Bryan Ruby

Blogging has always been a way for me to express myself creatively as I hide away in my home office for "me time". Unfortunately, the COVID-19 Pandemic changed all that with my day job requiring maximum telework which in turn transformed my creative personal space into a remote office that work owned eight hours a day. For my mental and physical health, once those work hours are up I have made the conscious decision to walk away from the computer. I now find it more necessary to find something else to do that doesn't involve screen time. This shift in priorities unfortunately reduced my writing time.

Life has a way of distracting us from our goals. Four years ago when I decided to retire CMS Report, I did so in the hope for opportunity to find a new voice in my online presence. It didn't work out so well. Instead of being more creative in my writings, I spent more time maintaining the nuts and bolts to my websites and publishing other people's articles than I did expressing my own thoughts and ideas. I know for many of you, you find yourself in a similar predicament.

So my 15 minutes of fame for 2021 has already happened. I was interviewed by Dakota News Now at the end of 2020 which aired on KSFY and KDLT the first day of this year. 

My son asked me why the local news was doing the interview. The short answer, I'm getting old.

During the summer months the quantity of articles I write and publish are often minimal. I enjoy my summer activities of bicycling, motorcycling, camping, and other family activities too much to sit in front of a computer all summer long. Not being much of a winter outdoorsman and living in South Dakota, the winter months have always been my time for focusing on my personal blog as well as writing some articles for socPub.

A few months ago, I reviewed six different vinyl record turntables due my renewed interest in listening to music pressed on vinyl records. Despite all six vinyl turntables being good choices to consider, I still needed to select the turntable I would bring into my home. In the end, it was the Fluance RT82 Reference High Fidelity Vinyl Turntable that I chose as my latest stereo component. 

When I entered college just after graduating high school in 1986, there was a new band from my neck of the woods that just spoke to me. The band was call The Rainmakers and they were from Missouri.

I'm a big believer that it is the small positive things we do in our day that have the biggest impact on our own well being. From here through the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, I've decided to just blog about the small things I'm doing to escape from the anxiety producing headlines in our news. I recognize that not everything I'm writing is of interest to others, so while some of my work will continue to be posted at socPub, all of my work can be viewed on my personal blog, bryanruby.com.

Surprisingly, I recently sought out and purchased a vinyl record turntable. This is a surprise to me because I've spent the last three decades moving from the opposite direction as my music collection evolved from vinyl and cassette tape to compact discs and then finally to digital music stored as MP3 files on my computer and mobile devices. In this century, I don't even know if you can call it collecting music because I now subscribe monthly to an endless library of artists and songs through various music streaming services.