#rival robot

2011 was a mixed bag of a year for me. For the most part, things were good. I had a job I liked very much and was good at, enjoyed an excellent week in New York and am now living in a great apartment.

There were a couple of hiccups on the professional front. They were disappointments more than anything, and they were not things I could do anything about, so I can't be too downbeat. I'm not one to whine and complain though (especially on the Internet), so I'm looking ahead and creating a plan for 2012 and what I want to achieve in the upcoming calendar year.

In the second year of this young decade, I plan to be everywhere. I mean, leaving thoughtful comments on an ton of blog posts, learning a lot more interesting stories, creating more things and tweeting, Facebooking, plussing, and other networking a boatload of strong content. 

I'm making some minor changes to Rival Robot. For instance, I've added a tech section and started to populate it with things I've written but haven't published elsewhere. I'm also going to stop autoposting content from there to here. I have other plans for the site this year, so watch this space.

Also, I'm starting to contribute to a bunch of other outlets. More on that when it happens. I've been working on few other exciting things under the radar.

I'm starting the application process for my permanent residency in Canada, and will be shipping that off within the next couple of weeks, all going to plan. Elsewhere, I'm going to be looking into lifehacks to automate parts of my life that I need to pay less attention to, watching a lot more than the 30 new films I managed to catch in 2011, learning how to speedread, and generally having more fun.

Over the past few days, I've been tinkering with Rival Robot to improve the design and make things much easier on the eye. Today, I'm ready to unleash it on the world.

Grated, it doesn't looks amazing, but with my limited abilities to make a few minor changes to a WordPress template, I'd say it looks not too bad at all. That logo needs to be improved too, and there are still a few bugs that need to be squished. Enough about its shortcomings though.

The first piece to appear on the new-look version of the site is a look at The Artist, and why you should definitely, definitely make the effort to see it. It's a major awards contender this year, and with very good reason.

There's a lot that's changing for me right now and, as a result, I've been offline a lot more than I have been on. This means much less tweeting, Facebooking and plussing than previously. That's changing though, and I'm getting back into the swing of things in a bigger way. At least, that's the plan.

As you might have noticed, Scribbal has shut up shop, at least for now. There are a few exciting irons in the fire though and I hope to be able to reveal details about what's next for me soon.

When I have been online over the last few weeks, I've often found myself doing a little housekeeping: shedding some people I'm following on Twitter, deleting inconsequential posts here and there, and streamlining my online activities as a whole.

I'm going to start using Tumblr as my main hub for everything I do and share on the Web, at least for now. 

I’d planned on using Posterous as my main personal blog, but I’ll start using Tumblr instead. It’s easier to share things here, whether it’s things I read or see on the Web and want to talk about, or tech-related stuff I want to share (definitely doing less of that on my FB profile - there’s just not much interest for it among my friends). I’m finding that the things I share on Facebook (skewing more and more towards the tech side of things) is stuff that my friends aren’t necessarily interested in. 

It’s also a lot easier to just reblog cool stuff and add a comment. I'll be very selective about the things I'll reblog and try to at least add a comment or two when I do. I’m planning on setting up a custom domain too. 

I’m still aiming to work on Rival Robot and post movie/TV-related thoughts there, and hope to delve back into that site in a big way over the coming weeks and months.