OK. I couldn’t resist. I wasn’t going to blog this but i’ve been telling so many people about it that i figured i had to. The Onion wrote an article about President Bush’s blog that captures the essence of a certain form of blogging. To the tee. So much so that i really couldn’t stop laughing. Like rolling on the floor laughing.

My favorite quote:

Bush said he could not understand McLaughlin’s anger, characterizing his blog as a “personal thing written for friends and family or whoever” and therefore “none of the CIA’s business.”

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As much as i’m a geek, i’m also the classic end user. I have no patience for technology that doesn’t just work and after hours on the phone with support, i always break down in frustration and tears. I am not someone who gets motivated to figure it out – i just want to throw it all away.

Mind you – this is why i hated computers for the longest time and why i’m really particular about technology that i buy. If i can take it out of the box and use it right away, we’re going to get along fine. I cried out of joy when i turned on my first 12″ because it asked me if it should join the apophenia network.

I was a terrible programmer in this regard because i hated debugging. With a passion. I would just lose it trying to figure it out. This was only worsened by the fact that i can always create the most peculiar bugs in any system. There were a few people who were always able to calm me down and get me out of that frustration and set me on a goal-driven direction to be productive. I was good at coding – i just hated it and i hated what it did to me.

Today was a reminder of why i stopped coding and debugging technology. A friend generously arranged for me to borrow a fancy phone for moblogging SIGGRAPH. I was ecstatic. I was like a little kid with a new toy, happily showing it off. Unfortunately, it was down hill from there. Taking a picture was easy. But it wasn’t sending. I read the manual (which was good because i couldn’t figure out a lot of things before that). I got on the phone with T-Mobile. I spent over 3 hours and 7 phone calls with T-Mobile. They were patient and kind, trying to change my plan, trying to sort through manuals to figure out how to deal with this new phone that was not yet available in the States, trying to make it work. Another friend was IMing me with suggestions because she too had one of the fancy phones and loved it (in fact, it was she who inspired it). The errors kept coming. I had to change my plan to get email to work. They suggested that i call the maker of the phone. The maker refused to talk to me because that phone is not supposed to be available in the States.

Over 5 hours of futzing went by and i was in tears, having gotten nothing that i was supposed to be doing done and being nowhere closer to moblogging. My friend kept giving me suggestions, bless her heart, but i reached that state of impossibility, defeat, exhaustion. I took a walk and decided that it would be better for my sanity to revert the account back to my Sidekick so that i’d at least have email, SMS and IM, even if no camera.

I feel super guilty because my friend was so kind in getting the phone to me. I feel like a failure for being unable to get a stupid phone working. But more than anything, i’m reminded of the state of mind that motivated me to leave computer science. The added weirdness comes from the fact that i’m about to drive to LA to see the man who spent four years trying to keep me in computer science. And i still feel guilty for having left.

Updated note: T-Mobile was great for what they were able to work with. I am by no means frustrated by them. In fact, i’m far more impressed with them for their patience and kindness. The problem was that the phone manufacturer whose States’ division would not help and whose technology did not easily connect.

Show Me Your Context, Baby: My Love Affair with Blogs is Kate Baggott’s trAce award piece on blogging positioning blogging against literature and discussing its merits as its own medium. The piece is thought-provoking, but the image is outright eerie.

“In lieu of charisma, bloggers possess a magnetism that would repel in any other medium. Bloggers are like the smart and difficult students who interrupted every lesson with sarcastic commentary and passed their exams with audacity and contempt for their schools, their subjects, their teachers and the exams themselves. They do not write for audiences or according to deadline. They comment because they have something to say.”

[FYI: it’s a New Media style piece and assumes some knowledge of theorists like McLuhan and Postman.]

Look who just got Flickr to auto-blog! Be warned. Soon there will be a camera phone and then it will be all over. Trouble is a-brewing because i started playing with new technology. (And yes, this means that i’ll be able to auto-Flickr-photo-blog SIGGRAPH.)

SIGGRAPH (computer graphics) was my original academic community. I first attended the conference as a student volunteer in 1997 and have attended most years since, always with a role ranging from speaker to party press. (Yes, i managed a legitimate pass once to cover the party circuit… it was the web era.)

Last month, i got CCed on a conversation about social software and SIGGRAPH. Not surprisingly, i opened my big mouth and shouted off my opinions. Of course, as with all academic communities, the moment you start giving suggestions, you’re told to just implement it. So i did. And it’s official. SIGGRAPH is using social software and the links are live on their main page.

