Labels

R (15) Admin (12) programming (11) Rant (6) personal (6) parallelism (4) HPC (3) git (3) linux (3) rstudio (3) spectrum (3) C++ (2) Modeling (2) Rcpp (2) SQL (2) amazon (2) cloud (2) frequency (2) math (2) performance (2) plotting (2) postgresql (2) DNS (1) Egypt (1) Future (1) Knoxville (1) LVM (1) Music (1) Politics (1) Python (1) RAID (1) Reproducible Research (1) animation (1) audio (1) aws (1) data (1) economics (1) graphing (1) hardware (1)

30 December 2008

Why blog?

This is the picture i have on my desktop. I wish i could remember where i found it, because i love it, and someone else made it, and i wish i could give them credit for it.

Are blogs inherently narcissistic?

As a *nix technologist, i use google to fix 75% of my problems *very* quickly. Google just finds the already-published answers, many of which come from personal blogs, short write-ups of problems solved.

It's like stone soup

As an aside, I read a lot of newspapers. There's a huge, ongoing conversation about how newspapers *create* news, while bloggers move it around, pick out the nice parts, etc. Are bloggers destroying newspapers? I reckon it's a question worth asking, but with respect to technology, it's a null one.

Personal observation in general, and micro-problem-solving in particular, is where blogs excel. I'm a little embarrassed that i started so late, but i've gotten to the point in my life where, more and more, i use technology to solve a clear-and-present problem. I need it to fit me.

Enter cellphone blogging.

I need it to be simple, to work as near the speed-of-thought as possible. Keybindings are a great example. I learn new firefox and vim keybindings because they allow me to work *much* more rapidly, with much less thought, once my fingers finally learn them.

Sometimes computers are a pain to find, or there's no internet access, or my battery's down, or i only have time to check my email and run. On the other hand, my cellphone can stay on for days without a charge, (finally!) has a thumb keyboard and camera attached, and can almost always send pix messages. Alternately, I can use my laptop with gmail; then i get a real keyboard and firefox's spellchecker, and i can compose a well thought-out email quickly and easily.

I don't want a blog to take time out of my life. Rather, i want to put a little bit of effort into it here and there to make my life better. For me, these are the things of which speed-of-thought blogging is made. Only now do i enjoy tossing things into this vast and mercurial stone soup cauldron.

which way is south?

snow is still on the ground on the north side of this massive 4-wheeled thing that never moves, after 3 days of relatively warm and sunny weather.

this still gives me a moment of pause - unexpectedly logical, a trick, like navigating by moss on the north side of trees.

*edit* my cellphone camera doesn't have the best auto-exposure... i had to pull the pic into digikam, which does have some really nice auto-adjust tools, and then re-post it. you can see the car, the shadow of the tree, the sidewalk, and the faint crust of crunchy snow on the grass, right?

first post from phone - 1000 chars is a big upgrade from twitter for some stuff.

next: www.x14n.org... automagic link interpretation!

finally, the knoxville *linens'n'things*, post-pillage by holiday shoppers. the fixtures are for sale!

*edit* - i'm so stoked that actually works. verizon "pix text" to go@blogger.com can get pics from phone to blog just fine, with auto-link-detection. life is sweet. I did have to afteredit the image to rotate it...

first post

crosspost: http://www.twitter.com/prosopis annoying - links not autorecognized... what's up with that? I *really* hate having to click a toolbar button to change text. Yes, I'm a text-input primadonna.