Ever since I was a boy, I’ve collected ‘interesting’ bits of information. I put that in quotes because by interesting, I mean interesting to me. I can’t speak for anyone else.
I collected them like a squirrel gathers nuts, tasty kernels of facts that I then bury away somewhere because I know they’ll come in handy one day.
But like the squirrel, too often I forget where I’ve buried them, or I remember only half the story, which can be worse.
That’s one of the reasons I keep this blog. If I record things somewhere that has its own search facility then I have a better than even chance of finding it again when I need it.
Absolutely. It’s the reason I write the blog for work and ESPECIALLY the blog for the New York State Data Center affiliates, not to mention my own.
This was my response:
I was saddened when someone I thought knew me quite well said recently, “You spend so much time on that blog, and you don’t get paid!” Which, of course, misses the point completely. I do get paid – in relationships, in therapy I don’t have to pay for and in a place to store my squirrel nuts.
Mr. Parrot replied:
You’re right, of course, Roger. If people only spent time on the web because they got paid, there wouldn’t be much of it other than Amazon, e-Bay, and porn!
Ah, let’s see what kind of traffic I can drive here by talking about pornography! PORNOGRAPHY! Nah. Truth is, I don’t even look at the numbers anymore – PORNOGRAPHY! – because, and I believe I’m merely paraphrasing Alan David Doane, I do this for me. Though I DO like comments…
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And speaking of PORNOGRAPHY, some damn filter has been installed at my work computer. One of the blogs I visited regularly was tagged as PORNOGRAPHY, maybe because it occasionally has a woman not fully dressed. I appealed it, saying it was a personal blog, but not PORNOGRAPHY.
They wrote: “You submitted the following rating request to [company]:
Rate [site] as “34.Personals and Dating”
The request has been reviewed and rated as:
“41.Glamour/Society”
Which is hysterical.
Iself have long kept a text file called “Random Jottings” for those shiny bits and pieces of language, quotations, odd factoids and made-up phrases that sound musical to MY ear!
I used to do that too, but now I sometimes feel so heavy with information that I forget it almost immediately.
Roger thank you for you visit. You asked about the title of my entry. There is no tittle. The psalm was not meant to be published. My laptop is out of order, the video card is broken.. I work now on my iPad, which is difficult. Fortunately I scheduled all my ABC entries till September. Hopefully my computer will be repaired by that time.
A friend of mine told me that she Re-Tweets links she wants to be able to refer to later, so sometimes I do that, too. While my blog links to sites I find interesting or useful, when it’s an article I usually print to PDF and file them away on my computer. I’ve referred to them several times, sometimes for blog posts. If you use a service like Print Friendly to make the PDF (and all of my blog posts have that as an option for readers), it also includes the complete URL for the article/post which is very useful if you need to do a proper citation.
The main reason I do that is that my brain can’t possibly remember much of anything anymore.
The simplest way to explain it is to say that my blog is an extension of myself. I use my hands and my feet to provide for myself, and also I use the blog.
So for me, advertising is like putting a dead weight on my blog, like putting manacles on my hands and feet. Makes it hard to provide for myself.