It's nice to be back.

I'll post some pictures soon, but it's just so nice being back online again. We really do a lot of connecting online via blogs and email that I did feel totally out of the family loop for a while. It's nice to be back in the fold!

How long?

I have the "automatic suggestions" function turned on in google, and some times I'm surprised with what comes up...

...and the order it comes in!

(You will need to click on the image to see a full size version...)

Browse this.

I've just discovered Flock. I don't know if I'm just behind the times, and this is yesterday's software, but I only just found out about it. I was introduced to it via a news article from the BBC about it, so it can't be new or cutting edge...I think I've just really not been paying attention. But I've tried it, and I kinda like it.

If you haven't heard of it, it's a web browser designed to take better advantage of, dare I say it, 'web 2.0' sites. It calls itself the "social web browser," which almost drove me away, but I've been using Firefox for a while now, and I'm curious about other browsers, so I decided to give it a try. I've only been trying it for about 10 minutes, and already I have figured out how to use some of it's gizmos (which means it's pretty intuitive, even though it looks overly-complicated with lots of buttons and tabs and windows-within-windows). I like how it deals with web mail, and I've already set up the RSS feeds for all the family blogs.

I'm posting this from within Flock, rather than using the dashboard at Blogger, and so far, so good. But I did have to open up a window in Firefox to find the urls for the links above, so I don't think I'm there yet. But hey, it's only been 10 minutes...give me a couple days and we'll see how it goes.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Yes, it's got me too.

A couple of weeks ago, Mark was out at a gig in the evening and I was left home alone with the interweb. The result? I finally succumbed and signed up to Facebook.

I had (still have, actually, though I never look at it) an account with Friendster way back when it was the thing-to-do, but when I moved from LA I didn't use it and I never replaced it with anything else. I think friends have used different things since then, but lately, everyone has been talking about Facebook. It's been in the news, which means that it's been around so long that you're way too late for the "early adopters" badge, you've gone past the "bandwagon" stage and you're pretty much in the "might-as-well-do-it-since-everyone-else-is-and-there-may-be-something-to-it" moment. So I thought I would give it a go.

I quickly found that actually, it's kind of useful. Lots of people that I haven't talked to in ages are on it, and it's given me a good reason to drop them a line. Plus, it's such a low-pressure environment--you can send a note of just a couple lines and you don't have to worry about writing everything that has happened in your life since you last spoke to them. So it's a nice way of letting people know that you're thinking of them and catching up with what they're doing now.

You can do lots of different things through adding applications--and I did go a bit overboard at the beginning and over-applicate, if you know what I mean--but I'm back to a happy, managable level.

And I'll be buying you all dinner once I cash my checks from this commercial...

OK, I'm back.

Thanks to my sisters' recent forays into the blogosphere (AmigoNet and ScreaminJohn's Blog), I have returned to this long dusty corner of the interweb, brushing away the moldy bits and bytes I long ago stored for no-one-in-particular's purpose (not even my own).

I reread the original (and only) entry. Man. This mockery of postmodern self-reflexivity just isn't going to cut it. I know (or knew) too many people who actually know what that means...or at least what it is supposed to mean. So if I am really going to try to do this (and this no more than an experiment after all) then I have to just play this one straight.

But beginning this process reminds me of something that Kurt Vonnegut talked about in an archived interview from Fresh Air. He talked about when he first began writing and mentioned (if I'm remembering this all correctly) that being a science major at college helped him because if he had been a literature major, he would have realised that writing something good is hard and would never have started. But since he was just a science geek, he didn't know what good writing was supposed to be like or that it was difficult, so he just wrote. So I'll just write, when and what I can, and never be as good as Vonnegut's left nostril and leave it at that. There's no point in trying to write something good when you know how good good can really be (and know that you're no good). Or something like that.

Plus, as my Dad and I were discussing last night, there is so much digital storage space out there in the world these days, that it doesn't matter if I'm taking up some chunk of memory for my navel-gazing ramblings. Actually, on that subject, Dad told a very interesting story about how when he was doing network support a while ago (back when they fought over kilobytes rather than tetrabytes or paeleoflops or whatever we're up to these days), he wanted to clean out some outdated and unnecessary files on the computer system in order to reduce the cost they were paying for data storage. But it turns out that it was cheaper to rent the data storage for years and years than for the geophysicists to spend their time going through and figuring out which files to keep and which to delete. Which just proves how much storage out there and how cheap it is. Either that or that geophysicists are overpaid. Or both.