Solipsism Gradient

Dave Pollard‘s put up some excellent tips for bloggers:

As much as I enjoy blogging, there are times it becomes an ordeal, especially when I am plagued by deadlines or a heavy workload. As I’ve reported before, being an empty-nester and night-owl allows me to devote 2-3 hours per day to the hobby – most of the time. When I can’t, it shows. How can you maintain a good blog in less time? Here are a few ideas…

Recommended.

Betsy Devine asks “So, what do you look like, really?“:

I remember my mom, age 80, telling me, “I look in the mirror and I think, who’s that old woman?”

I don’t know what my mom’s “real” image really looked like. I do know the person who lives behind my eyes – she’s still somewhere in between 10 and 13. She’s somebody who lives happily in her body, but expects you mostly care about her ideas and her jokes.

By one of those synchronicities, last Saturday I attended a class reunion. About one-third of my 400 classmates from the ’73 engineering class attended; it seems they’ve been meeting every five years or so, but this was the first time I was invited… apparently they’d never thought to use Google before.

Except for a dozen or so that switched to work with computers, as I did, I’d never seen any of them again after graduation. I remember being the youngest in my class, so I shouldn’t have been surprised meeting a group of, let’s face it, middle-aged or even old men. (Only a handful of the 400 were women, and I think none of them attended.) Although some select few were easily recognizable except for gray hair and some extra wrinkles, looking at the name tags was mandatory. Most of them seemed resigned to that, and a few who sported obvious hairpieces or dye jobs had to endure quite a lot of ribbing. Nearly everybody recognized me immediately, which surprised me a little… I’d always tried to attend as few classes as possible and had very few friends.

Betsy’s post woke some memories about self-image. Here’s my official graduation photo on the left (I was 22, and for some reason took my glasses off for that photo), and my current appearance on the right, 30 years later:

At the class reunion, one of my elementary school colleagues commented that I always had seemed to be in my mid-twenties, even at that time; looking at the left-hand photo, I remember thinking at the time that I looked absurdly young. I grew a beard at 30 and after that I usually thought of myself as being around that age. The right-hand photo looks OK to me… it matches my current age of 34 (hexadecimal). 😉

If you’re wondering about the title of this post, it’s from the classic text-adventure Zork. There were simple verb-noun commands to interact with the environment. “Examine xyz” was the standard command to look more closely at something:

West of House

You are standing in an open field west of a white house. with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

>examine mailbox

The small mailbox is closed.

>examine ground

There’s nothing special about the ground.

The authors slipped in a nice joke here:

>examine self

That’s difficult unless your eyes are prehensile.

The Schockwellenreiter refers to Julian Dibbell‘s excellent text Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man:

Because even if it?s true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it?s also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

A Web log really, then, is a Wunderkammer. That is to say, the genealogy of Web logs points not to the world of letters but to the early history of museums – to the “cabinet of wonders,” or Wunderkammer, that marked the scientific landscape of Renaissance modernity: a random collection of strange, compelling objects, typically compiled and owned by a learned, well-off gentleman. A set of ostrich feathers, a few rare shells, a South Pacific coral carving, a mummified mermaid – the Wunderkammer mingled fact and legend promiscuously, reflecting European civilization?s dazed and wondering attempts to assimilate the glut of physical data that science and exploration were then unleashing.

Just so, the Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the “discovery” of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.

My opinion exactly – very much worth reading. Thanks for the link, Jörg!

A spike in my access statistics appeared for Monday (after Technorati delisted my site) – the number of visits increased a little, but byte volume and file count about doubled. Go figure. Back to our normal service…

I see from my link cosmos at Technorati that yesterday this weblog briefly made the Top 50 Interesting Recent Blogs list. It’s off the list again today…

There was no spike in my access statistics, nobody famous linked to my site, I didn’t publish anything controversial – or so I think. So it must have been something quantum. Or perhaps the coconuts?

Forgot to check, but just now I did… my first post on this weblog is now just over one year old! ❗

It certainly was an eventful year for me and posting here more or less regularly has helped my English no end, generated favorable publicity for my products, and made me several new friends. Thanks to all of you who keep on reading…

Posted by AcronymBOY:

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

Several modern browsers seem to be dropping the “www.” in front of domain names under certain circumstances (like auto-completion), so I was getting a certain volume of complaints that while http://www.brockerhoff.net/ worked, / fell through into my provider’s default page instead of redirecting or providing a 404, as is customary.

Yesterday I finally got through to support, and they promptly misunderstood, taking http://www.brockerhoff.net/ completely off the air (but making / work correctly).

Due to several circumstances I was off the net until today in the morning, when I was shocked to see what happened, and am now trying to have them fix it ASAP. If you’re seeing the “www.” in front of the URL, this has been fixed.

My apologies for the mixup…

Why would people even use the www prefix? It’s typing out a subdomain that is not needed at all. It’s just as silly as having www.forums.support.domain.com or having your mail server be www.mail.domain.com. It’s extra DNS work that could have been avoided had subdomains been used as what they were intended to be used for (mainly pointing to different physical machines all serving the same domain, useful for large insistutions like colleges, businesses, and such).

But I do like what you’ve done here with the blog and phpBB and including the entire trackback thing. I like it.

I’ve just closed a deal with a Brazilian website to write a more-or-less monthly column. Names, topics and URLs will be released around September 1st.

This will be a bilingual column. The Portuguese version of each article will appear on said website, while the English version will appear here (although in a separate topic). It’s a first for me; until now, I’ve written occasional articles and papers in English, and articles in Portuguese for Macmania magazine.

Writing the same article in two languages will be a valuable exercise, I think. My usual modus operandi is to read some reference material, let the information percolate through my subconscious until a few hours before the deadline, and then produce the article in a single (albeit somewhat panicky) sitting. I suppose this won’t work for two languages, and I’m busy reviewing some reference material on writing.

One of my favorite books about writing is Lyn Dupré’s “Bugs in Writing“, and it’s long overdue for rereading. By a coincidence, a post at Ronaldo’s Superfície Reflexiva led me to Crawford Kilian‘s Writing for the Web; Crawford is one of my favorite “alternate history” authors, although it’s been years since I found any of his books. Also coincidentally, he taught a webwriting workshop in São Paulo, Brazil, around the time I was there, and lives in Vancouver, a favorite city I visited a couple of months before that. Anyway, Crawford’s articles are a great resource for writers and I’ll be reading them most carefully…