Well, I've had my blog up for one month now and have logged five and a half thousand hits in that time. I imagine about a good two thousand of them were me fussing with the layout. HA!
I think it's been more than that because it took me a while to figure out the page counter and I went off a quasi counter before that.
At any rate, it's been VERY fun.
Psychologically it's been interesting to see the pressure that I feel under to oblige an audience and then to be true to myself and write what I like and wonder how it will turn out.
I started the blog when I visited Washington DC for the first time in my life a month ago to have research done on Jennifer's medical condition with her muscular dystrophy. It was absolutely inspiring to see all the things I've only heard of before that such as the Declaration of Independence, the Star Spangled Banner,, Abraham Lincoln's top hat. I also got tired of pestering people with emails about politics and my email being blown about because people really don't use good security when they forward email chains.
So this is one month! I'm working on starting my masters and Ph.D. programs for psychology here in the semi near future (no later than the end of next year). If I get involved in research again expect the blog to take a heavily psychology bent.
Currently my "expertise" or my strong area of psychology is the biopsychology of pictorial pornography and sexual deviance and rehabilitative efforts. I've either been doing observations (biopsychosocial analysis) of sex offenders (rapists, pedophiles) for the past couple years in a group therapy setting or supervising them for structured social outings. I got into working with sex offenders because I wanted to see "the impossible" done - most people don't believe you can rehabilitate a sex offender. I wanted to see if you could. I ended up working with THE name in rehabilitation of sex offenders in the world, Dr. Barry Maletzky at his clinic here in Portland. I wanted to work with sex offenders because I have little patience for my work to be morally armchair quarterbacked. I knew the public would be on my side in saying "this is right - that is wrong" whereas when I work with other issues in psychology there are so many sides to the issue that it's really frustrating and my work is handled with "that's your opinion." Much of psychology is that way though.
I did learn rehabilitation is possible as well as the definitions of rehabilitation. I've also contributed to putting someone back in prison because he was so high risk and predatory and was what we call "cycling" or leading up to an offense in his cycle that it was safer to have him put back in a cell. I can discuss rehabilitation some other time. I can also discuss the biopsychology of pictorial pornography another time. Having been a police officer I became very frustrated with the criminal justice system so I decided to go into psychology to fill in the gaps where law enforcement left off.
My training is pretty advanced for my level of education but that's because I maintained an internship for a year and a half and have worked in the field for 2 years and not just the 10 weeks required by the university.
I'm going to in the next few weeks put another article in here on types of insurance for financial planning. When I work with my employees I see too many people being "taken" or "scammed" by insurance fraud essentially even when they fill out their W-2's. I hope the info is useful to someone.
At any rate, it's been fun. I do see a lot of blogs that make fun of the issues but I don't really feel like they educate people on the background of where we came from or how we even got here. All history in the U.S. did NOT start with the advent of CNN and there's a lots of different shades that Obama would just rather have us forget. I hope to be some small voice contributing to that knowledge. But for now I'm just having fun.
My readership spikes whenever GOC mentions me on his blog and it looks like I'm around 1,500 hits a week average now for the blog without GOC's links. So I hope it continues to grow and I'm not sure where this is going to head. Some of my friends want me to put sea-stories from my naval service on here - I can't say I have anything as exciting as landing an F-18 with low fuel on a pitching deck in the middle of the night but I can talk about I don't know how many fights I got in as an MP and how many military regulations were changed because of something I did that wasn't in harmony with Naval standards as I tried to think outside the box and found out they just say they want people to do that so they look like they honor divirsity but really don't want us to.
Anyways, it's been fun, hope y'all come back - its been neat seeing this get hit from Singapore, Tel Aviv, Quatar, Egypt, Iraq, Switzerland, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, all over Canada - but I believe today is one month since it's been up - I'm too lazy to look as I'm headed out the door but - welcome aboard y'all!
