Month: January 2007

It’s your thing, do what you wanna do

I started writing this as a comment on Matt’s dos and don’ts for webloggers, but I think this is a better place for it.

The rules Matt writes about apparently (lol) work for his blog and personality and reading habits. However, as regarded long-time blogger Rebecca Blood writes in her essay on the history of weblogs, The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a […] particular mixture of links, commentary, and personal observation unique to each individual site [which] has always given each weblog its distinctive voice and personality.

My particular mixture is my own, but it’s influenced by what, and how, I read. On my blogroll are a lot of blogs that are little more than the occasional essay interspersed into an extended link dump, many others that are comprised of short commentaries on a link or two, and a few that are basically personal journals. And when I do one of my occasional prunings, those are among the first to go. The ones that I keep are made up of a mixture of different topics, lengths and styles. I have no idea or care about the frequency at which the writers post, because I’m subscribed to a large enough number of them that there’s always something new and interesting for me to read.

I joke from time to time about my “audience of none”, but it’s because that’s all I expect. Just because I write something doesn’t mean people are forced to read it, whether it’s at work—where I’d been blogging, unregarded and mostly unnoticed, for four and a half years before others started last month—or on my own site. If people find some value (whatever that may be) in what I write, when I write it, they’ll read it and maybe even come back; if they don’t, they won’t.

So here’s my own personal list of blogging dos and don’ts:

  • Do blog when you feel like it. Don’t write because someone expects you to.
  • Do write about what you want to, the way you want to. Don’t squelch your own style.
  • Don’t expect an audience. Do appreciate an audience if, and while, you have one.
  • Do come up with your own rules. Or don’t; it’s your blog, you can do with it as you please.

Where’s my frakking Rogers HD?

I’ve also always been fascinated by the inability of businesses to take my money. They spend millions marketing to me, then totally fumble when I want to close the deal.

It sure does. For more than a month and a half—since December 1, in fact—I’ve been trying to get Rogers Cable to pony up on their end of a deal that my condo board arranged. It should be so simple: I work for a company that deals almost entirely with the exact settop boxes that Rogers provides, and even if I didn’t I’m more than capable of installing it. I’ve placed seven phone calls to three different service representatives trying to get a box. I’ve told the same reps repeatedly that I don’t need a tech to come out to install a box (i.e. plug it in), and that the notice of service from Rogers specifically stated that they’d be willing to courier a box to me if that’s my preference, but they insist that installation by one of their techs is necessary, and that a technician will get back to me that afternoon or the next day to schedule an appointment, and that it doesn’t usually take them this long.

Doesn’t that bug you?

Nope. I’m way past bugged. I’m ready to go to the condo board to see if I can’t get Rogers cited for breach of contract, or something to that effect. Think that’ll get their attention?

Newspaper puzzles (10 letters)

The surest sign that a person has a large ego is that he does the crossword in pen.

I’ve done the crossword in the local newspaper on a regular basis for years, but I’ve found that I have to keep making it harder on myself in order to keep enjoying it. Initially it was as simple as not crossing off the clues I’d finished, but that’s no longer enough of a challenge; I’ve moved on to things like only filling in puzzles based on the “across” clues and doing them in spirals from the outside to the middle. Yet even with the extra level of difficulty, it’s a rare occurrence to take more than my seven-minute morning break to finish one off.

The most recent variations are two sides of the same coin: solving crosswords while driving (with someone else reading clues and filling in the puzzle—I may be crazy, but I ain’t stupid!) and solving them in my head, without filling in any of the squares. The experience of the former is sort of like playing a trivia game, except you get a bit of a sense of what sections of the puzzle look like and can use that to come up with answers. The latter is something I realized I could do while watching coworkers fill in puzzles; it’s become sort of a parlour trick at the office.

Lest this entry appear overly boastful—and with a quote like that at the top, how couldn’t it?—I freely admit that the Newsday crosswords are really pretty easy once you’ve gotten the hang of them. I haven’t gotten anywhere near this point on the New York Times weekend puzzle! But my experience does make me wonder if the reported benefits of this sort of activity start to tail off as the perceived difficulty does.

Not clowning around

One of the great things about going to smaller events—club concerts, fringe theatre, and the like—is the chance to actually meet and talk with the people you’ve just seen perform. At last summer’s London Fringe Theatre Festival I had the opportunity to do just that with Rachelle Fordyce, an actor from Winnipeg who performed a clever, surreal mythologically-based play called netherwhere : etherwhen. Since then I’ve been reading her weblog about being in and around the Canadian theatre scene.

She’s currently in Toronto attending a Clown Through Mask Workshop, which has given rise to an interesting series of posts. Friday’s entry describes two exercises, the first of which sounds like a variation on a meditation technique I learned years ago. At the ’05 Fringe I had a short discussion with a director (also from Winnipeg, although he’s moved here) who’s familiar with the structure and etiquette of using masks in the theatre; from Rachelle’s descriptive journals it sounds like this course is very much about teaching and preserving that tradition.

Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’

As strange as it may seem, there are actually people out there on the internets—most of whom I don’t work with—who read the drivel I occasionally post to this blog. There are very few among those sorry souls who have actually announced the fact, however, and I think having such poor taste deserves some public ridicule: so thanks, Paul! If this sort of thing keeps up I’ll have to change my theatre bio from writes an unpopular weblog to writes an only slightly unpopular weblog.

Seriously, Paul Gorbould’s gor[b] has been on my own blogroll indirectly for quite a while now, via Planet CBC. (Here’s a piece that I think will give a good idea of why I read gor[b]: Paul’s remembrance of Lister Sinclair.) It’s kind of strange to know that someone at my favourite Canadian institution is actually reading what I write, not just about it but everything else.

(Don’t) Call me

Take away most of the iPhone‘s extras—phone, camera, wifi—and drop the US$600 price (including required two-year cell contract) and you’ve probably got a nice, reasonably-priced media device that I’d consider buying; it’d probably be on par with a current video iPod, if the memory capacity were bumped up sufficiently. I don’t need a lower-resolution camera than the one I’ve already got, and I don’t need to be connected to the net 24 hours a day (which, granted, is only about 3 hours more than I am right now). Frankly, I don’t need video playback either, although it’d be nice to replace that functionality with some more open and/or lossless audio codecs.

But most of all I don’t want a cell phone! Don’t use one, don’t need one, don’t want one. Can’t think of anything less desirable that doesn’t involve physical pain.

It’s an impressive bit of tech, cramming all that stuff in there, but it’s not for me. Given the level of similarity I’ve discovered I share with the average consumer, they’re gonna sell billions of these things.

Shout out

Attentive Petroglyphs readers will have noticed a new commenter a couple of posts back. That would be Tammy, discoverer of this world map game (53!) and someone I just realized is a former co-worker. I guess it’s not really surprising that I wouldn’t have known that, though, because—believe it or not—I never met her once during her two stints at the company.

All of which is a long way of wondering if there are any other ex-work folk out there blogging? A while back Mike found one site owned by one of our California-based cohorts, but that’s been about it.