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.