Diary of a Network Geek

Too many people read my blog.

Too many people I know, too many people I care about, too many people who care about me.  In the early days of this blog, eight years ago, all I wanted was readers.  Now, all I worry about is who’s reading.  Since I started this blog, we’ve added “Dooced” to our vocabulary.  We live in a world where potential dates Google each other to see what’s on their Facebook or MySpace pages.  And, now, I’m much more careful about what I write.  I’m afraid to rant about the English gits, er, fine gentlemen from the UK, that I work with, in case they happen to be reading.  I don’t say everything that I might otherwise about women I’ve dated, or even my ex-wife.
So, poor me, right?  So many people read my blog that I’m worried about how I’ll come across, who I might offend.  I fret over little things like not getting to far away from who I am, or who I think people perceive me to be, lest I overly disturb their sense of how I fit with them and the world.  Yeah, what a terrible burden I bear.  Ha.

So, I’ve talked about starting another blog, a creative blog, that’s not so closely associated with my professional life, with me.  Something where I can experiment on the screen and go mental and emotional and creative places that I feel too stifled to go here.  The Super Secret Creative Project of Doom.  It keeps me awake at nights, like tonight, and gnaws at me like the Midgard Serpent gnaws at the roots of the Tree of Life.  And, even as I write things like that, I feel the teenage angst that’s been sent off to French boarding school and grown up into upper middle-class ennui, like I should be wearing a black beret and smoking clove cigarettes.
So, where’s the drug that’s supposed to help me?  The clove cigarettes don’t take the edge off any more and the single-malt Scotch doesn’t help me sleep.  So, what’s a guy to do at 1:00 A.M. when my mind is racing, but the track is a tight circle that’s getting ever smaller and muddier?

What’s there to do but blog?

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
A real hero is someone who's afraid, but does the right thing anyway.

“He’s go the whole blog, in his hands!”

My darling wife sent me a link to the World as a Blog, which is as fun a site as I’ve seen. It shows you a map of the world and, as registered blogs update, it pops up those updates in little windows! How cool!
So, if you sit and watch, you can see what bloggers all around the world are posting about. In real time! I haven’t signed up for this, yet, but you can bet I will!

Now, it’s Friday, go have fun!

Say what?!?

Okay, for those of you not familiar with Japanese culture, bento boxes are fancy lunches that co-dependant mothers make for their kids. They can get quite elaborate and are often quite tasty! Oh, well, yeah, you can get them at train stations, too. In fact, every little town along the railways in Japan allegedly have their own “specialty” bento.
So, this BentoMoBlog is the Japanese equivallent of an American school lunch blog. Nutty. But, oddly fun, too….

Blog of a fugative heiress?

Maybe, maybe not. I saw the story on Wired News, but it’s been other places on the ‘net, too. It’s possible, of course, that this fugative from a repressive, arranged marriage is legit, but there’s enough controversy surrounding it that it quite possibly is just a stunt. Some have speculated that it’s just a creative attempt to generate some buzz about a fictional account of an escaped “poor, little rich-girl”. Who knows for sure? No one, yet. I’m sure it will come out eventually, but for now, no one really knows.
It does, however, harken back to an earlier entry I did about Anonymous Blogging.
Anyway, it raises some interesting ideas about who might want to have an anonymous blog and why. I wonder if she’s trying to communicate with anyone from her past via her blog?

Well, I’ve finally gotten a real blog set up. No more manual updates for me! Well, okay, that’s not really true. I mean, it’s not like I can just *think* the entries into the blog. But, at least I have a MySQL database keeping track of everything for me now. So, I guess I’ll keep the old, lamer-than-lame Diary of a Network Geek entries around in some form. For historical purposes. For posterity? Eh, just because I can’t bear to let them go.

Stay tuned for more *real* entries to the Diary of a Network Geek!