Hibernation

I saw an article on Slashdot about a trojan being posted to blogger blogs from spam bots using the blogger post by email function. I thought it would be a good idea to make sure that my post by email was not turned on lest I become part of the problem. It was on, but it's off now.

While I was here I decided to lock this down against any other malicious use as much as possible. I have turned on every form of comment moderation, image verification etc. that I can and I will begin turning off comments on all my old posts. I have transferred everything to my new site at davidjmiller.org which has been retitled "Pursuit of Liberty" and which I have been using longer than I ever used this blog.

Now I just wish that blogger had a function to turn off all comments on posts older than {specify timeframe}.

Going Home

I have finally made the move back to my own domain for my blog. This blog will remain at least as long as it takes to import everything from the new blogger to Wordpress. I have no idea how long it will be before that is possible so this may stay for a while. However, I will not be posting here anymore. Recovering Technophile now resides at www.davidjmiller.org.

For any who use a feed reader without visiting my site, here is the new feed.

Holidays

I'm guessing that it will be normal for me to post less often during the holidays. Hopefully 10 day breaks will not be normal.

Besides the obvious Christmas festivities and work, I have been doing very good with my running until this week. Sometime on Christmas day my right ankle began to hurt. I went running on the 26th and, although running was fine, I noticed that my ankle got worse. My Achilles tendon began to swell some so I have been staying off it for the last few days. I don't know how it happened, but I have to assume that it is related to the running. Hopefully resting it this week will allow me to get back to training sooner than if I pushed harder. I'm going to give it a try with a short run tomorrow.

I'm still trying to find the balance of what I write about here. I was doing lots of candidate endorsements before the break, but I want a better balance. I have found that there are two new candidates who have filed with the FEC since I last wrote. I guess I had better get caught up again because it looks like we are likely to have even more in the coming weeks.

Last night I got a call from my Grandpa and we got to catch up. I had not talked to him for a few months as he has been busy with his new wife trying to keep up with their combined 48 grandchildren. I don't know about her grandchildren, but I realized that of his 24 grandchildren half of them were married so we're all getting spread out a bit.

I can only imagine how busy it would get trying to keep up with 48 grandchildren. Anyway, it was nice to catch up with him, that's why I decided to do a little catching up here.

Looking Forward

I just passed 100 posts to this blog in just over 3 months since I started it. It was fun to see that. Despite that milestone I still feel like I am developing a feel for where this blog will go.

I have noticed that I enjoy writing politically oriented content when I find news of a political nature. Maybe that is because I am interested in a wide range of political topics and in political participation in general. With the official announcement today that Tom Vilsack would seek the Democratic presidential nomination for 2008, I have decided on one thing I will be doing with this blog in the future. I have decided that, for each person who announces their candidacy officially, I will research the candidate and make an endorsement for every candidate who I feel would make a good president. These endorsements will not indicate who I will be voting for (that has not been decided yet) but will indicate who I think deserves votes.

I will do this for any candidate who is running (not those who look like they will run) from any party so long as my research indicates that they could be a good president. In other words, don't expect to hear anything about the likes of General Zod.

Look for my endorsement, or anti-endorsement if I think they would not be a good president, on any candidate I hear about within a week of when I learn of their official candidacy. If you hear about a candidate that I have not yet listed please let me know.

Generalizing

Start of Series

Now if I might generalize from my experience. . .

I had the opportunity, during the short time while I was working towards a PhD, to help teach a class, and more importantly to construct a blogging component for that class. In creating that component I faced the challenge of giving structure, for the purpose of making it possible to grade the assignment, to an activity which is best left unstructured. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, while blogging can benefit from structure - such as regular posting or a consistent topic or objective - it does not benefit from structure which is mandated by anyone other than the writer(s).

From what I have seen, the structure should be discovered during the early stages of creating the blog. The assignment I gave was first, one of three options for the students; second, required a minimum number of posts (20 if I remember correctly); third, had a minimum duration (8 weeks with at least two posts in each week out of a 12 week semester); and fourth, had to have an educational purpose in keeping with the course. I hoped this gave enough structure for the purposes of grading, was comparably rigorous to the other options, and was flexible enough to allow those who chose this option to find their own blogging rhythm.

As I observed the blogs of the students who opted for this assignment I noticed as they went through the growing pains of finding things to write about, discovered their voice, and explored their chosen educational purpose. I also saw that their thinking (as displayed in their posts) changed to be less inwardly focused and more focused on building on the thoughts expressed by others. That is one of the benefits of blogging. Over time the focus changes from a desire to create from the single source of the authors mind, to building on the work of other sources with similar topics.

