Jay Fenster

And that’s an underwhelming way to break a nearly year long silence on my own blog.

I’ll have more to say soon.

I apologize for all the test posts that have gone out over the blog, over my Twitter feed and via my Facebook page today. I’ve been trying to get Twitter integration to work, and Twitter Tools kept failing to post a URL in its tweets, so I went back to the drawing board and installed the WP-to-Twitter plug-in. Works like a charm.

Dear California,

If you’re going to export your smoking bans to our bars, the least you could do is refrain from exporting your wildfire smoke too.

Thanks!

Love,

Jay

Spring into ___.

Fall into ___.

Also, your steakhouse is not simultaneously rare and well-done. That pun was funny exactly once. When Fred Allen said it 50+ years ago about television. And now you’re all using it. Stop it. Just stop.

You already know this unless the only way that you follow my exploits is via JayFenster.com (in which case your stalking skills need work, friend), but I bought a house this spring. I live in the southwest part of the Vegas valley now in an awesome house with mountain and Strip views, pretty much as far in the middle of nowhere as you can get while still having a 15 minute commute to work.

Photos are on my Facebook.

Sometimes I think that I was born ADD, and grew up long before they knew what it was. Because my mind is always going a hundred miles a minute, with all kinds of disparate, simultaneous projects in various stages of undress. I’m always amazed when I polish off something as intensive as a 300-page book because my mind is so inspired by so many great ideas around me that I often overwhelm myself with no idea where to start.

Swina.com is a perfect example of this. I had a grand vision of what I wanted to do with the site, but I could never quite pull it off. Combined with the time constraints I’ve had on my personal and professional life lately, and I’ve certainly been negletcing my media empire. Hopefully if I can get WordPress µ to work properly it’ll be much easier. I also plan on integrating it into either Google or Facebook Friend Connect. Depends how difficult the API is for a web development half-wit like myself to figure out.

Anyhow, as of today, after a couple of hiccups I’ve upgraded JayFenster.com to the latest version of WordPress, version 2.71. I’ve selected a few pieces of my casino marketing output to add to my online portfolio – about time! I’ll upload a few more when I can. It’s good stuff – I know what I’m doing. Unfortunately, I broke the feedback page in order to fix the upgrade so I think I need to take a fresh look at all my plug-ins.

It’s time for me to start sprucing up this place.

So I’m thinking that I’d have to be nuts or unemployed to actually attempt to maintain four separate blogs when I haven’t written anything new for swina.com since like 1901.

At some point in the near future I’m probably just going to move the WordPress install I’ve got up over at more++ and start ignoring all four topics in a single centralized location.

Other than that, life goes on. After a few weeks of nervous hemming and hawing, I’ve decided I like my BlackBerry Storm. At first I didn’t know how much of my affinity for it was because it was my first BB and how much was because it was the Storm, I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter. The .75 firmware release helped with a lot of the initial beefs I (and the rest of the world) had with the device, and I’m downloading the leaked .85 release as we speak, which is supposed to be leaps and bounds better yet.

My 32nd birthday is coming up this week. I only mention it because I’ll be glad when it’s over. The period of the year between Thanksgiving and my birthday is always profoundly depressing, and this year was no exception. I’ve never been happier to see a year change on the calendar, and if it wasn’t for Barack Obama winning the election, this year would have been a total disaster.

While I despise the idea that the New Year is the only time when you can make positive change in your life, for once I’ve got in my mind a wishlist of self-improvements. For starters, I need to get serious about eliminating dairy from my diet so that I don’t end up choking to death in my sleep from lungs full of mucus. Gruesome, but that’s my misery. Once I can breathe again, I’ll think about getting back to the gym. I’m not going to be one of those January workout tourists. But if I can make time for it, I know it’d do me good on a lot of levels.

We’ll see.

So even though I’m going back to the drawing board in an obsessive-compulsive attempt to get this exactly right with a limited and rusty web design skill set, the good news is that I’ve come up with names for three of the four blogs that I will launch as part of the Swina Disinformation Network. The bad news is, I can’t for the life of me come up with a name for the fourth.

more++ is the sandbox for now. I’m using it as a development playground for now, but that’ll be the first one I stand up and tinker with and break down and stand up again and so on and so forth. Then I’ll clone it.

neontubes will be the Vegas and gaming blog, picking up where Open Road’s Best of Las Vegas Blog left off.

ooh, shiny! covers diversions of all kinds. If a subject is a waste of time, chances are you’ll find it here. Music, movies, television, food, wine and other hobby type interest sort of things get their due. We like to keep it light.

The fourth blog is the one for which I can’t figure out a name. The original Swina blog focused primarily on news and politics, specifically progressive politics. I can already tell that I won’t be posting much on this one. Everything I care to say is being said better in other places. So I’m guessing this blog is going to mostly be links to other content. But oh well.

