here goes

I must be feeling better

Yesterday, I met a man who is both an NPR commentator and a syndicated columnist.  He also has a blog and writer as part of his living.  One of his "failures," he confessed, is that not enough people read his blog. (I certainly know that feeling, but what else do I expect if I make a post once a month or so?) 

Last night, I finally filed my business cards from the last year and I as I indexed the cards I picked up in April of 2006, I started thinking about my blog.  I clearly remember my blog being a big part of my life at the time.  What happened?

It was my broken arm, of course, followed closely therapy for my weak ankles (not related issues, I assure you).  I just checked for certain and found that, indeed, I kept posting twice a week or so until I broke my arm.

Meeting a fellow, more committed blogger again, has piqued my interest in blogging again.  Look for a link to this guy's blog soon after I actually find it.  Apparently, he doesn't shy away from controversial subjects and has lost friends over it.  Sounds more compelling than my very carefully worded blog.  Hmmm.

Digital distractions and the decline of personal narrative

A while back, I alluded to other activities in my life that have been slowing my blog efforts to a near halt.

One cause is my recent obsession with digital storytelling. The technique involves using a personal story, normally in the form of a audio narration recorded by the person telling the story. The creators integrate video, still images, and either music or sound effects. Back in 2004, a heart-wrenching movie done in this digital storytelling style, called Tarnation, enjoyed a brief time at art-house theaters. Most digital stories run around 3 minutes.

Earlier this year, my favorite digital storytelling organization, the Center for Digital Storytelling, launched a new website for sharing digital stories, Stories for Change.  Not only is it a place where digital storytellers can share their often intimate work, it's also hosted in Drupal. (My other website is in Drupal).

Ever since visiting this and helping the CDS get a small grant for helping foster kids capture their stories, I've been obsessed with honing my three-minute digital storytelling skills. For one thing, I'm about to start giving presentations, and I want to do something other than the usual, boring-as-hell PowerPoint presentation. I've been writing and going through photos and digitizing videos and making digital art to go with my stories.

So, with all this great energy about people telling their own intimate, personal stories, I also sense a decline in the personal narrative. Stanford University is now offering a class called "Writing Beyond the Me," which promises to teach telling a story from another point of view and not tell a story like James Frey.

Not all personal narratives are deceitful nor told for the intention of securing monetary gain. I'll stay the course with my brief narratives. These really short stories, I hope, will help me hone my dramatic skills.

New name, new look, etc?

Lately, since I have been medically unable to write much recently (for the last six weeks or so), I've been thinking I miss writing enough to not be called "reluctant writer" anymore.  Is it time to retire this blog and be reborn as something else?

The name "Shiny Rhino," alas, has already been taken.

A name by any other name

The campaign is bumping along.  One of those major search engines still isn't finding my campaign web site even though I registered it twice and had several supporters register it, too.  (Argh!)

Now that I've been doing an activity that resembles blogging for over a year now, I have some issues with my blog name.  It's okay, but I abbreviated it when I joined metafilter.  Now I covet other people's user names.  Where do people get creative names, like say, "One Good Bumblebee" or "amberglow" or any number of clever blog or screen names.  (I'm feeling distinctly uncreative at the moment to the point I can't even think of the ones I like.  I'll add more later.)

I saw an editorial by a Stanford linguist today who quoted a metafilter thread about Yahoo! news photo aggregate showing pictures that labeled black people as "looters" and white people as "finders."  Could the lingust be CunningLinguist (also a clever name)

I've been thinking about it, I may join metafilter again with a name like ThunderKitten or Tears in Rain.  Neither of these names seems very original or creative though. Something to think about.

Longing on the internet

This article about Justin Hall's retreat from blogging contained a quote:

"What if intimacy happens in quiet moments?" he said. "I think the Web makes me not alone and I feed it my intimacies, and the Web is my constant connection to something larger than myself ... but what if something you do, something you practice like religion as a dialogue with the divine, drives people away from you?"

Reading Justin's words takes me back to words written by our mutual friend, Marshall, about his idea of gravitas, the human creature's need for the physical presence of others, the need of the experience of another person in the same place and time rather than a mere disembodied entity glimpsed through words and images on a glowing computer screen:

i'm not so sure it's all joyous on the internet. i suspect there's a lot of loneliness at the heart of the typing, some fantasy or wish that somehow one leave the web of words and hear a voice, see a face, touch a body...

At the time I read these typed out in cyberspace by our friend Marshall, I was in need of contact myself. I encountered Marshall on an online forum and these words of his about need.  I felt these words to my core, I felt the need like an ache, impossible to deny or ignore.

