Hi. It's about noon on Monday. It was supposed to be raining but its not. As I keep saying: we need the rain because it's been very dry. Dry like a bone or a dry rock. This weekend I went hiking up Dry Rock where I could see all the way to Dry Bone Valley. Not true. It rained all day Saturday and into Sunday. Made music on Friday watched an old movie with Dara on Saturday. On Sunday I went to visit Amy and Steven's new baby. Very cute. Then came home and finished the last hundred fifty pages of Reamde, the newish Neal Stephenson that was really hard to stop reading. Normally this is good when it comes to novels, but it felt a little yucky at times, addicted to turning pages. A thousand plus and now I am free to read something not so controlling.
You may notice to the right that I've added a blog, a Tumblr account that I'm going to use for posting articles that I used to post on Google Buzz, the now defunct social media service that worked though gmail. Buzz worked well for me, but apparently nobody else liked it, so it disappeared along with my ability to share articles. There are many services that do this, but my doubts about sharing information with strangers and gigantic companies that mine my data to sell it back to me always keeps me from committing to an entrenched matrix of public internet activity indicators. I still regret the time I filled out my Facebook profile after drinking a full cup of Theraflu. Even though I erased what I wrote, it's still out there. No doubt, in the middle of a job interview ten years from now they'll ask me how often I abuse over the counter painkillers.
One of my proudest internet moments was deleting my Facebook account last Spring, after I had to reject a student's request to be Facebook friends. I never know what to do in these situations, and so decided that instead of grappling with this question at the end of every semester, I would just delete the question itself. I never used it anyway. I'm an introvert you know, and sharing my junk via somebody else's tightly controlled system always made me squeamish. This blog is personal but I leave large swaths of my life unmentioned. Which are usually the parts and stories that make me look bad. Maybe they can come up with a service that will let us be the assholes we really are. But don't get me wrong. I love the internet, and am happy to have a platform that enables me to write whatever and put it out there. Magical tools that enable us to build houses, or put people in the hospital. As if anything outside of ourselves could satisfy us.
You may notice to the right that I've added a blog, a Tumblr account that I'm going to use for posting articles that I used to post on Google Buzz, the now defunct social media service that worked though gmail. Buzz worked well for me, but apparently nobody else liked it, so it disappeared along with my ability to share articles. There are many services that do this, but my doubts about sharing information with strangers and gigantic companies that mine my data to sell it back to me always keeps me from committing to an entrenched matrix of public internet activity indicators. I still regret the time I filled out my Facebook profile after drinking a full cup of Theraflu. Even though I erased what I wrote, it's still out there. No doubt, in the middle of a job interview ten years from now they'll ask me how often I abuse over the counter painkillers.
One of my proudest internet moments was deleting my Facebook account last Spring, after I had to reject a student's request to be Facebook friends. I never know what to do in these situations, and so decided that instead of grappling with this question at the end of every semester, I would just delete the question itself. I never used it anyway. I'm an introvert you know, and sharing my junk via somebody else's tightly controlled system always made me squeamish. This blog is personal but I leave large swaths of my life unmentioned. Which are usually the parts and stories that make me look bad. Maybe they can come up with a service that will let us be the assholes we really are. But don't get me wrong. I love the internet, and am happy to have a platform that enables me to write whatever and put it out there. Magical tools that enable us to build houses, or put people in the hospital. As if anything outside of ourselves could satisfy us.
