Sunday, February 15, 2004
Where, oh where, dites-le-moi, je vous en prie, to begin my story?
"Who I am"
followed by
"How I got myself into this situation" ?
or vice-versa?
No, definitely in that order. Although vice-versa would make more sense, in this antipodean blog-reading format. What do I mean by that?
Blogger is an ingenious tool for web-journal hosting (note my duly-placed link in that sycophantic statement). I have been keeping a journal for something like fourteen years -- i.e. a real, honest-to-goodness, handwritten journal. In my adolescent assurance that whoever was reading my journal, decades or centuries in the future, would want to know the complete story, I began each volume with a request to the reader not to read it until he or she had completed all the previous ones. The volumes were numbered for easy reference. Alas, I finally gave up on those pleas for contextuality in the preface of something around #15.
I have been mildly computer-literate since I was a wee lad, first cutting my teeth on a TI-99/4A and then upgrading, seriously, to a used ITT Xtra XP to learn all about DOS and IBM compatibility while in high school. College days saw my entrance into the world of Unix and internet. I used to be on a discussion list named Causerie, based in Canada, on which francophones and students of French alike from various continents would discuss "de tout et de rien". And e-mail has been my friend ever since.
So I'm no slouch at journal-keeping nor at use of the internet to keep in touch with a contingency of readers. And I don't know when I first heard of the idea of online journals -- though with some scraping of the memory cells it seems like it was around the same time I heard of webcams sitting in persons' apartments and broadcasting their lives to the public, Jennicam being the infamous, albeit pioneering example. So that puts the date at early 1998. And though both technologies seemed pretty unappealing at the time, the weblog has certainly proved that it is far more useful than I will ever be, and shown me to what degree I am out of it (since I discovered the genre only a few months ago).
Having said that I must return to my point, which is that there is one drawback of the Blog format which I find unsettling. The postings (or "posts" for you cavalier, progressivist users of the English language) are published in reverse chronological order.
That means that everything I have just typed will probably never be read after the next couple of weeks, if it is ever read at all. That's why I did not put much care into its writing.
It also means that if I were to provide some background information about myself, right here and now, you (gentle reader) may never be able to make sense of later postings, without rummaging through the archives. Which I am SO CERTAIN you will do, since I will kindly ask you not to read the new postings without having read the old ones. Yeah, right...
To be continued... (which means, you've have a better chance at seeing the continuation than ever seeing this).
"Who I am"
followed by
"How I got myself into this situation" ?
or vice-versa?
No, definitely in that order. Although vice-versa would make more sense, in this antipodean blog-reading format. What do I mean by that?
Blogger is an ingenious tool for web-journal hosting (note my duly-placed link in that sycophantic statement). I have been keeping a journal for something like fourteen years -- i.e. a real, honest-to-goodness, handwritten journal. In my adolescent assurance that whoever was reading my journal, decades or centuries in the future, would want to know the complete story, I began each volume with a request to the reader not to read it until he or she had completed all the previous ones. The volumes were numbered for easy reference. Alas, I finally gave up on those pleas for contextuality in the preface of something around #15.
I have been mildly computer-literate since I was a wee lad, first cutting my teeth on a TI-99/4A and then upgrading, seriously, to a used ITT Xtra XP to learn all about DOS and IBM compatibility while in high school. College days saw my entrance into the world of Unix and internet. I used to be on a discussion list named Causerie, based in Canada, on which francophones and students of French alike from various continents would discuss "de tout et de rien". And e-mail has been my friend ever since.
So I'm no slouch at journal-keeping nor at use of the internet to keep in touch with a contingency of readers. And I don't know when I first heard of the idea of online journals -- though with some scraping of the memory cells it seems like it was around the same time I heard of webcams sitting in persons' apartments and broadcasting their lives to the public, Jennicam being the infamous, albeit pioneering example. So that puts the date at early 1998. And though both technologies seemed pretty unappealing at the time, the weblog has certainly proved that it is far more useful than I will ever be, and shown me to what degree I am out of it (since I discovered the genre only a few months ago).
Having said that I must return to my point, which is that there is one drawback of the Blog format which I find unsettling. The postings (or "posts" for you cavalier, progressivist users of the English language) are published in reverse chronological order.
That means that everything I have just typed will probably never be read after the next couple of weeks, if it is ever read at all. That's why I did not put much care into its writing.
It also means that if I were to provide some background information about myself, right here and now, you (gentle reader) may never be able to make sense of later postings, without rummaging through the archives. Which I am SO CERTAIN you will do, since I will kindly ask you not to read the new postings without having read the old ones. Yeah, right...
To be continued... (which means, you've have a better chance at seeing the continuation than ever seeing this).
Pinḥas Ivri 18:13