A port on a computer is a communication channel that allows devices to talk to each on the same piece of hardware without interfering with each other. Think of it a...

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This blog is continued on AMuseView.com. Please click through. I miss you all!

If the IT Department Managed My Dating Life

The upcoming CW series Life UneXpected will be shooting scenes in Portland over the next few days. The series, which is set in Portland, is actually shot in Vancouver, B.C., so imagine my surprise when I heard through the grapevine that they were actually here in Portland. Series creator Liz Tigleaar posted...

Scene in Portland Column

Continued on AMuseView.com

Are you a Twilight fan? Or maybe you'd just like to be an extra in the next Twilight movie Breaking Dawn.

Breaking Dawn, the fourth film in the Twilight series, has created an enormous amount of buzz on Twitter, blogs, and even on casting websites—so much so that casting director Lana Veenker had to post a blog (The Casting Scoop) just to tell people to stop contacting her, because she hadn’t been contracted to cast the film.

Read the rest here:  Scene in Portland

This blog is also posted on www.amuseview.com.

My History of “Blogging”

1976 Snail Mail

My friend Kevin moved away and we wrote funny letters to each other constantly. This was my first attempt at “blogging.” Readership: 1.

1978-1978 Letters from Finland

In August of 1978 I left home to spend a year in Finland. There was no email or Internet back then, so again, I relied on my snail mail connection to my friends back home, and my new found exchange student friends all over Finland. I received over 500 letters during my stay, and I probably wrote 600. Readership: 25 family and friends.

1986 to 1994 The Desktop Publishing Years.

In 1986 I went to work for a company called Frame Technology. Their main product was a desktop publishing tool called FrameMaker. It was the first WYSIWYG desktop publishing tool I had ever used. It could do column layout, rotated headings (if you knew PostScript), and could import graphics! I was in heaven. I immediately started using the product to create my own newsletter and send it out to family and friends. Readership: 45 family and friends.

1994 I See the Light

In 1994 my friend Chuck sent me a link to a website called “Alex the Girl.” I clicked on the link and found a very simple website where a woman named Alex would post her photographs and her musings about life.

“Chuck,” I said. “This is what I’ve been looking for! This is what I want. How do I make a website like this?”

At the time there were no websites like Blogger, MySpace, or anything of the sort. If you wanted to blog you had to create your own website from scratch. I didn’t have the expertise to create my own “Kelly the Girl” website, so I continued to send my family and friends quarterly newsletters through the snail mail.

2003 Blogging Goes Mainstream

In 2003 a friend of mine sent me a Beta invitation to one of the first blogging websites called Yahoo! 360°. It was kind of crude, and didn’t have many users, but I started posting anyway. My first blogs were posted from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Readership: Probably 15 people.

2005 Kelly Discovers MySpace

In 2005 my friend Brandon told me about this cool new website called MySpace. He was using it to promote his films and music, and said I should create a page so I could network too. I created my first blog on MySpace on August 1, 2005. It was entitled “Sunday filming.” Readership: 0. My second blog was called “Asses and Crotches,” and was posted on August 2, 2005. Readership: 1 (a guy named JL).

My readership did not really take off until six months later when Margie Boulé, a columnist for the Oregonian, published a story about my blog.

MySpace was the perfect platform for me. There were about 20 million users when I started, and has now flattened out at about 125 million users. That’s a lot of bloggers and blog readers! But with growth come growing pains, and MySpace has certainly had them.

Stay tuned for my “Dear MySpace” letter.

Well, it's not dirt really, just the latest in industry news in Portland.

Scene in Portland

Big audition tomorrow. New blog coming this weekend!

This is a combination Cheers and Jeers, and “Name that Blog” blog.

Thanks to my good friend Andrew B. I am now the proud owner of a Wordpress self-hosted blog. It is currently sitting in limbo on his hosting server, waiting for a domain name.

And here’s where you all come in: what should I name the new blog? I would love your ideas.

I currently own a multitude of domain names, but not many are appropriate for a blog name. The only two that are possibilities are:

PickyChick.net

LokoNotes.com

MuseCamp.com

I was hoping to use something with the word Muse in it, since I have been known as The Muse for the past four years. So, send me some ideas! Most of the obvious choices are already taken (I’ve checked), so you’ll have to get creative.

 The quicker we come up with a domain name, the quicker I can start blogging again!

Now onto Cheers and Jeers:

Jeers: to this stupid bug that wiped me out for two days. I’m starting to feel better now.

Cheers: to Denver blog reader Lou who sent me a cookie platter from Duvrai bakery here in Portland. So yummy!

