Blog Backup

I thought I'd like to do a backup of my blog. Partly for reasons unknown even to me, but for one I was curious about how much I've written in the blog since its "birth" two and a half years ago. So I started the tedious task of viewing each post and then select, copy & paste into a Word-document, and so far I've covered 72 posts and have still 250 to go. The result is approximately 50 pages including comments, and if this meets the average for the rest it means I've produced enough bull to fill a whole book! Even a quite substantial one, reaching 450 pages. Impressive or scary, I don't know...

For The Umpteenth Time - On Blogging

Am I here or not?

When I first started out this blog quite a few people who knew me (or thought they did) were rather surprised by me, and what I was writing about, not to mention my style of writing. I "chose" to be very open, and I have been warned more than once that it might not be such a good idea to reveal so much of myself. Well, to me, this blog has been very self centered and often served merely as a safety valve to let out steam. And it has worked too, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be standing so "upright" as I am now if it hadn't been for my writing here. Some have asked me if I really have to publish my thoughts to web, why not just write and save it on the hard disk? I think, writing publicly keeps me on my toes, it makes me concentrate more. And to be honest, I do feel good when someone recognize what I'm doing...

Anyhow, one of my "guardians" used to call me (at least in the beginning of my blogging career), every time I shared a little too much of my sadness and frustrations here in the blog. I told her than that she needn't to worry until I "went missing", that as long as I was writing I was fine. It's when I'm not writing I'm really depressed. Again I feel I have to correct myself, you see, judging by my poor attendance on the blog I should be locked up in a secure environment! This time though, it hasn't so much to do with being busy writing my assignment (although that is exactly what I should be doing...), but more with me being busy living. And how wonderful isn't that!

I'm pretty sure I'll write more, either here or somewhere else, but right now? Too much going on, don't have time to sit down. And when I do I rather play around with PhotoShop, I'm confident that I'll someday have use for knowing how to turn pictures into a preset brush!!!

External Censor

I'm so lucky to have friends that carefully point out the possibilities of mistakes I might do. Or just ask me the questions I need to hear. This time it's about the blog.

I know I'm very open and revealing here, and believe me, I have given it a lot of thought. Is it wise or not? For the most part I actually know who's reading, simply because it's mostly my friends who know about the blog in the first place. And they know me well enough to read between the lines when that's necessary, and when to know I'm exaggerating only to make a point. And they also know when it's pure fiction, and not from my real life. And most important, if they get confused they just ask me next time they'll see me.

Other people who stumble upon the blog who don't know me; I actually don't care that much what they think. Strangers who reach me via links in lets say Toril's blog, probably won't read the posts anyway if they get the impression I'm a lunatic. 'Cause this is what it's about. A friend of mine, after reading a few of the most recent posts, made me aware of how it might appear. Crying on the bus? The roller coaster metaphor? Shitty days? And party the next?

I agree with her, actually. If I didn't know myself, I too would have thought I was heading for a mental institution, diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Hands On Research

I'm not sure if I'm feverish or just plain brain dead, but these days I found the silliest things amusing. Like my new phone. It's red and almost, as Toril said: sexy. I wouldn't actually say that about such a prosaic thing as a mobile phone. But this one? It is. Kind of.

When I first read about it long before it was released I new I would like to have one, and I just figured I'd wait for it. But just shortly after, my son's phone was stolen, so I offered him mine and bought a cheap phone for myself. From then and until now I've been pretending I was over this kind of gadgetry and was perfectly happy with my very basic phone. No camera, no extras, no nothing really. I could make calls with it, though. Kind of the idea with a phone, isn't it? And why bother with all that extra stuff? The cameras are usually not that good, and if I want to take pictures I'll use a proper one. Music? Have my 6Gb Mp3 player, no need for that.

Lucky me, my son is a teenager, and a lot of them have some serious problems in differentiating between what's their's and not; so for the second time this year some kleptomaniac couldn't resist the temptation, while my son was playing basketball. Now I could stop pretending, and I ordered the SonyEricsson K610i which arrived today. This is when the fun starts, and the very reason I first noticed it:

It has a blogger function!

With just a few key strokes I can publish to my new mobile blog account, as for now only in old Blogger, but hopefully new Beta Blogger will catch up pretty soon. What I hope even more is that I somehow can find some inspiration in it too, regarding my field of studies. Blogger Mobile could be relative to both "Digital Culture & Digital Media" and "ICT & Learning", I guess. And I DESPERATELY need inspiration.

Have to remind me what I told myself when I first began this journey at the University. I said, that it's not only what I learn there and what stimulates me, but in finding out what's not stimulating I will get a clearer picture of what I want to do. And one thing for sure, I'm too old to be back in elementary school with reading aloud from a book. Pun intended.

What To Do When You Don't Know What To Do

One idea is to dive into something you know very little about, just for the fun of it.

