I have a bit of an email/Twitter compulsion. And by “a bit” I mean I wake up in the middle of the night to check the BlackBerry on my nightstand. The BlackBerry is only 8 months old, and the chrome around the trackball is already chipping off from overuse.

It’s a sickness, I admit it.

When I’m working, I have my laptop on my lap, and my BB next to me. I will email and tweet from either one at any given time. I check my email compulsively – some might say maniacally – hundreds of times throughout the day.

I need what my friends refer to as a “Twitervention”.

Actually, two weeks ago a Very Bad Thing™ happened to my BlackBerry, and I lost service for a fortnight. For two weeks I was unable to roll over in the wee small hours of the morning to check my email. For two weeks the ability to check my Tweets 1500 times from the train platform was taken away.

And you know what? I survived. Ok, the first few days kinda felt like I’d had my hands cut off, but after that, I just got used to not checking in. I didn’t get all new-age-get-on-the-cover-of-Oprah or anything and start saying how great my life was without being tied to technology. That’s all bunk anyway. I didn’t feel any more or less free for not having a BlackBerry, and I think my tweeting only went down by about 20%.

Social Signal has an article with Seven ways to break the habit of compulsive e-mail and twitter check-ins. Most of them are inane touchy-feely type things, but I like the second one:

Declare a Twitter sabbath. Observant Jews go without electronics — without turning on electricity! — from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. You don’t have to keep kosher to discover the benefits of 24 hours offline each week. If a day without e-mail feels unimaginable, try a day without Twitter. I went three whole days (!) this past long-weekend, and enjoyed the opportunity to experience memorable moments without boiling them down to 140 characters.

It’s worth attempting, though I think I’d have to shut the power off in the apartment to achieve it.

Do you have a podcast you produce yourself? Have you always wanted one, but didn’t know where to begin?

Not every podcast on the web has professional aspirations. Some people are just podcasting as a hobby. But more and more we’re seeing semi-professional and professional podcasts being produced for business, activism, entertainment and more.

I’ve been podcasting for a year now (well, a year next week) at Brass Balls Radio. I haven’t got the first clue how to put together a professional sounding show, but my co-host and producer Mike Williams does. Week after week we churn out seamlessly edited content with a real voice announcer doing our intros and outros, music that has been legally licensed, and great guests. I’m merely a figurehead – I bring the personality as if Brass Balls were my own personal dinner party. Mike does all the heavy lifting in the background, making sure we don’t sound like a couple of four year olds with two tins cans on a string.

We have just shifted from the amateur stream to the professional one by contacting a marketing company to help us gain advertising. With a half million listeners every week, we felt it was time to make that shift. Our potential is huge, and grows from week to week.

Mike Williams is now consulting to aspiring podcasters. For those of you with big ideas and a drive for perfection that have no idea how to get started, Mike will put you on the right path.

A 90 minute session with Mike will give you:

• All the software required to cleanly record and edit a podcast
• A walk through on using the software
• A professionally voiced and recorded intro/outro to your show
• The coding required to automatically submit your show to iTunes whenever you update
• Mike’s personal email address in case you get stuck
• Optional hosting and site design

So what do you need to get started?

• A headset with mic.
• A free skype account
• It helps to already have a website. If not, Mike can offer optional hosting and set up.

If you are ready to produce your own professional sounding podcast, you can contact Mike at

mike AT brassballsradio DOT com

A 90 minute skype session with Mike is $110. Good luck, everyone. I hope you find as much success with your podcast as we have with ours. And for you political junkies, check out our May 18 anniversary show at Brass Balls Radio. It’s going to be our best ever.

Being a freelancer means that you can choose to take time off over the Christmas holidays, or you can choose to work. And if you work, it can be at your own pace with your own hours. You don’t have to bust your butt if you don’t want to.

I’m using this time to catch up on a few personal and marketing projects I’ve been putting off in lieu of client work.

• Squidoo – I will be creating a lense on Squidoo, as soon as I figure out what the heck it is and why I want to do it
• E-Book on relocation – I have been putting this off for months while focusing on other areas. I need to finish this and put it up for sale
• Twitter – I need to update my Twitter profile page to better reflect the work I do, and to make it more professional
• Book on the sex industry – I’ve been wanting to write this for years, but never sat down to it. I finally started it when I was in Denver

So while I may not be doing much client work over the holidays, I will still be plenty busy. I just hope that Santa sees fit to get me that sweet BlackBerry Pearl I wanted, so that I can add “setting up and maximizing BlackBerry” to that list!