Jeers: to my 3-day nanny Jordin who just decided it was okay to not show up at my house for work, not give me any warning, not return my phone calls, and leave me without childcare.

Cheers: to my new nanny Katelyn who actually shows up for work, and loves watching my kids after school every day.

Cheers: to Joe who gave me three free tickets to The Killers concert last week. I was able to treat my friend Kevin’s son Kaleb (age 10) to his first concert ever. AND he’s a big Killers fan.

Cheers: to Andrew B. for being a fantastic editor, who answers my emails at almost any time of day.

Cheers: to Andrew B. for creating my new self-hosted Wordpress blog and hosting it for me.

Jeers: to the US Senate Panel for rejecting the public healthcare plan option. We know all of you government workers have great healthcare, but what about the millions who don’t?

My weekly Scene in Portland column just got published. Please check it out:

Scene in Portland

Hope to have a new blog address by this weekend! Stay tuned.

Here's a link to my weekly column on The Portlander called "Scene in Portland."



Scene in Portland

The latest buzz on Portland modeling, acting, film and commercials.

And how are you all today?

I posted my first blog on MySpace over four years ago. Since that time I've posted nearly 850 more. A lot of you have been a part of my loyal audience since the first year, and I appreciate that

MySpace has been my blogging platform for years, but I have become increasingly frustrated with the fact that the blog indexing is no more. I have no way to search through the 800+ blogs, and neither do you. Frankly, that sucks.

I have started to write elsewhere because of this. I currently have a weekly column with an online newspaper called The Portlander. It is a column about the film and modeling industry in Portland, Oregon, and may be interesting to you whether or not you're in the business. You can check it out here - Scene in Portland.

I am also writing features for The Portlander, and will have an article on Psychic Suzanne Jauchius later this week (I hope).

As far as my personal blogs, I haven't quite figured out where to blog yet. I can't continue to post here if MySpace won't give me a way to search my blogs.

Facebook on the other hand is my personal private playground. My profile is set to Private, and I am not searchable on the internet, and I will keep it that way. I only accept friend requests from people I have met in real life, with a few rare exceptions.

Some of you have sent me friend requests on Facebook, and please don't take this personally, but I won't accept. I currently have 405 friends on Facebook, and I know 95% of them personally. At least 50% of those people are actors and directors, and I use Facebook to keep up with them in the industry.

I would love to continue sharing my experiences with you all, but I don't know if I can continue to do it on this platform. I have kept my MySpace profile wide open, because I have a lot of readers who access my blog without logging into MySpace. Once I move to another platform those readers can subscribe to an RSS feed and just read my blog in their Inbox.

I know I will lose a lot of you when I move, even if I post a link here to each blog I post elsewhere. I hope you'll make the extra effort to click through.

I love my audience here. You are not typical MySpace users by any stretch, and it shows in your comments and the emails I receive privately. I would love to keep all of you.

I will keep you posted!

Kelly "The Muse"

I was running along the waterfront late yesterday afternoon, when I spied the KOIN 6 Local news van. My friend, and former news anchor, Anne Jaeger just started working for KOIN again, so I figured she just might be in the van. So, I made a detour over to see if I could find her.

She was indeed working yesterday afternoon, and she immediately asked me if I would go on camera and answer a couple of questions she was asking people on the street. I declined, only because I had been running for an hour in the 80+ degree heat, and I looked like it.

However, I did ask her what questions she was asking people. One of the questions was, how did the events of September 11th, 2001, change the way you view life and live your life?

I looked at Anne and said, "Anne, my answer to that question is so boring. It didn't change my views at all." And it's true.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have always lived my life like I'm on borrowed time. We all have a finite amount of time on this planet, and the truth is that none of us knows exactly how long we have. So you can put everything off until "things get better," or you can put nothing off and live life like this minute is your last.

The events of September 11, 2001, were tragic, and my heart goes out to the people who lost their lives and lost loved ones. I was lucky enough to visit Ground Zero last November. This is my 2-minute video.

It's been way too long since I wrote a Cheers and Jeers blog!

Cheers: to Kevin for setting up the amazing Jennifer Batten house party this Friday night. I can't wait!

Cheers: to Geoff Byrd for getting back to music and back to Portland. We will kick it this Friday and celebrate your birthday in style!

Bummer: to the poor guy who drove a brand new Saturn sports car off the end of a car carrier truck this afternoon, and forgot to extend the drive rails off the back! DOH! He realized what he had done when the car hit the ground nose first. This is the car: