5 posts tagged “internet”

Come this December 15 I’ll have been online journaling/blogging for 10 years.  Not all here, of course, and what a circuitous journey it’s been: started on Diaryland, moved to Diary-X, moved again to Typepad (and lost all my Diary-X archives when it later went kaput) and then finally to Vox.  Before I made the first Diaryland entry I practice-blogged for a few months but since those entries never saw the light of day we won’t consider that an anniversary of any sort.*  December is the big one.  I can’t believe I’ve been doing this a decade now, and steadily too.  (Again, just not here.)

Ten years means a lot of words to have spilled, especially since when in the beginning my entries were routinely between 2k and 3500 words.  My biggest source of stress - apart from wondering if what I publish will really piss off people I know (or, equally, people I don’t and never will) - is keeping track of what I’ve said.  I like it when other bloggers know what they've already written and generally don't repeat themselves too much because nothing turns me off faster than a broken record.

Until this year I’ve had to rely on my own increasingly-faulty memory to promote consistency and avoid repetition, with varying degrees of success.  Going into 2009 I determined this would be The Year Of Getting My Shit Together regarding all my written product, and yes, it really is taking a full year.

First part of the project was indexing every OLJ/blog entry I’ve ever written (even those early practice runs).  In the process I found the bulk of my Diary-X archives were still available through the Wayback Machine, which was a huge bonus.  But it still took a lot of time and effort and when it was done I saw why I’d put it off for so long: because, as is so often true elsewhere, an index only scratches the surface of a document.

So in the last month I've moved on to the next stage: combing through each back-entry and extracting any section, paragraph or even sentence that strikes me as even remotely important.  Then dumping it all into a freeware program called Evernote, which is a handy little database for a life’s loose ends.  Been paying special attention to stories and/or memories, because when you’re pushing 50 you begin to wonder exactly what all these piled-up years so far have consisted of and it’s quite comforting to have some sort of answer with a quick keyword search.  It’s a huge project, and right now I’m only approaching the beginning of the Typepad-era entries.  This is a mixed blessing because though I started on Typepad in early 2004, meaning I’ve got well over halfway still to go chronologically, that was also when I first imposed a word-count of 700-900/entry.  Plus Typepad is already searchable.  I’m just about to hit the downhill slope, I think.

Though when I finish sectioning the last entry and upload the last piece to Evernote I still won’t be finished.  After that comes the refinement process: adding tags and supplementary notes, naming names and fleshing out references that I didn’t want visible on the internet, etc.  For years I’ve been frustrated that all of my history has been locked inside my head and I’ll lose it before I have a chance to make a proper dump.  I know I’m going to lose a significant chunk of it anyway but this is the best way I’ve found yet to make sure I have even a partial backup.  And as it stands I suspect I now know what I’m to be spending a good part of 2010 doing too.

*Except for the one I’m belatedly publishing here when I finish this.  See the next entry.

Not at all happy with eMusic today, as I discovered that starting next month they're going to cut my download allowance in half.  Or double the price, whichever suits you better.  I've been using eMusic off and on since 2003 and a member continuously since early 2005 and I think this is a pretty shitty reward for my loyalty.

I do understand the soundness of this repricing as a business move, as eMusic is finally deploying itself to move out of 3rd place behind iTunes and Amazon.  To this end it's finally doing business with major labels (specifically Sony) and promises that formerly out-of-reach artists like Springsteen and the Clash and Beyonce will soon be available.  Now, Ms. Knowles I give not a fig for and I already have everything I want by The Boss and the Four Horsemen, so I can't say I think I stand to benefit much by this development.  But I'm glad that my scrappy little eMusic is ready to play with the big kids, and they're going to be getting a whole lot of new customers who generally don't give a fig for the Cold War Kids or Six Degrees Records while still appreciating the low impact on their bank account.

I just wish there was some sort of grandfathering plan for long-time members, which would IMO be truly in the indie spirit eMusic's operated under until now.  But no: instead of the 65 downloads/month I've been getting for $15 - cheap! - I'm only to get 37.  (Not even 38 - fuckers wouldn't even eat half a free download!  Argh.)   Which comes out to something like $.43 apiece and compared to the big kids is still cheap, but am I mollified?  Not by this.

Neither by eMusic's version of easement, which is promising a one-time bonus pack of 25 downloads sometime in August.  Almost an insult when I remember it was a no-limit service back when I first signed up.

OTOH, they are instituting album pricing.  Finally.  No album will be charged for more than 12 downloads, no matter how many tracks are involved.  This helps - just a little.

All this aside, I'm sticking with eMusic for the immediate future.  Not just for the price, but because the selection is enormous and as a service it's the best way I've found yet to discover stuff I'd never hear of otherwise.  And even with the changes I still think they've got a better business model than their competitors.

