking walks or doing other things aside from sitting on the computer some more.
2. While this blogging platform seemed very exciting to me at first, I have to be honest: some of the mechanics of the Vox interface drive me bats to the point I avoid using it because it feels like such a pain in the ass as compared to other blogging platforms available. Even if the other platforms don't have cool free layouts like Vox does, they at least seem faster and more intuitive to me, and I'd rather have an ugly blog no one reads that is easy for me to use as my personal journal than a pretty blog that gets read but has features and controls so annoying I don't want to write anything. I'm sorry to say this stuff, as I think there are many nice things about Vox, and I have encountered such nice people here, but I just can't stand some of the mechanics.
3. Our computer at home has security on it--in fact, multiple layers of it. But we were recently infiltrated with some kind of virus that traced back to Vox. This is probably random-- I am not accusing the software or the users here of doing bad things. All I know is: the big bad virus looks like it came from something over here--perhaps a third party add-on or something. But all I know is, I need to be cautious. (By the way, another different virus seemed to come from Facebook-land, so I am not going over there very much any more, either.)
So...I suspect this is my last post here on Vox. If anyone would like to reach me, you can send an email to my Gmail which is annamatt. (I purposefully just phrased that sentence awkwardly to try to avoid Internet bots from grabbing my email address and spamming me, so I hope the phrasing was intuitive enough that anyone who wants to reach me can in fact do so.) I do not open my Gmail as often as my other email accounts, so please be patient with me, knowing the response will take me awhile.
I want to say a quick thank you to all the nice people I have met through Vox the past 2 years. I have really been touched by some of my interactions with random strangers on here and I appreciate everything you have all done for me. I am sorry to be leaving this community but I hope you will understand my situation.
Will I ever blog again? Most likely. I have blog post ideas in my head all the time; I am always seeing fun restaurants, shops, and places to blog about, and I am still a snack addict and a bath and body product addict who wants to share her fun finds with others. I think I just need a little time to mature my business and restore my schedule to an even keel.
Now, it's time to go run one of those hot baths... My back hurts from sitting at this computer so much.
Please check http://maxvanhmlmwtmc.blogspot.com/ for any more posts from me. I may come back to Vox, someday, but I've had it with 90% of this site, for now.
Pure Crap. Now, this site is giving me Viruses!
One more to the list? Obituary
The Loyal Opposition.
I've decided that I'm going to be putting the "journal' element of this blog elsewhere. It's going to be nothing but clips, links and photos from here on out.
See, Vox, like much of the internet, has a problem: it's not user friendly enough. I can already guess your second guesses on that, but let me tell you what I'm looking for: I like my family and friends. I want to be able to share things with them. Since not everyone has an account with Vox or blogger, or any one platform, I can't just set up the blog to be seen by only them, I've got to make it public, so my Mom can just type in the web page and read or look. At the same, I have a lot of thoughts. I like to write them down. It's not like I'm trying to make big editorial statements or anything, I'm simply trying to work out stuff for myself. Unfortunately, many members of the public make it their business to intrude upon that. They want to sell me something ( usually porn), or convince me of their opinion, or something else that's intrusive. I don't swear often, but these people are assholes. So, all I want is a way to filter out assholes, and Vox, Blogger, Myspace, Facebook, you name it, none of them have such a simple feature. Instead, I caneither make it private or make it public. That's it. There's no middle ground, like there is in real life. I can't do "invitation only". I cannot open and close a door. There is no way, yet, to have a virtual doorman.
So, before you either gloat; "Yay, another evil liberal silenced" or berate "You're giving in, and letting them win" or whatever, please consider if that'd be apropriate behaviour if you were at my door? If you barged into my living room, and started giving me grief for what I was saying to my TV when the news is on, would I be wrong to ask the police to escort you out? Since I cannot do that, I'm leaving my living room, here. I've never once considered this as something more. I have no platform, I'm not trying to convince you of anything. But, your behaviour has hounded me off of my own little patch. It's been proven to me that you cannot be trusted, because I already tried limiting the comments, until now, I had to shut them down. So to hell with it. Nobody has "silenced' me, because I wasn't speaking out loud to begin with. Yes,I am going to continue thinking exactly the way that I do. Yes, I'm going to vote, and more. I'm every bit as active as I've ever been. As for the other end, what exactly did the assholes win? They don't get to use my little patch, I'm keeping it. I'll probably still be posting stuff, just none of my thoughts.
One final thought, though, just a parting shot: The older I get, the more I experience, the more I think I was right when, as a teenager, I thought to myself that while socialism is the only just way to run an economy, most people aren't interested in justice, and many people aren't interested in freedom, either. What they really want, to the exclusion of their humanity, is their whims. That's not the majority is like. The majority just wants peace and quiet. They don't care about justice, but tranquility. So, when that percentage that's sociopathic: that wants society to cater to their whims, not serve the social interest, when this phalanx of nutjobs breaks the peace often enough, people will cave into them just to maintain peace. Those people who do want justice, along with liberty, freedom (NOT the same thing) peace and prosperity are concerned enough with society that they won't break the peace. In the end, love for everyone is a losing proposition. The only way to justice, I'm not yet willing to go: revolution. See, I'm like the majority, I like peace. I'm not willing to give up everything to see justice. So, I'll campaign for some little bits of justice, and little bits of freedom, but I know that I won't see real justice in my lifetime. I'm willing to accept that. And here's a song:
See Ya!
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