How Not To Argue On The Intarweb

I got into a flame war in the comments section of a blog that i read recently regarding my comments on a post that the blog author had made about somebody else's blog (isn't the internet fun?). This wasn't long after Paul Graham got lambasted for his essay that made an analogy comparing normal employees vs. founders to zoo animals vs. animals in the wild, and then followed that up with an essay explaining how people should properly respond to his essays.

I found these occurrences interesting because of the indirect and yet public nature of the debates. I'm sure this went on in the regular press in more intellectual times, but certainly at a much more deliberate pace. I learned a couple of lessons from this that i think might come in handy should i ever write anything that someone else reads.

1. If a large number of people respond negatively to something you write, you should probably consider the possibility that it was offensive and not merely misinterpreted.
2. If you think what you wrote was misinterpreted, you should probably consider the possibility that you didn't write it that well.
3. Be very careful about generalizing from small, non-random samples to the entire population with no interim stopping points (even if that's what i'm doing here).
4. Do not respond to your detractors with smug blog posts about logical fallacies.
5. Responding with "Whatever" means you lose the argument.

The Trouble With Syndication

I came across Sam Jacob's Strangeharvest blog in a roundabout way: the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died, which led to Alex Mardas, which led to the Mardas Gap, an idea that Jacob suggested to describe the gap between a designer's idea and its realization. Strangeharvest is, at least to my mind, one of the coolest looking blogs i've ever seen. It's geometric, but not rigidly symmetric, and its form maps clearly onto its function. It's nice to look at and navigate.

Most of the blogs that i follow get unceremoniously dumped into Google Reader, and i rarely navigate to the actual blog even for full text. Of course, this is partially the fault of the bloggers. They could choose to syndicate only beginnings so that you have to go to the regular blog to read the full text. But it seems like what I really want, at least for the cases where people go to the trouble to make their sites attractive, is less like the Google reader's digest approach, and more something like the channel guide on my cable system. There's gotta be some Ajax-y feed aggregator out there that does this, right?

Pride and Pain

I started a second blog, called Pride and Pain, as an outlet for my interest in martial arts and fighting.

Blog Changes

I've been slowly adding bits and pieces of automatically generated content to my blog page. I'm not sure why, except maybe it seems to compensate for my infrequent updates. So far, i've got:

• Workouts that i've logged at RunningAhead.com.
• My Flickr stream.
• Product of the Day on Pristine Planet, my friend Cathy's web site.

I thought about doing a Last.fm thing also, but frankly i'm sick of music recommendations.

Now i gotta get busy and get rid of this standard template. And maybe write some blog entries.

Blogs I Still Read

I'm not sure if blogging has become so mainstream that nobody talks about it anymore, or if it's a fad that has passed its peak. Personally, i read very few blogs regularly now, and a good percentage of those are work-related. Among the hand-full that i still visit almost daily are:

• WarrenEllis.com - Warren is (unbeknownst to him) sort of my Beatrice, in the sense that he is my guide to a kind of underworld. Plus, there are often pictures of persons unclothed.
• Postmodern Sass - Still fun to read, still sui generis, not still in Canada.
• Global Guerrillas - Because it scares me.
• BoingBoing - More of a metablog, but in a good way. Basically the Slashdot of oddness.
  

I think there are two main reasons why my blog enthusiasm has waned. The first is that i just can't stomach reading political opinion anymore, even if (maybe especially if) i agree with it. The other is that anything that's interesting on the web will be forwarded to me within 15 minutes by my virtual network of acquaintances. For example, the Peanut Butter Manifesto, about the problems of my beloved employer, was IM'd to me by three people.

Dream Blogging

A milestone for me. Last night i had a strange dream, the details of which i won't burden you with, but it had to do with going to see a rock concert that turned out to be in a high-school gym and after 3 songs the band decided to change venues and have everyone at the concert bussed to the new location. The milestone: during the dream i clearly remember thinking "this will make an interesting blog entry". I was actually sort of disappointed when i woke up and realized that it wasn't a real event and so it wouldn't be fair to blog about it. So i decided to blog about the dream. I suppose the distinction between reality and dreams so far as blogs are concerned is not terribly important, but what i find interesting is that the idea of blogging is enough ingrained in my subconscious that it entered my dream like any other element of life might have done; no more odd than a ringing phone or an old friend.