Anyone got any spare ideas for blog names? Some sort of secret formula, like how you figured out your porno name by combining the street you grew up with and the name of your first pet (Hi there, Coco Polly. Nice to meet you.).

UPDATE: OK, I spoke too soon. The politics/news/current events blog is going to be called debriefing.

I’ve upgraded the site to WordPress 2.7.

So in attempting to zazz up more++, I wound up screwing up something and having no idea how to fix it, so I’m once again hitting the reset button on that project.  I wish I had enough time to actually devote to my websites and various other projects. But even with a full featured CMS at my fingertips I’m just not writing.

I wonder if it’s a similar situation to what would happen if you worked as a porn star, and didn’t want to have sex at home at the end of the night because you’d been doing it all day on the clock.

That’s clock. C… L…

I somehow managed to give myself yet another bizarre freak injury today. I was getting ready for work, putting on my clothes in the walk-in closet off my bathroom. I braced myself against the wall with my right hand as I pulled the second sock onto my left foot.

I felt as if my back was cramping up, but only for a split second – then it was like a dam bursting, lighting me up with pain like a Christmas tree, radiating from near my kidney all the way down to my knee, all the way up to my armpit and straight through my abdomen.

Now, I’ve had back issues for about a decade or so at this point, but they’ve always been pretty much confined to my upper back and environs – my neck and shoulders. I’d never had pain in my lower back before, and I’d never felt anything like this – anywhere. I knew right away that something was wrong and told Casey I needed to see a doctor – today.

I called my doctor; their response was “go to the ER.” I called my company’s health clinic, they told me to go to an urgent care center. I opted for the latter.  It was the right choice, as there was nobody in the waiting room. I was examined and x-rayed. The verdict: a pinched sciatic nerve, causing acute lower back pain and muscle spasms. Great. Even better, the doctor tells me not to expect much improvement for 3 to 4 days and advises me not to return to work until Thursday.

I’m medicated to the point of comfort right now, thankfully this didn’t happen last week or the week before. As it is, I’ve been taking care of loose ends and miscellaneous projects from home as my condition permits.

Moral of the story: never wear socks.

The media empire known as the Swina Disinformation Network will soon be returning to the airwaves intertubes.

I think that part of the reason that I lost interest in keeping the old Swina website(s) up and running is that I was sort of unfocused on it, and that I couldn’t figure out how to integrate all the things I wanted to write about.

So I’m taking a different tack this time around, setting Swina up as a series of (what looks like now to be four) blogs, plus a single community forum and maybe some other stuff, I’m taking baby steps with it right now. I haven’t done this in a while and I’m a little bit rusty. Like JayFenster.com it will be built on a  WordPress content management system, and there will probably be a phpbb forum there and some other stuff to be determined.

Anyhow, the first blog that I’m setting up is called more++. It’s going to be about how to streamline your life. I’m always seeing efficiencies that can be enjoyed, loopholes that can be exploited, opportunities to squeeze more out of every day and every dollar.

The second one will be a relaunch of what used to be the Best of Las Vegas Blog. It’ll have a slightly different focus, as there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening in the industry writ large right now, not just on the Strip. Of course, “interesting” is a nice way of saying “where’s my suicide pill?” these days. I can’t tell you much more than that right now, but the new blog will be called neontubes.

The third and fourth blogs will encompass what used to be the primary focus of Swina. One will cover politics, news and current events. The other will focus on movies, music, video games, food, entertainment and other frivolous diversions.

But like I said, I’m taking one step at a time rebuilding my conglomerate.

Feel free to check it out, although be aware that to call what’s going on over there right now a beta is an insult to betas everywhere.

Updates on the progress of the site will be posted here as appropriate.

I’ve added even more newfangled technology to my shiny new website. It’s called a contact form! Now if only I could figure out the Y2K bug I’d be set…

View my resumé and then send me lucrative job offers.

JayFenster.com is slowly but surely coming together. I’m even rustier than I thought when it comes to not only WordPress but DreamWeaver, which is pretty pathetic for me. But it’s happening.

I’ve added some of my best work from my previous position as Strategic Marketing Manager at Meridian KSI (2001-2006) to the Portfolio section. I’ll upload more samples of my work as I can.

Hi there.

As you might be able to guess, I’m Jay Fenster. This is my website.

Actually, it’s like my third domain and my umpteenth website. I’ve been designing websites since 1995 and somehow it took me 13 years to get around to buying my own name as a dot com.

This site is currently a work in progress. Please bear with me, my WordPress skills are pretty rusty – as readers of my EPIC FAIL Best of Las Vegas blog can attest.

I’m going to put together something simple here, and then hopefully port this over to Swina and get that back up and running.

Thanks for visiting.