What is Blogging?

Start of Series

In order to substantiate my claim of what benefits blogging provides for me, I think it is important to define what I mean by when I talk about blogging.

I have already indicated that blogging is more than simply posting thoughts here. Part of blogging, for me, is reading other blogs and commenting on things that other people are posting. I read a wide range of blogs, ranging from personal journals, to political commentary across the political spectrum. My most important criteria for choosing blogs to follow is that they must be generally thoughtful. In other words, I don't follow blogs which consist of nothing but rants on some subject. Nor do I follow blogs that have an extreme agenda. Some might have a purpose, or a focus, but they do not spout the "Doctrine of Open Source Software" (or any other cause) with their eyes shut to the limitations of their professed agenda.

Although I have less control over this aspect, I also find it very useful to receive comments on the things that I post. This helps to refine my thinking and sometimes to expose me to a new point of view. This was driven home to me recently as I received comments from a few people out of the blue. I have no idea how they found my blog, but they left comments which provoked my thinking.

Because I no longer make use of trackback in my blogging, I rarely make comments on my blog with thoughts I have had from things that other people have posted. This means that I have to get my material from other sources. Those other sources are my own experience and current events. A lack of current events (at least, current events I wanted to comment about) is what led me to start thinking about this current series. As i faced days where I felt there was little to say I began to consider - should I force myself to say something, or should I just let the day slide?

So that is how I define blogging, it is a process of ingesting information, processing that information, and then constraining my thoughts to the confines of written language where I invite others to critique what I have posted.

Benefits of Blogging

Start of Series

When I started blogging, I noticed that there were a lot of people blogging about blogging, especially in the circle of educational bloggers. Very soon I began to dislike those types of postings. This leaves readers here to wonder - why am I doing the same thing now?

In the past few months of blogging, and especially the last two weeks, I have had times where I was not sure what I wanted to post, but I wanted to post. That left me asking what it was I was trying to accomplish by blogging.

The answer to that question was that I wanted the benefits of blogging which, according to my definition of blogging, are an increased capacity for thinking and communicating. That may sound like a very generous description of the benefits, but I believe it is true for the type of blogging that I try to do.

Why Blog?

This is going to be short, and almost without substance, but my history of blogging comes from a background of education where the question has been asked, but never completely answered, what is the benefit of blogging?

I can only answer that question in regard to my personal experience. Even with that limited scope it will probably take more than one post to answer, so expect a series of posts trying to answer the question, "What is the benefit of blogging, from an educational perspective?" I expect to write about why I blog, how I blog, and what benefits I have seen. I might even throw in a post about how my experience might be generalized for other people. I might even take the time to define what I mean when I talk about blogging (hint: it's more than just posting things here).

Making a Change

I have been thinking about getting rid of comment moderation. Over the last few months the number of comments has grown, as I had hoped, but thankfully there has been no comment spam. For that reason I am getting rid of comment spam so that comments will be immediately available when they are posted. I can still delete spam comments if they come, but unless the get bad I will leave comment moderation off. No more waiting until I get time to approve and publish your comments.

Code for Old Blog Tools

I thought I would add the html code from some blog elements that I am putting away but which I may want to use again.

Here is the html code for the election projections:

<a href="http://www.electoral-vote.com/"><img alt="Click for www.electoral-vote.com" src="http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2006/Icons/ev-small.png" border="0" height="72" width="72" /> <img alt="Click for www.electoral-vote.com" src="http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2006/Icons/ev-small-house.png" border="0" height="72" width="72" /></a>

Blogging or Thinking

I made a little discovery yesterday about the pattern of when I post to my blog and when I don't. It comes down to the "Time Matrix" discussed in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey. The time matrix suggests that all activities and concerns can be broken down into four quadrants. Quadrants one and two are labeled "important" while quadrants three and four are labeled "unimportant" Quadrants one and three are labeled "urgent" while two and four are "not urgent." The idea is that we should spend out time in quadrants one and two instead of the natural tendency to focus on quadrants one and three. Quadrant three "urgent/unimportant" is full of things that grab your attention which can be ignored, like a ringing telephone. Quadrant three is the reason we invent things like caller-id.

When I am busy thinking about things in quadrant one I tend to miss writing in my blog. I get buried in thinking about the problem at hand and do not take the time to relax and filter my thoughts through the lens of language. I missed a week when I thought I was going to be getting a very nice job because I did not want to write about the company and then have nothing come of it. I missed this weekend because I was thinking about how to address the conundrum of responding to a job offer while waiting on a second possible offer. Ideally I would be able to get both offers and make a decision. So far I have been stuck with one offer and the second employer has been delayed by some vague internal emergencies. I solved that by coming to an agreement with the first employer. We set a date for me to make a decision with or without the second offer.