Youth Culture Killed My Blog

Well, not exactly. But it's been a hectic month. Both of my boys are playing on their respective soccer All-Star teams in addition to the regular schedule, so they've been playing and practicing almost daily. Unfortunately, they didn't fare well in their first tournament, but there's another in a couple of weeks. Win or lose, it's a joy to watch them play- they move with such grace and they've both evolved into pretty good players.

Although i've been reasonably busy at work, i feel as if i'm spending most of my time (when i'm not at a soccer practice) running. I did my first 30-mile weekend this past Sat/Sun (10 miles on Saturday, 20 on Sunday). This last week was the peak of my mileage for this training cycle. In a span of 8 days i ran over 80 miles. I've still got two more 20-milers to do in the coming weeks, but my weekly mileage never exceeds 60 miles again.

The Thanksgiving holiday was nice. Thanksgiving is now my favorite holiday, probably because it revolves around eating. When i was a kid the heavy marketing of Christmas didn't start until after Thanksgiving, but now it starts around Labor Day so Thanksgiving seems neglected. I like that. You get a couple of days off work, you get to feast with impunity, and you don't feel like you're being barraged with media messages about how you must celebrate the holiday in order to be happy. Seriously. I've seen commercials for magazines and television shows that instruct a person how to celebrate Christmas. People need help with this? I think this kind of crap was probably a much better reason to send Martha Stewart to prison than whatever it was she went to prison for.

Saw the new Harry Potter movie. It's a bit scary, but it should be given the subject matter. My only minor complaint (which applies to the last movie also) is that i don't like the new Dumbledore as much (i read somewhere that "dumbledore" is an old english word for "bumblebee"). Richard Harris had the perfect temperament and physicality to play somebody who is both old/wise and a serious badass. The new guy is a little too Yoda-esque for my taste.

We've been doing work on the house. I had the family room painted, and the pool replastered and i'm putting new sod in the back yard. It's amazing how much effort goes into simply arranging to have other people come do work for you. I get the feeling though that the construction boom is abating, because contractors will actually return my phone calls now.

Can you believe it's almost December? Damn, where does all the time go?

The 4 Stages of Tequila Mockingbird

One of my college roommates had one of those 4 stages of tequila T-shirts:

1. I'm rich
2. I'm good-looking
3. I'm bullet proof
4. I'm invisible

So, anyway, one of my favorite bloggers reports that Julia Montgomery, author of the Tequila Mockingbird blog, has apparently reached stage 4. No, even worse than that, she seems to have stopped blogging, which sucks because her blog is even way better than the great name would suggest. My personal theory is that she returned to Bali so that she could get out of the blogosphere, but that's probably more in line with my own mid-life crisis fantasy.

So for what it's worth (and it ain't much, let me assure you), this is my small contribution to the search for Tequila Mockingbird.

Getting A Life

I've heard it expressed recently that blogging must neccessarily be trite and pathetic, because anyone with an actual life doesn't have time to blog. I suppose there's a small grain of truth in there, though it makes it hard to explain the blogs of people like Mark Cuban or William Gibson. I would counter with the idea that people who blog must have some sort of life, otherwise they wouldn't have anything to write about, though i guess the comeback to that idea basically writes itself.

The interpretation of the phrase "get a life" reveals a lot about the person interpreting it. I remember an interview years ago with Nicolas Negroponte, the director of MIT's media lab. One of his detractors had declared that he should "get a life", and Negroponte responded that at the time he heard the criticism he was dining on his yacht off the coast of Greece. By which response i assume he meant to say that he was living well and so he not only had a life, but a life that most would envy. I personally think the original comment meant to imply that Negroponte needed to get a "normal" life, i.e., a stressful job that required him to produce something useful in order to get paid, maybe a family, some crushing mortgage debt, the desire to drink a six-pack of Coors in order to numb his brain. Sort of: "walk in my shoes for a while and then maybe you'll understand how much i value electronic paper and wearable computers".