Any of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that I have tried quite a few different layouts, and just recently I stripped it down to a very minimalistic style, with only a picture header as a personal touch. Except for the color choices, they are mine too. But I get very easily bored, and I want to fix the template all the time. Rather stupid, but I found a way to justify it this time. To really reflect the kind of person I am, I thought it would be cool to have a random picture in the header, and I was quite sure I could find something in my JavaScript book. Except for the fact I didn't want to use JavaScript. A Google search for "random picture header" sent me to PhotoMatt, and I immediately started some serious copying&pasting, while also preparing a few pictures for the folder which everything should go in. This is PHP we're talking about, which applies to my opening sentence, i.e. I know very little about it, so when it didn't work I really couldn't figure out why. I suspected it had something to do with Mozilla; I love Mozilla, but sometimes they're just handling things in their own way.

Sure enough, it had to do with how Mozilla handles image caching, and after reading comments on Weblog Tools Collection I found a very useful one from snuf, who directed me to A List Apart. Now why didn't I think of that? Should've remembered how good that site is. Anyway, more copy&paste, and then off with everything to my server, and the result is here. But like one of the comments said; it's not like the users are going to hit the reload button every fifteen seconds, it's more that they get a different picture each time they visit the site. Maybe not all that exciting, but at least I had some fun.

Now I just have to update the photos once in a while. But that's really one of the benefits with PHP compared to JavaScript, as you don't have to alter the code everytime you put new pics in your image folder. Neat. Just like programming should be.

Objects In Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear

I have an ongoing debate with myself about the purpose of this blog. Why, how, when, and questions alike. The conclusion is most of the time that it has no specific purpose, it changes and evolves like I do. In a way it functions as an internal mirror, a place where I can look and see the inside of myself, and not the exterior version. Blogging keeps me sane. Or is it the writing itself?

That leeds me to another issue I have in this debate, whether I really do need to put my inner self out in the open? If it's only the actual writing that is vital, why publish online when a simple, old-fashioned, diary would do? I think there might be something significant here, 'cause I have never been writing a diary in my entire life, could never hold it up even if I tried to. (Last attempt was probably in seventh grade, writing some silly notes about silly boys and silly love. Pretty much like I do now, come to think of it.) What I really would like to look into then, is whether the avarage blogger ever kept an ordinary diary. And people who have been writing diaries from early on, are they now bloggers? Have a feeling they not necessarily are.

So there must be a certain aspect to blogging that makes us do it. Let's go back to the mirror again. Maybe it's an intentional angle to the mirror? Maybe there's something that makes us wanting other people to look into it as well? "Hey, can you see me?"

This is quite confusing for me, 'cause on the one hand I don't want any focus at all, I'm not the type you'd find in the middle of every event. On the other hand I very much like recognition and attention, as least as long as I'm not caught off guard. Perhaps that's one element of blogging that appeals? Every single word can be considered, evaluated, reconsidered, withdrawn, and so on. Right until I'm satisfied and press PUBLISH. And even then there's the EDIT possibility. Like no one ever is going to notice that I changed an "it's" to "her", in a post a originally wrote days, or even weeks ago...

All this make me wish I had another way of expressing myself that wasn't so direct. Or maybe I should just learn to keep my mouth shot? And another question -

Who wins and who loses when you're arguing with yourself? I? We? No one?

Who Else...

...but me, would spend an entire afternoon republishing every singel post in her blog? Well, not everyone, I have only worked my way through 50 of them so far. If I continue at this pace I just might be finished before my exams. And why all this trouble? If anyone hasn't guessed it yet, I'm a controlfreak. (In a sort of complicated, unorganized way.) I simply like systems that work.

And with this new Beta Blogger I can label my posts, and I think that's a nice feature. But the old posts won't go tagging themselves, so I have to do it. Yes, that's right. Have to. All 192 of them.

Beta Blogger

I'm trying out this betaversion of Blogger, and it looks promising, though it also seems like I'll have some fiddling left to do with the template. It turns out the script for the Flickr album isn't wellformed and therefor won't parse. Hate fiddling, but once you've started you'll just have to go on. Until the end. And it must be some reason for this as well, 'cause incidently this fiddling has very much to do with what's in this years curriculum; character and text encoding, SGML, XML, HTML,... What a boring post! Just had to write something to see how it looked. I'll probably delete it tomorrow...

Rebuilding My Life

I'm trying as always to reorganize things so I'll eventually get my life at least resembling a good one. A blog might not have to do so much with that, but here's a little change on the layout anyway. I'll come back later with more, as I don't think it's done as it is. Not my life either.

A Spanish Fox

Hola!
I'm stunned. I can write in Spanish! And I didn't know before. Just kidding, but what I didn't know is that Google has a translation tool, and someone used it to have my page translated. It made me giggle.



So many things I don't know, every day is exciting: what will I learn today?

("time elapsed, about 5 min...")