So there it is. When I am not blogging, it is probably because I am stuck in quadrant one.

Political Polling

I have begun to wonder how people view presidential hopefuls before the heavy campaigning gets underway. To that end I have created a poll on my blog where people can vote for those people who have been identified as potential candidates for whom they would be willing to vote.

You can vote as often as you would like - I believe that the poll will only allow a person to vote once every two weeks.

I was only allowed to include 20 options in the poll I created so I included 10 of the most prominent republican hopefuls and 10 of the most prominent democratic hopefuls. I have listed all of them alphabetically. I have made no indication of their party affiliation, although some of them will be obvious.

There were another 11 potential candidates that I could have included. If I notice candidate who are consistently failing to get noticed in the poll I may drop them and add some of these other candidates that I could not include.

What I had wanted initially was a ranking system similar to the way college football teams are ranked where voters would rank the various candidates and their rankings would be weighted to give an overall ranking. If anyone has an idea of how I could do that I would love to hear about it.

I am looking to have this circulated as widely as possible so feel free to let friends of all political persuasions know about this poll. Also I would appreciate if anyone has any ideas of how else I can make this poll known to a wider audience.

UPDATE: I have decided to make create a separate page for the poll so that it is not necessary to scroll to see it. It will still be included on the sidebar here, but it can also be found at http://mr.david.miller.googlepages.com/poll.html If anyone does choose to share the poll with their friends, that page is where they should probably point.

Reprise

I have been thinking about the comments I got from my personality posts I have to admit that I did not understand at first what Jason meant when he said:

"The trick, for me at least, is to find reasons to love whatever job you have. I've enjoyed forklift operating, fruit picking, yard work, construction, mail sorting and inventory control. None were exciting, none were interesting, and none made any real difference in the world. But I learned to love the work"

My initial reaction was to disagree with the idea that few people get to make a difference through their employment. After stewing on the comments I had received, I found the flaw in my thinking. I had been wanting to have meaning in every aspect of my life. I wanted to have meaning in my work, my family, my religion, my community, and any hobbies I might choose. When I said I have no personality it is because I had allowed those parts of my life that were not fraught with meaning to sap the meaning from the other areas of my life. I had abandoned hobbies unnecessarily and shut my eyes to other meaningful aspects of my life.

With renewed perspective I now recognize that I need to have meaning to my life as a whole and allow that purpose and drive, those goals that I am pursuing, to invigorate me and infuse meaning into the more mundane things which are necessary whether or not I find intrinsic value in them. That is what I understand Jason to have meant when he said he learned to love the work he had rather than moaning that he was not doing the work he might have chosen for its own value.

Moving On

I'm getting tired of dwelling on being unsatisfied with my life. I'm going to make an effort to move on to other topics. Either they will be happier topics related to my life or else I will write about things that are outside of my life, like the fact that I found an interview discussing torture that aired on on NPR's Talk of the Nation two days after I had posted on the subject.

After listening to that show today I realized that we must continue to address this issue until we get this administration to change their policy on torture to a policy that condemns torture outright. I hope that more people will take an absolute position similar to the one expressed by Ariel Dorfman (from the interview) and make it publicly known that we do not condone any torture as Americans.

Personality

I was sitting - nowhere near the computer - and suddenly I was struck with a thought. It started as a recognition that the best blogs I read have an established personality. Concurrent with that thought was the admission that even when I had established blogs with regular readers my blogs had no personality. I considered this for a moment and then realized why this was the case. In a clear instant I realized that I have no personality.

It is not only my writing that suffers from that absence of personality. Who would have thought that you could have idiosyncrasies without any attending personality. That explains why my life is so flat. The only semblance of color in my life is a direct result of my family - I have no character to lend my own mark on the people and the world around me.

I wonder if there are any psychologists out there studying this phenomenon.

More on Journals

My wife has been going through old emails etc in an effort to construct her journal for the past few years. As she has been doing that, I have been going through old blog posts and seeing a little bit of my history for the last two years. The process has given me new perspective on the question of the intersection of blogs and journals.

Because of her efforts I recognize that journals have as much variety about them as I have long known that blogs have. My current position is that I will be blogging without regard to how it might serve as a journal. I can always go through later and decide about including any of my posts in a separate journal.

7 Minute Lull

Most people have heard of the 7 minute lull. It is the idea that conversations tend to have a lull in them at regular intervals (theoretically 7 minutes). I have come to the conclusion that blogging has a similar phenomenon. This is based not only on my own blogging, but the blogging of many other bloggers I have read over the years. Everybody takes breaks from posting occasionally.