It's hard for me to argue against the notion that if you have time to blog you also have time to walk your dog, and that the latter is probably the more noble pursuit. But human beings don't seem to work that way. We all wander around to a greater or lesser degree within our hierarchy of needs. Blogging maybe fulfills the needs to exchange information and express one's self, particularly for those of us without the will or capacity to spend a lot of time in more face-face social situations. Since many blogs consist mostly of a compendium of links to other people's opinions or news stories, blogs also apparently serve as a way to express opinions without actually stating them. Blogging is the ultimate act of personalization, if i may borrow a buzzword from my industry. It's less about describing who you are than about describing how you want to be seen.

Why Blog?

I read a news story this morning that contained the line "...critics continue to dismiss blogs as mostly prosaic rambling...", which prompted me to think "what's wrong with prosaic rambling?". My blog is a combination of half-baked, unresearched essays and what one of my favorite bloggers refers to as "what i had for breakfast"-type of entries. I think prosaic rambling is an apt description.

Of course, the story was referring to the minute percentage of blogs that have large readerships and which influence thought. I was reading an article recently about the number of blogs and the growth in blogs in recent months, and while i forget the exact numbers i seem to recall that there are around 47 trillion blogs now and 100 million new blogs created every second. That works out to roughly one-hell-of-a-shitload of blogs for every living creature in the universe. Out of those, on any given day maybe 3 or 4 will have an impact on the meme-o-sphere. That means that the chance of a blog to influence people's thinking is slightly lower than the chance of winning the Powerball lottery and then being struck by lightning during a solar eclipse.

In fact, while blogs are completely public they are for the vast majority effectively private journals. You could, as some have, seed your blog with popular keywords so that it shows up with a high rank on search engines. If your goal is to generate income via blogads, that's fine. But for most of us the justification for spending time on a blog has to overcome the presumption that nobody ever reads the damn thing. My personal rationalization goes something like this: 1) i get to practice writing without any of the bothersome paperwork, 2) i like writing because it's somehow cathartic, 3) i can look back on this in a year, 5 years, 10 years and get a reminder of what i was thinking and doing, 4) blogging is an interesting cultural/sociological phenomenon and/or fad so that by participating i am part of the experiment.

I mentioned in an e-mail to somebody that, for me at least, blogging is also a way to define and explore those aspects of my life that distinguish me from my demographic. Based on my income, job, neighborhood, marital status, number of children, and age marketers would most likely target me as a customer for mutual funds, mid-level luxury automobiles, golf clubs and what they call "house porn" (those magazines that insist you just can't go on living without travertine countertops and crown molding). It's not really important to me that other people find my weird hobbies interesting or that anybody share my taste in music; but it is important to me to think that i'm making my own choices about these things rather than being unduly influenced by what advertisers and social norms dictate. Blogging forces me to think about how i really feel about these things, both in terms of what i'm willing to say and what i'm not.

Stating the Obvious

When my younger son Henry was still learning how to dress himself he'd often put his right shoe on his left foot and his left shoe on his right foot. One day i pointed it out to him so that he could correct it.

"Henry", I said, "your shoes are on the wrong feet".

He looked down at this shoes and replied, "No, these are my feet".

I thought this was funny. I also think it's evidence that you can state something fairly obvious and still be funny and insightful. That's my modest goal for this blog, which is why i've borrowed most of Henry's answer for my title.

I claim that i'll be stating the obvious because, demographically speaking, i'm about as ordinary as one can be. Married, two kids, middle class, middle-aged, etc. I work in the software industry (i know, i know, this is a real rarity among bloggers). In principle, i have little beyond the obvious from which to draw. This (intentionally) defines the obvious to be subjective; i expect my observations to be obvious because they are the observations of someone whose experiences are among the most common. But as Sherlock Holmes would say, "There's nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact".

So, i'll state the obvious and, if you wish, you can point out to me when i've got it backwards. To the extent that blogging is anything beyond quick-fix vanity press, i think that's about the best one can hope for.