For now, anyway.  Because loyalty is such a fickle thing when it goes unrewarded for too long.

P.S. I know that as news this price increase is almost a month old but I just found out about it two days ago, and rather circuitously at that.  eMusic certainly didn't go out of its way to inform me.  Which is another reason I'm not at all happy with it.

In a fit of “I’ll show them who’s an antique”-ness Monday I signed up for Facebook and now am, predictably, already feeling overwhelmed.  Shee-sus.  If I wanted to find Carl who I used to terrorize on the 7th grade playground, he’s there.  The young woman to whom I lost my virginity?  She’s there, photos of her kid and all.  Charlie, my buddy from the Westtown swim team?  There. Suzy who played rhythm guitar in my last band at Bard?  Yep.  Cindi who I had such an immense crush on junior year?  All righty then, let’s not forget her.  I heard Cindi liked blackberry brandy so I stashed a pint in my room just in case she hypothetically ever dropped by.  Even then I’d never have touched the stuff myself, ick, but seeing her picture on FB reminds me exactly why I kept that bottle long past any crush’s reasonable expiration date.  Girlfriend looks hot for her 40s.

And so on.

Now, I already know the internet has its wonders.  Over the years it’s helped me keep track of, among others, my old Bard pals Nayland Blake and George Hunka who both have their own established web presence and that in itself seemed wondrous enough.  But shit – now by pushing a few buttons on the browser I can legitimately call them friends again.  So much for a low-stim, mellow beginning to 2009.

Every time I talk at length to Michael he wonders whatever happened to a certain old girlfriend who came about three or four before Suzanne. Well, he ought to join Facebook too because she’s sure as hell there.  No doubt he will some day.  The fact that I finally succumbed pretty accurately predicts the fate of even a computer-phobe like him.

I didn’t find out until this morning that progressive blogger Steve Gilliard, Mr. "We Fight Back" himself, died over the weekend.  It’s a huge blow.  Not entirely a surprise – his partner Jen had been giving updates on his condition since he was admitted to the hospital in March and when even she said “I don’t know if he’s going to make it” that pretty much did it for me – but that doesn’t lessen the impact.  There’s been no single writer I’ve looked forward to reading as much, day after day, since I discovered him over three years ago. I’ve been missing him badly these last three months but I still hoped for whatever miracle it would take to permit his return.

Shit.

Steve put a lot of thought into what he wrote.  Once I learned to overlook the poor spelling and punctuation I understood that there was no mind quite like his working my side of the blogosphere, and no one who could explain things with anywhere near his cogency.  That’s what I treasured him for the most – he explained things to me in a way I could understand, invoking his vast knowledge of military history, his experience in race relations, and his common sense that still seems so basic and broad-reaching you wonder that so few other people have anything like it, or at least, employ it regularly online.  I’m not the most savvy person politically and my eyes glaze over when the wonks get about 3 sentences in, but I almost never had any trouble understanding what Steve was saying.

He could talk about a lot of things knowledgably, and he did.  Right now my biggest fear is that all his archives will disappear next month.  I don't know about anyone else but there's a lot of stuff there I want to be able to go back and pick over whenever I need to for years to come.

He was sometimes wrong, sure.  He put a lot of predictions out there and some of them were spectacularly off-base; I remember in particular how he said the 2004 election would go to Kerry because all the October polls were based on people with land-lines and missing the cell-phone (as in, young) voters.  We’re still waiting to see if his deepest-held conviction that Bush will not finish out his term holds any water.  Most by now seem to have given up on that.  I won’t.  It’s the least I can do in Steve’s memory.

Many tributes the last few days link to favorite posts by him, especially his predictions on the ending of our Iraq involvement and its foreseen similarities to a place called Chosin.  But the one I remember the most – besides all the endless discussions of food – is one he posted in January called “Is Bush a Sociopath?”  He didn’t write it but I don’t care; I would never have seen it otherwise.  Not too many people are willing to promote a discussion of exactly how badly damaged our president is emotionally and how that’s now playing out on an international basis.  I admired, and admire, Steve a lot for jumping into that one with both feet. He was a brave guy who died much too soon.

I feel like I’ve lost a friend, even if I knew we’d never meet.

Congratulations to Gina, Adam, and the rest on the Annual Weblog Awards win last night!  I wish there was a Category for "Someone Should Have Started This Site Five Years Ago" so they could have won that one too.  Lifehacker has certainly made helped improve my own life-navigation just in the year since I discovered it.

I don't know whether I'd be able to say the same about the winner for best European blog but with a name like that who really cares if it's useful.