After 12 days of posting every day I discovered that I had not posted for two days in a row. That doesn't worry me, but it got me thinking about the phenomenon. I have ready many times about the large number of blogs that get started and then die in their infancy. This is why. Many people, once they hit that first lull, never get back to blogging. The experiment ends and their voice goes silent.

I will not argue that everyone should get past that first lull, I know that blogging does not suit all people, but it is interesting to see the pattern. I suspect that most blogs that die do so on the first lull. Put another way, most blogs that survive the first lull will survive long term.

Blog, Journal, or Both

I am not new to blogging, but in some ways I am blogging from a new angle. On previous blogs I was posting enough to maintain three blogs and often posted multiple times each day. Since I have started this blog, I have managed to post every day so far. Last night I began to ask myself, "What do I want for this blog? Do I want to commit to posting every day?"

I like posting every day, and I hope to continue that, but I'm not sure how strong the commitment is at this point.

For me, there are a variety of purposes that a blog can serve. I have seen them used as a means of keeping in touch with distant friends and relatives. I have seen them used as journals as much as any locked diary. I have seen them used as a creative outlet to practice writing. I have seen them used as an outlet to push an ideological agenda. I have seen them used as a forum for publishing ideas and getting feedback from professional colleagues. The question I am asking myself is, what purpose do I want this blog to fill?

I know I want it as a way of communicating my thoughts and perspectives so that other people can see what I think and what I think about. I have a desire to keep a consistent journal, but do I want it in this blog, a private blog, or something entirely unlike a blog? I don't know quite yet. It is easy to forget at first (before anyone discovers your blog) that information in blogs is generally available to the public. That is not really suitable for some types of journals. I guess my answer would be easier if I was sure about what type of journal I want to keep.

Why air this pointless monologue on the front page? Because, what little I am sure of in my blogging intentions, this fits. It is what I am thinking and I have no reason to keep it private, even if my public here can be counted on my thumbs - and even if my public were to grow in the future.

Linking to Newpapers

For today's edition I thought I would share a tool I found back with my previous blogs. It is most useful for those who like to blog their reactions to news items. I used to link to New York Times articles and that would become a problem once those articles left the one week timeframe and were no longer accessible for free. I was not the first to see this problem because someone else made a tool which generates special links to articles in the New York Times which are freely accessible in perpetuity. (They do this with the permission of the people at the New York Times so there is not question regarding the legality of the tool or the practice.)

I don't know how many other major newspapers pose this challenge for news bloggers nor if any of them also have such tools, but this is a great tool for anyone who does that kind of blogging and likes nytimes.com as a news source.

I was reminded of this tool when I linked to an NPR story yesterday. I don't know how much I will need it since before I was often commenting on Op/Ed pieces which are mostly only Times Select (paid service) now. Since I don't pay for that access I may not use the tool much, but hopefully it can be useful for other people.

Back on the Scene

It's good to be back in the blogging scene. That may sound strange for a first post, but this is my fifth blog. The first two were little more than experiements. I then began publishing three more - representing different aspects of my life. That was back when I was an unabashed technophile.

Things have changed since I was last blogging. I no longer thrill when I am surfing the web and trying new gadgets. I have settled down to a point where I am finding much more of my joy in more pedestrian pursuits such as gardening, dutch oven cooking, and camping with my family.

None of that is reason enough to dump my previous blogs. They were good. I had more readers than I would have expected. Occationally there were some very stimulating conversations about the topics of interest to me. All of that I would have liked to keep, but my hosting provider changed policies and I was no longer able to get hosting to satisfy me for my domain. My domain is now parked, and I have not yet decided if I will keep it, or give it up.

I have gone for months wishing that I could share some of my new thoughts on a blog, but I did not want to return to blogger after seeing how nice some of the other blogging platforms are. I had moved on to Wordpress, b2Evolution, and even Drupal. All of them offered options more advanced than blogger - and I am something of a control freak when it comes to my online persona. Then today I learned about the new Blogger beta and discovered that the folks at Google had helped Blogger to narrow the gap between themselves and other blogging software. Having given up on getting my own site up and running anytime soon, it sounded like just what I was looking for. Free, better than before, and in line with my less demanding requirements for a blog.

So here I am, back on the scene. While my outlook on technology has morphed somewhat, I hope to explore how technology can be really useful in our lives (especially mine) and also to highlight where the technologies of yesterday may actually be superior to their modern counterparts. Honestly I don't think that the less advanced technology will prove superior very often, but I do think that some less modern perspectives could prove enlightening in the world of the Information Age.