Winter is officially here in downstate New York. I can tell you that because yesterday I dug out from our first snow storm which dumped about 8″ on us Friday. Today, Sunday we got another 6″ luckily I didn’t have to shovel out of that. After I dug our car out from the first storm, I moved it to the front of the building so the plow man could make one clean sweep of our single lane parking lot, then moved the car back so he could do a clean sweep in front of the post office. Yes, the weather forecasters have been promising us snow and ice for about a month now but we’ve hadn’t gotten much more than a dusting Tomorrow of course is the first official day winter but it’s been nippy out there for a while. We had a mini heat wave heck last week I slept with my windows open.
Some of you have probably notice I haven’t been all that active on my blog lately. That is partly because I’ve been more active on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. The other part of that is I don’t have much to write about. Right now it’s pretty doom and gloom for me; with the recent down turn in the economy web work has all but completely dried up for me. This year the Christmas shopping fund was meek at best although those whom I’m shopping for are all adults and understand that Christmas isn’t just about presents and will appreciate the gift I got for them. Truth be told, I spent most of my Christmas fund just keeping my head above water. That being said I also have my normal winter blues, I like winter for a about 5 minutes after the first coat of snow then I’m sick of it. The second I see slush mixed with sand on the roads, I’m ready for April. I can think of 100 reasons why I love the spring, summer, and fall but only a few reasons for winter.
With the introduction of winter comes the soon to be new year. The new year is always a time to reflect on both what I have and haven’t accomplished in the past year and what I hope to accomplish in the next. I’ve been working on a few things for the new year: The first thing I did was trash my old myspace profile. I went and created a new profile and friended all the people that I keep in contact with at least once a month; everyone else I just didn’t bother ‘refriending’. All too often ‘friends’ or followers become a numbers game people just add you because they’ve had interaction with you in faintest since in order to drive up their number of ‘friends’ some how that makes the superficial people feel more important. I’m not one of those people, if I’m not related to you or haven’t had 1-on-1 contact with in a while I won’t be refriending you. Nothing personal you might be the next Obama but if we haven’t had contact in a while chances are I don’t care what your status is. 
With the new MySpace profile comes sort of a rebranding of me: I’ve bought a new domain name, www.coffeedope.com as well as reserved all the of the screen names on the instant messengers and freemail services that I feel are important. I’ve always had a love of blogging for reasons I’m not quite sure of. Some of my blogging has been very successful on other blogs. Most of my blogging here on BigDan.us isn’t followed. I suspect that’s because I’ve had no direction with this blog; I’ve often rambled on about this or that, posted a few tech posts, and maybe a few posts about this or that but BigDan.us has never had any real clear direction. It’s a hodge podge of what ever topic pops into my head. In that respect it will remain that way however CoffeeDope.com will be more on point and attuned to one topic set although I’m not clear what exactly that will be yet. CoffeeDope.com will become my main blog in the new year. BigDan.us will act as both a personal voice for me and an aggregator for all my blog posts across all the blogs that I author whether or not Google likes duplicate content.
That being said along with the re branding also comes a move away from Big Dan. Sure I’ll go by Big Dan on most of the forum I frequent because I’ve changed my name before and don’t want to aggravate the admins with requests for a screen name change. Ever since I can remember I’ve been “Big Dan” the big comes from my size I’m 6’3″ and obese I think that if perhaps I stop thinking of myself as “Big” Dan I might gain a different self image which will help with my weight loss. Coffee Dope was chosen because coffee is my #1 favorite drink and heck coffee flavored liquor is also my favorite coffee just runs through my veins. Dope was chosen as a suffix for a number of reasons, one of them being that everything else I wanted like ‘coffee king’ and ‘coffee man’ was already taken. 
Here’s to the new year!!
