more Random Stuff on the Random Intertubes
Want to see me acting like an idiot on the internet, get called on it, apologize, and then make a new net friend?
Begin on your revelatory path to ronnyd’s idiocy here and then work your way back through the links provided within the various posts.
You don’t get entertainment much better than this for free, kids.
thanks for helping me edit this post, sarah!
I’ve made a change to the posting structure of my journal entries, to fall, yes, I agree, more in line with the masses. As I read more and more online journals, I see that the de facto standard is to post the most recent entry at the top of the page, moving all previous entries, as they get older and older, further down.
I’ve done this only with the journals from 2005 so far, as there weren’t that many of them, and I have to consider whether I want to do this with the rest of the journal too. I had originally considered the formatting structure when I redid the look of the journal about a year and a half ago, and I chose to keep the entries in a more narrative format, so that you could read from the top to the bottom in chronological order as though you were reading a book. I’ll have to see if this change helps me to post more often.
Another consideration is whether to start using some sort of, damn I hate using this word (see below), blogging software. A lot of weblogs advertise the fact that they were created with some sort of blogging software, like Blogger, Movable Type, or WordPress. Anyone have any thoughts on these tools? I think that they would make things easier, as I currently type in HTML directly with a simple text editor and upload using either FTP or an SCP client such as WinSCP.
Of course, all of that describes what I do when making changes via my Windows laptop, and that’s going away soon, as some of you might know. I’m going to have to get familiar with updating again on my OSX laptop, which isn’t a bad thing at all. I started this website on that machine anyway, and besides that machine is mine.
Posted also to my WEBLOG at people.tribe.net/ronnyd
Don’t misinterpret that title. I don’t hate keeping an online journal. www.ronnyd.com/weblog is evidence of that. That site is not updated as often as I would like, but it’s there and it’s passed its two-year birthday.
I’ve cross-posted this there as not everyone who reads ronnyd.com is a tribe member (though they should be! (www.tribe.net will get you all started. Look for me under this sites email address (ronnyd at ronnyd dot com)).
For me, this need to create geek-speak for something that we happen to do on a computer is infuriating. Maybe it’s not geek-speak, but maybe it’s a hipster lingo. Eh, whatever it is, I don’t like it.
See, I fancy myself a bit of a word man, or least I romanticize myself that way. My vocabulary probably isn’t big enough, nor my grammar strong enough, for the romanticizing, so please just indulge me. I would like to write, be a writer, a scribe, an historian, an investigative journalist, or what have you. I know that I need to get out onto paper some of the really bad and awkward prose that’s lurking in my fingertips in order to get there. I’m working on it.
Back to the point of this post: Stop for a moment and consider the word ‘blog.’ Say it with me now: ‘blog.’ It’s pretty revolting when you say it out loud, isn’t it? Sounds more like you’ve puked up your guts after a night on the sauce that it does in describing the contents of or the act of writing your thoughts into your online journal for god-knows-who to see.
‘Blog.’ A lesson I learned when studying computer science is that programmers hate to type. The less typing one has to do in order to complete a task the better. If you can reduce your code to the smallest set of arguments and functions possible, and still accomplish your intended or assigned tasks, then you’ve hit paydirt. I think that this is the type of mentality that has permeated the online universe. LOL. BRB. TTYL. OMFG. We all know what these mean, don’t we? They’re shorthand, and they do save time when typing, chatting, and, um, journaling. There’s no argument from me there.
But.
Does our language suffer at the altar of expediency? Is this vast archive of thoughts, perceptions, hopes, memories, fears, anecdotes, and dreams, this online archive, going to be looked back on in revulsion because we chose to call this forum that we share in a ‘blog?’ Are our thoughts that we share any less sacred or true because we invent new words, even if born of the need for speed, to describe our online life.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe I’m just making much ado about nothing.
Should we care all that much? I think that you know my answer, but, yes, I think that we should. After all, when we express online, we’re nothing but black and white pixels on the screen. We have at our disposal this tool called language, and we have rules for using it. The more adept we become in using it, the more clearly our thoughts can pass from one to another. In becoming more adept in our use of language and all of its foible and beauties, there is less chance for miscommunication or misinterpretation of our thoughts or feelings. When used to its fullest power we can express and share more fully.
Maybe I’m just a conservative and hate change and growth. Nah, that’s not it. I still hate the word ‘blog,’ though.
Copied, without permission, from today’s The Writer’s Almanac. None of the words that follow are mine:
It’s the birthday of the playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, born in a rich suburb of Dublin, Ireland called Foxrock (1906). His mother was a tall, strict woman, famous in her neighborhood for her short temper. Beckett started rebelling against her at an early age by climbing trees and jumping out of them, spreading his arms to break his fall on the branches.
He moved to Paris and became one of James Joyce’s assistants and disciples. He wanted badly to write like Joyce, but he had little success. He was struggling to support himself as a translator and miserable about his failures as a writer, when one day he was attacked and stabbed in the chest by a pimp, the knife barely missing his heart.
Word spread that he was in the hospital, and a surprising number of people came to visit him. He didn’t know he had so many friends. James Joyce brought him yellow roses and Nora Joyce baked him a custard pudding. Even the Irish ambassador came. One of his visitors was a French woman named Suzanne who had seen him give a lecture. She later became his wife.
Beckett got involved in the French Resistance during World War II, and he helped transmit secret messages across the boarder in packs of cigarettes. He had been struggling for years to write a novel, and the effort had only made him miserable, so in the midst of the war he decided to try playwriting. He said, “Life at the time was too demanding, too terrible, and I thought theatre would be a diversion.”