I feel Justin's doubts. Really I do. My friends, some of them, have fallen away from me precisely because I wanted to write. Who wants their foibles immortalized?  Most writers do, perhaps, but everyone else wants anonymity.

Marshall's words inspired me to reach out and I did so by responding to him on his online forum with this:

I recently read Thoreau's "Walden." Thoreau writes

"Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them, trying our knives... We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-of-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation. Great Looker! Great Expecter! to converse with whom was a New England's Night's Entertainment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, it expanded and wracked my little house..."

This quote evokes in me a sorrow that such conversations are to me more often the stuff of myth and literature than of experience these days. I wonder if all our advances in communication technology merely mask our lack of skill in its art.

Within a week, Marshall and I spoke on the phone. Within a year, we eschewed our public, online conversations for other forms of communication. Now we exchange email once in a while. Perhaps, one reason I started to blog was because I missed the writing, the longing, the struggle to imbue my words with life, to communicate through words alone with another human creature. Now, rather than talking with another writer in a very public way as Marshall and I did online for a while, I find myself talking to myself in the dark room of this blog. Sure, I get the occassional comment and the occassional email, but it is not the same.

I believe Justin will resume public life with something expressive. But, I'm not so sure he will ever blog again.

Blog divigations

I spent a very pleasant afternoon today conversing, eating scones, drinking coffee and playing chess under the shade of a dozen California redwood trees. My interlocutor expressed an interest in learning more about the blogging community, so off the cuff, I wrote the following introduction for him:

Under the section "People to Visit," on the left side of my blog, the entry for Chuck Olsen is probably the best launching place for people who want to learn more about famous blogs. Chuck is neck deep in the blog movement. Check out his links under "Blogerati" on the right side of his blog to find links to many of the famous ones. Chuck Olsen's site does not link to several fairly famous and interesting sites: www.wonkette.com and www.slashdot.com and www.boingboing.net.

I myself link to several highly regarded sites (Word for My Enjoyment and Prepare to Meet Your Bakerina), but they are humor and cooking sites, respectively. By "highly regarded," I mean they've been nominated for awards where bloggers vote for their favorite blogs.

Recently, Justin Hall, a person I used to link to on my blog, a friend of a friend, flamed out quite publicly when he posted a 5-minute video of himself having a nervous breakdown. Several years ago, I heard Justin speak at a conference. He was one of the first bloggers ever. He essentially grew up blogging about all his angst about his home life, about his parent's divorce and about his relationships. By the time my friends and I heard him speak when he was in his mid 20s, he seemed to be processing the world at a breakneck speed, and impossible starving hummingbird speed. Somewhere, I have an audio recording of us discussing his essence. He seemed not human somehow. I would like to dig out that recording and post about Justin's breakdown very soon. (This lack of alacrity prevents me from ever being a leading edge blogger, by the way. And I'm okay with that.)

I don't do a blog for the "normal" reasons (to get more and more readers, to keep my friends and family entertained). I write as an outlet for the occasional story I wish to tell, as a repository for my thoughts and reactions. At one time I wanted to write "concretely" every day as a discipline, but that lasted about three days. My father reads my blog and I admit that I do edit what goes there. I write about my personal life (not everyone does), but I do not mention names of people or locations. Despite that, my blog is essentially an extension of my memory

It seems like a lot of bloggers lately have been questioning their role in society and the role of blogging in their lives (including bloggers I link to like Syntax of Things and )

So, I would very much enjoy getting together again for chess almost any Saturday afternoon, either at the many-windowed place under the redwoods or at the sun-dappled public plaza with the 20 open chess boards. I hope the conversations continue.

The foibles of me

Many of the blogs I read have been nominated for Best of Blog Awards.  That's gotta' be a good feeling. The thing about awards is that most blogs have categories.  My blog, on purpose, is not easy to categorize.  It's not literary, particularly. (Sometime I should blog why I do book assessments the way I do.)  It's not humorous. It's definitely not a cooking or knitting blog. I don't like to spew forth links to other sites.  So, I'll just keep doing what I do.  (I would like to get out to other blogs and interact with comments more.)

One of the aspects of my life I allow into the blogosphere is a document of my entering public life as an appointed official or maybe someday an elected one.  My faux pas count is so high that if I got out more, I could turn that process into a humor blog.  Geesh, my friends can't invite me anywhere!

Not that they don't try now and then.