I'm back after checking out Googles tools, and it turns out that I can write in a lot of languages including Korean and French. Excellent! It's also evident that I never before really have taken any time in exploring Google. Sorry about that, folks! I'm sure I will find many uses for Googles Help Central in times to come. But that's also kind of typical, the most obvious things can take forever to discover, even if they're right in front of your nose.

(Four Things) Meme

Yesterday I was tagged by Angela in this "Four Things Meme". I must confess I didn't know to begin with what a meme is. But that's me, amazingly unknowing at some points. My excuse then is that if I don't know, I do my best to educate myself. Dictionary.com is a good place to start, and here I found a rather short and handy explanation. Further, more substantial reading, was found on Wikipedia. Excellent!

Now that I had regained my belief in not beeing totally unaware and ignorant, I started to trace this meme backwards, to see what I would find. I must say, if this had arrived in it's original form, and without me reading Angelas inspiring ponderings about the online meme-phenomenon I would probably not have been doing anything about it. Because this meme thing is, to quote Bruce Lawson some seven steps back, "just geekspeak for “Chain Letter”", and I don't do them. (Stopped doing chain-letters when a "foolproof" one came around which should have provided me with lots and lots of nice wine. I delivered my bottle personally and went home, eagerly waiting for the followers to execute their part. Needless to say, but no bottles ended up on my doorstep.)

Only two steps back from me I found "The Ramblings Of Linden Langdon", and it's about now I once again realize why I don't read too many blogs on a regular basis. For the same reason I try to stay away from some new TV-shows and Smith's Crisps - They're too good!, I get so easily hooked and then I just have to continue. (reading, watching, eating...) But I think Lindens blog will be added to my daily sitevisits, much thanks to the artistic perspective. Very impressive! (and Langdon senior is a ceramist, what can I say?)

I followed the memetrace even further and 14 steps and only 4 days earlier Michele Finotto in Italy was tagged. A couple of days later he made this statement which I in a way can relate to.

It soon became evident that it would be quite impossible to find the source of the meme, not to mention absolutely pointless, so from here I instead tried to find out how many chose to continue the chain. That turned out, not surprisingly, to be a rather tedious task as well, but I think my conclusion is that not too many can be bothered. So we're kind of back with Angelas thoughts again, because even if we perhaps don't like these kind of memes, we'll still need them around if we're going to elaborate around the actual concept. Trapped once more!

I think I've mentioned it before, but I really don't like lists. I'm always afraid that some misconceptions could be read between the lines, and that might validate the reasoning of "favourites as identity markers", as Angela and Linden suggested. Very much in my own line of thinking, and certainly worthwhile pursuing sometime. Perhaps the fact I'm not going to write a list of likes and dislikes, is telling just as much about my personality and identity as if I had?

Somewhere else in the line I followed, I found this handsome young man. He seemed to be quite enthusiastic about this meme, but it might have to do with his young age, in time he will most likely be as cynical as the rest of us... He's even sticking to the "rules"! I'm not! Another trait of mine, beeing unruly (but yet conscientious - what a contradiction).

So my deepest apologies, Angela, for not following through, but hopefully it wasn't a total waste of time. I enjoyed it, even if this particular track stops here. Perhaps I'm just too lazy?

The Gloomy Days Are Over

It looks promising, this new year has started out real nice. So if I’m in a good mood, what am I supposed to write about then? Have no idea, but since this isn’t a job and I don’t get paid for writing here, my postings might appear more sparsely. And besides, when I started to write this blog, a friend of mine asked: Why? and that is actually a very good question. Why do I put my thoughts and frustrations out here in the open? In the beginning I didn’t have any choice, since it was part of a course, but later on I simply regarded it as a safety valve, letting steam out when the tension built up.

And now I’ve found out that I love to write. I always have actually, I just didn’t do it for nearly twenty years. But doing it so publicly as in a blog, has recently made me feel a bit vulnerable. On an abstract level and realated to my field of study it’s kind of interesting, but as a private person I’m not so sure anymore. How do I know that I'm not misunderstood or misinterpreted? Who am I in the blogospere? Is it my real me or is it fiction? I believe the questions are innumerable. Also I have personally witnessed what people with bad intentions can do to someone that is trusting and open, so If I am going to continue this I have to be more careful with the content, I think.

Another thing is that over these past three years so much has happened to me and I have evolved as a person, hopefully and probably for the better. With that I have gained a new confidence, and I’m not so confused these days. In my case I think a lot of my postings have come to life in a state of utter distress or total bewilderment. (I hope it doesn’t sound like I mean the rest of the blogging-world consists of flaky and unsecure nuerotics! There are a lot of intelligent, sane bloggers around. None mentioned, none forgotten...) What I’m trying to say is that I’m not that desperate for affirmation any longer, I have developed a more true sense of my identity and value now. Thanks for that, my friends, you know who you are.

I’m pretty sure there still will be tears, that’s part of life, but I have made a few decisions now and that feels good. Being more at ease with the situation I think I can look forward to a much better year than the last one, and my new motto is: easy does it.

In the meantime: read a book!