Beckett never published the first play he wrote, but he began to use playwriting as a way to cheer himself up after he got blocked writing a novel. He was struggling with a new play just after the war was over, so he decided to write another play. As an exercise, he made it as simple as possible: it would be a play about two men, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for a man named Godot, who never arrives. He finished it in just a few months, faster than he’d ever finished anything he’d ever written. And that was Waiting For Godot (1952), the play in which Beckett wrote, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”
He didn’t have much hope that it would ever be produced, but his wife thought it was a masterpiece, and she showed it to everyone involved with the theater that she could find. It was finally produced in 1953, and became an international sensation.
Samuel Beckett said, “I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.”
He also said, “All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.”
He also wrote, “I didn’t invent this buzzing confusion. It’s all around us…the only chance of renewal is to open our eyes and see the mess.”
It’s the birthday of novelist Judith Guest, born in Detroit, Michigan (1936). In 1974, she sent the manuscript of her first novel off to Viking Press. She didn’t have an agent, and didn’t send along a query letter or a synopsis first. The novel managed to catch the eye of an editor, and became the first unsolicited manuscript accepted by the press in 26 years. The novel was Ordinary People (1976), which went on to become a bestseller.”
Quoted from The Writer’s Almanac today.
Comic book legend Will Eisner died Monday evening, January 3rd. I’m not an authority on the man’s work, having only discovered him in the last 4 years of my comic reading, but what work of his I did read renewed my appreciation of and fascination with this highly disregarded art form. His work helped to ignite the passions and to expand the imaginations of a new generation to the limitless possibilities of what one could accomplish in the medium. Eisner himself said in 2000, “This medium lives with an undeserved stigma of being a comic book ghetto instead of being treated as a true art form and one of the oldest forms of artistic expression.” Think hieroglyphics as an example of how truly old storytelling is in the forms of what we call ‘comics.’
There’s a reason the most prestigious award in the comics industry is called the Eisner Award.
I’m not the first one to make this statement, but it couldn’t be more true: His Spirit will live on forever. Such is the fate of the artist, to be outlived for all eternity by their creations. Tis the true path to everlasting life.
In the Iron Giant, Hogarth Hughes, while trying to chose a bedtime story to read the Giant, holds up a copy of Eisner’s The Spirit, and announces: “The Spirit – Way Cool!” Way cool indeed. Mr. Eisner, Requiescat in Pace.
Thanks to yesterday’s USAToday for the nice quote.
Just testing the waters again. If this is easy to update, I should have some things to post soon enough. Looking forward to actually being in CA for the next 12 days. Such a rarity.
Well, I’m back. Back to what, you ask? Well, back to some more regular posts, since I finally have an easy means of accessing the files on my website securely from home. I can now write an entry and have it to you, my loyal readers in about 1/100th of a second. Maybe not, but you get the idea.
As I type this I’m sitting here, quietly looking out my bedroom window at the shady backyard, hearing the faint goings on in the neighborhood, and observing, for the first time in a long time, that dusk is here. The sun is setting but there is still enough light to see everything through the window. Nothing in particular is on my mind. It will probably be fully dark within the hour, and I hope to have finished this entry by then. I would like to have a drink on the porch as the sun sets.
There’s been a couple of recent developments in my life, some big changes.
I quit my job. I am no longer a customer support engineer as of the 23rd of July. What next? Well, let me tell you what the original plan was, and what the current plan is. After I quit, I was going to spend the rest of the summer here in CA, enjoying some time off in this state without the day-to-day worry of having to go to a job. I was going to ride my bikes, sleep, and go on some multiday camping trips. There is much to see in this state that I have not yet seen. I was then going to go on an extended couch surfing trip; selling a lot of my bigger items, putting the rest in storage and then hitting the road. Staying, undoubtedly, on the couches of you who are reading this right now.
However my life isn’t going to happen quite like that any more, and what follows is the current plan. Last week, I went for a run with the Director of the Field Services division of my company, the consultants. We talked about the company, the buyout, where we were going, and his need for someone in his department. He asked me to consider the position. I spoke with the man who’s going to be my new boss, and after a few days of consideration, I’m on my way to becoming a full time traveling consultant.
I still want the couch surfing trip, want it desperately in fact, but in weighing my options, this offer was too good to pass up now. If I don’t like it, I can always walk away as I had already. I’m going to do it for a while, perhaps a year, and during that time, I’m going to reassess where it is I want to go with my life. Am I too old to be thinking about what I want to be when I grow up? No, and even if you say yes, well, poop on you, I’m going to change anyway. That’s my story.
It’s getting harder to see anything in my shady backyard, so I’m going to wrap up and head to the kitchen for the G&T I’ve been thinking about. Hope everyone has [had] a good 4th of July weekend. See you soon.
OK. I was reading some of my old posts going back to last year, and at this time I was in the merry olde country of England. Just being in England gave me enough to write about almost daily, but realistically and actually, weekly. Looking back on those old entries I realize that it was the new locale that prompted my need to get it all in writing for all of you, my loyal readers.
Now that I’ve been back in CA for the past eight months [has it already been eight months?] I have posted very infrequently if at all. This is a shame. I love this state as much as I did living in England. This place is as new to me after four years as it was in the year 2000. I will be a more frequent poster, and I’ll write my love letter to CA.
Last week, Saturday, I went biking in Saratoga. Probably going there again today, or up to Marin. Let me think for a bit.