A friend has been after me for months to go with her to a Rotary Club lunch meeting.  Rotary is an international service club.  Their motto: "Service Before Self" or something like that.

This week, I finally attended a meeting with her at a local motel.  The members sit around and eat, then the program starts.  First order of business is to welcome visiting members from other clubs (the farthest traveled was a member from India). then introduction of guests, then announcements, then a presentation by a visiting speaker.

As I came in, I hugged and greeted people I knew (probably 20 out of 100 people). I saw someone I had not seen in five years, so I regressed to days gone by and wrote my host's maiden name on the "guest of" line.  Faux pas #1.  The members got a big chuckle out of that and warned me that her husband would scold me vigorously.

Faux pas #2 was worse. We sat at the table with the speaker, the mother of a soldier in Iraq who started the local chapter of a support group.  She brought fliers and a photo album.  The guest speaker asked me to pour her a cup of coffee.  Big mistake.  I had trouble with the lid on the pitcher. Finally, she had an overfull cup of coffee in her hand and I was relieved, duty done. After I poured the coffee, my host asked for a napkin. She wanted to clean the drops of coffee that had spilled on the fliers and album. I was mortified. The speaker assured me that the damage was not serious -- just a couple of fliers and no photos damaged.  Fortunately for me, the photo album pages were coffee colored anyway, so the coffee stains blended right in.

I made her an origami crane as a peace offering.  She wouldn't accept any more (other than donations to her organization.)

Faux pax #3.  I didn't give her organization any money either.

Even so, I got the recruitment email soon after, "thanks for attending, if you want to know more" signed by the recruitment committee chair.

Catching up

After I am back from an extended absence (it seems longer than it was), I find that I'm looking forward to catching up on the blogs that I couldn't read in Europe due to lack of Internet access.

First, I'm delighted to introduce a new blog, Hello World!, by a friend of mine, Super Chuy who lives in the same Silicon Valley world I do. Super Chuy is not his real name, but I like it very much. Write on, Super! I'll be reading!

Also I'm delighted that, after a nearly four-month hiatus, another blog I read regularly, So Shmoopy, is back online. Calissa, welcome back -- you are posting almost everyday now, so I need a block of time to read your posts. I can see a lot is going on and I love that you got a digital camera now. Also, I'm glad you all made it to Europe and have set up your home there all safely.

Of course, Pauly D has been steadily (and, I'm sure, brilliantly) adding to his Words For His Enjoyment. I'll need an even longer block of time to catch up with his blog, but I've been saving questions up for the Friday, Words for My Enjoyment feature. You betcha'.

Then there's the savory blog, Prepare To Meet Your Bakerina. Bakerina makes me wish I lived closer to New York so I could conceivably enjoy the smells and tastes of her cooking rather than just looking at pictures. Her literary food references are great, too. I never looked at literature in quite that way before.

I confess, I already caught up a little with a.d.d. (another dissertation distraction). I so get the distraction part. I didn't read all Lori's posts in great detail, but I took the poll to find out if I was a blue liberal or red conservative and, like Lori, I'm right in the middle somewhere.

Well, by now I'll be a few minutes late to work, so off I go! (It's disturbing to see my spelling is just as bad as ever.)

Technical writing instincts kick in

One thing that always makes me a little bit irrationally guilty about my blog is when people come to my blog looking for information on how to do something. Sometimes I know (or strongly suspect) they are not finding what they wanted on my blog. My professional training as a technical writer makes me cringe whenever I get that feeling. I've been resisting doing anything about it until today. Take the case of my blog entry about how to send email from a phone number.

That post was about a very specifc feature about my carrier T-Mobile. Let me set the record straight about that post.

I send and receive email from my cell phone all the time, but the method I described in that blog entry is not how I do it.

Beginning of technical writing section:

How to send email from my cell phone: I set up my phone as soon as I get it. I define the email accounts I want to use by going into the set up menus and entering a few very important, standard pieces of information all email set ups need to know. Setting up the phone is just like setting up your computer at home to check email.

To do that, I need to pick an mail server type. Typically, these are "POP" or "IMAP." POP means that the email server sends all messages to your local machine and deletes them from ther server. IMAP means that the server keeps all the messages until you specifically move or delete them and you can look at them from any imap-enabled email viewing system.

On my phone, I use pop.

To set it up, I enter 1) my POP3 server for incoming mail, 2) my SMTP server for outgoing mail, 3) my user name, 4) my password, 5) the name that appears in my addressee's "from" line whenever they receive my email.