Yesterday I was asked to participate in someone’s thesis on social networking. Two weeks ago I had a two hour phone conversation with a young blogger, helping her find her voice and her writing niche. A few weeks before that, I was helping a company set up their blog site.

I’m a consultant. People come to me for information on blogs and social media, and I have the answers at hand. When did that happen?? Well, I guess it all started on February 11, 2004 when I logged into Blogspot in a fit of pique, and my political blog was born. Since then I have kept at it, creating other blogs along the way – some lasted, some didn’t – and becoming a contributor to other sites. I have my own podcast and the usual accounts on Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn. I actually use them. So when people have questions, they come to me.

Sweet deal.

I have a deadline to meet, and yesterday was a lost cause spent traveling. So let me offer up the best of what others have to offer!

Jennifer Mattern has blog plugins for Wordpress that are total must-have for hardcore bloggers like me. Now that I have bandwidth to spare, I can install some of this bloggy goodness, starting with the Wordpress Auto Updater.

David Preston gives us A Stupidly Simple Cash Cow for the more technically inclined. I’ve already emailed this articled to a few of my web design friends. And hey, if you don’t feel comfortable writing your pitch email, you could always have me do it for you!

I blinked earlier today and when I looked back at my Gmail, it was all messed up. It turns out they have themes now! Ahem, the new default is pretty much unreadable, thereby causing one to choose a theme, or do what I did: Hit the “older version” button. Yeah, I thanked them for the warning, too.

Death and taxes, how dependable. Chrisblogging has some tips for freelancers on navigating their tax obligations. My own personal tip? Talk to your waiter about the work you do, then expense the meal! I mean, you talked about business, right??

Ok, gotta go. Catch y’all later.

Whew! I got started earlier this afternoon, and caught up. I am currently around 3500 words. You will notice on my sidebar that I have a word war widget (try saying that five times fast!). I am Kendra, and I’m sparring with my friend E.L. who is currently in Iraq.

Anyhow, you can keep an eye on my progress that way, in case I’m out of the posting loop for a day or two.

Good luck to all the NaNo-ers out there!

At 4pm EST, Deb Ng from Freelance Writing Jobs will be interviewing the Craig from Craigslist. I think it’s fascinating that a dude from Frisco decided to post a few items for sale on a website, and the next thing you know it is the go-to resource for nearly everyone on the web.

From the comments, Deb points out that she’s not the interviewer – it’s another BTR show that has Craig on. Hit her site to get the link details so you can listen in!

You know how I was writing the other day that I was dying under Vista? Well it turns out that Microsoft has done a lot of damage to our little household with their half-finished product. We live in the country and rely on satellite internet that has a bandwidth cap. And because Vista has been rolling out dozens of updates this week (supposedly to make it less horrible), we’re about to top out. Needless to say that upon realizing this, we’ve switched off our auto-updates.

Tell me, fellow freelancers, would you ever deign to present your client with a half-finished product, and advise them that you’ll spend the next 18 months sending them the rest of the pieces? And then ultimately just scrap the whole thing after 18 months and make them buy a whole new half-finished product? I’m willing to bet that if you tried, you would be very broke, very fast!

So why do we allow Bill Gates and his evil Microsoft henchmen to do it to us?

As a freelancer writer, I do a lot of articles that necessitate web research. I am not an expert in many of the subjects I write about, so I pop all over the web many times in a given day. As someone who has multiple browsers open for much of the day, can I just say: Vista sucks!

I average about two necessary restarts per day, or else I freeze up. This also means I can’t run my iTunes in the background or anything, lest I suddenly require three restarts!

Last year I bought this fully tricked out Dell Inspiron 1720 because… well, it’s pink. I invested a good chunk of money to make sure I had enough RAM and hard drive, only to find it’s no better than the Toshiba Satellite I threw over for it.

I blame Vista, and its largesse, for these RAM and virtual memory problems. It is such a huge operating system that all of its superfluous tidbits take up the space I need to do my actual work with.

Hey, you Mac geeks – d’you have problems like this?

Two weeks ago Google launched Mail Goggles, to prevent the email equivalent of drunk dialing.

Now Gmail has launched Canned Responses, so that you needn’t even bother copying and pasting that email you’ve sent a thousand times before. Now one click of a g-button will take care of it for you. Google Labs lets you download an application into your Gmail which allows you to save templates.

For me, it will be useful when sending cover letters, where I really only change a few key areas depending on the job; and in confirmation emails when I receive an assignment.