The most complex part if this process is finding the appropriate menus on my phone, learning how to enter the "@" symbol, and finding the names of the popd and smtp servers from my internet service providers. I don't even start trying to set up mail before I learn those things for each email account I want to use. Once I do, I'm set to go. It usually takes me about an hour from the time I start till the time I can send mail from my two or three accounts on my phone.

Where do I find out all these things. The phone menus and text entry system, I learn from the phone's user manual. Always, my internet service provider's web site provides the POP3 and SMTP server names it provides. I just have to search their web sites.

End of technical writing section.

That previous post refered to the T-Moble "feature" on the Sony Ericsson T610 that, whenever you go to the picture menu and send a picture from there, it always shows up as coming from a phone number. However, when you go to the email menu to send an email, there was no way from the menus you could make the email come from a phone number, too. At least, I did not know the way until I called customer care that one time.

My motivation for giving in to my technical writing tendency is to boost readership of my site a little bit, perhaps. My readership is increasing lately, but it is so gradual sometimes that I think it is just that I have more posts for Google hits to find. If I provide information that is actually useful to someone, that can't be a bad thing for them or for my site's hit rate. So look for more of this kind of thing.

Autistic spectrum disorders and blogging, or Blog thoughts after 82 days

I've added to this blog for 82 days. Even though it sometimes feels like a chore at the end of the day to write something more when I spend all day writing anyway, there are some things about it that keep me going.

My average daily readership hovers between 26 and 31 readers per day. The average was up over 30 before I went on my two-week trip to the midwest earlier this month. Then, an all-consuming project came up and my readership dropped off more.

I am really thankful for the three or four regular readers I have. The rest of the visitors come from people that click on my site from web-based searches. The number of hits generated can be quite high. When I posted something about gyrokinesis, I started getting 3 or 4 hits per day. When I searched Google for "gyrokinesis," my site came up on the second page. It stayed there for several weeks, then dropped back to the 14th page.

Since then, I find myself trying to ride the wave of new catch phrases to raise my average hit count. This is not an all-consuming passion or anything, but I do keep my ears tuned for new phrases. When I first heard "hair on fire" in connection with the Terrorism Commission, I knew that phrase would be popular, so I added a blog entry with it. Sure enough, after a couple days, I started getting about 10 hits per day. For a couple of weeks, my site was #6 on the Google search for "hair on fire." After a while, it dropped off to page 6.

Some of these popular phrases come out of nowhere, meaning I write them with no idea anyone will look for them later. "Shadow people" is like that. There are several others I still get hits for, so I won't muddy the waters by pointing someone to these phrases.

I've picked up from reading about bloggers that propogating "memes" is a big thing. My husband told me all about memes, or self-propogating organisms such as catchy ideas, many years ago because he is a fan of book by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, where the idea of memes was introduced. The term meme has caught on to describe what happens when bloggers pass around newly processed or newly released information that travels very quickly from one person to another.

This idea of memes came up for me again this week because of my husband's response when I sent him a link to a NYTimes article about Aspberger's syndrome, a mild form of autism. The sufferers aren't always aware of or able to follow social customs. Reading the article made me think of my husband, of me, of many of the engineers I know and work with. He suggested that a term mentioned in the article, "autistic spectrum disorders," could be my next candidate for riding the wave of a new meme to increase my hit count. I told him it was too late already. Once a term makes the NYTimes, it is way too late. I checked on Google and today there are over 40,000 matches when I search for it using quotes around the phrase.

These conversations we have make me think of a recurring feature I could have on my blog (besides these blogging thougths posts). Other blogs have neat regular features. Next time I find what I think could become a meme, I will post something about it as usual, but I will add a bit of self-awareness to those posts by also posting (perhaps in a separate, but subsequent entry) how many Google hits the word or phrase had when I made the post. Perhaps people who are looking for information would add comments about how many hits there were whenever they did the search. I don't know if anyone will cooperate, but I think it is an interesting way to track memes.

When I did a Google search on "tracking memes," I found a lot of entries, but nothing that had such a simple interesting mechanism as logging the number of Google matches through time. When I first searched for hair on fire before I posted my hair-on-fire entry, there were only maybe three pages of results, perhaps about 30 or so matches. Now there are over 15,000 if you search using quote marks and my post from March 23rd is on Google search page 69.

That's interesting. It's not a huge reason I blog, but it's a phenomenon I would not really have experienced quite this way if I didn't blog.

I doubt that this post will get hit on much by any of the many web search engines, but really, that's not why I blog, anyway. I'm not obsessed with hits per day, really!