* SIGGRAPH 2004 BLOG

* SIGGRAPH 2004 WIKI

I will be blogging live from SIGGRAPH (and hopefully moblogging). This is a fantastic moment of blending my current life with my past life. I’m ecstatic.

[Oh, and if you’re planning on attending, add yourself to the list of attendees at the Wiki.]

It’s August. This is the month when i start to twitch and my body feels the emergence of a new year. New Year’s Eve was never my “new year” because it’s smack in the middle of school and there’s nothing new about it… maybe that’s because i never finished my finals before NYE. Most years, August would mean a long journey, the closing of my summer project and a long drive across country back to school. Sometimes, this was punctuated with a visit to Black Rock City.

One thing always happens as a new year emerges – the desire to clean. Usually, i’m moving in August. Aside from last year (where i moved in July), this is the first year since ?1992? where i’m not moving in August (in HS, i was either moving homes or moving back from summer camp). Spring cleaning never happens, but moving usually requires cleaning. The problem is that i despise cleaning. Yet, the urge is there. Last night, i walked into my room, cringed and decided to clean some digital bits instead. Of course, one thing about cleaning (physical or digital) is that it means a walk down memory lane.

I’ve had over 12 online journals, diaries, blogs since 1996. They’re really scattered. I’ve decided that it’s time to bring some of them together. I’ve been asking people how their blogging voice evolved, but scouring my own journals was a real wake-up call. I’ve imported a mere fraction of my entries so far, but it’s so startling to hear the different things that i wrote over the years. I wrote about books, i wrote observations from the streets, i wrote about my depression and ongoing health crises. Most of what i wrote was personal. These were, after all, my diaries and journals.

Some of it is outright eerie. I didn’t address 9/11 in writing for various reasons. I had forgotten that i went to visit the mental health clinic on 9/10 because i was dealing with a bout of depression. That day, i wrote:

there’s something inherently wrong about having bitchy, impatient, mean administrators working in the front desk of a mental health department. hrmpft.

I have to wonder about their attitude the next day.

In an attempt to recognize my past, i decided to import almost everything, regardless of my own horrors and embarrassment about the mundane or foolish. Yes, this is a collapsing of contexts and it gives me the shudders. But i kept thinking about a conversation i had with a friend last December. He kept telling me about the importance of these historical artifacts, about how they allow for reflection, both from the writer and the reader. I’ve decided to own my ups and downs and include those entries for posterity, to remind me of where i came from. ::gulp::

Xeni interviews a bunch of “unrepentant compulsive digital networkers” (including moi) for her latest article: Online social networks go to work – Where personal connections lead to professional allies. It’s a fun candid read.

Dan Bricklin’s What we learn from the Convention blogging is a fantastic write-up about lessons learned. It is also exceptionally applicable to event blogging in general.

Of course, it makes me gulp a little as i’m gearing up to blog SIGGRAPH. Of course, SIGGRAPH is always exhausting anyhow and i’ve done the party circuit in costume there before.

Why is it that the only bloggers at the DNC are sympathetic to the Democratic party? What about other DNC attendees (other than protesters) – are they all sympathetic? Do non-sympathetic press cover the DNC?

It strikes me as odd that everything i’ve heard back from people at the DNC is from people who really believe in the Democratic party or people who are paid to not express their personal opinion. I realize that the bloggers with credentials are probably pawns of the DNC who want to employ them to get the word out further. But i want to hear rational critical voices… i want to hear what thinking Republicans think about the DNC.

I also had a realization this morning that i want to attend the RNC. I am not a good protester – i tend to get pretty upset with the type of herd mentality that emerges in those situations, even when i believe the values of the protest at my very core. So i figured that i wouldn’t go to New York next month. But what i realized is that i really want to be at the RNC, inside the RNC.

I want to talk to reporters about how their job works, how they perceive the bloggers. I want to talk to the passionate attendees about how they manage political information, about how they employ technology to share knowledge. More than anything, i want to be surrounded by thousands of people whose values and approaches to the world are fundamentally different than mine. It’s so humbling and eye-opening to talk directly to people who disagree with me, not to argue but to understand… to see the world from their perspective.

I think San Francisco is getting to me.

But seriously, i wonder if there’s any way that i’d be able to get into the RNC in New York. I wouldn’t want to go to attack or protest, but to understand. I think it could be quite humbling to see the world from a different perspective for a few days. And goddess only knows that it’d be far more mind-expanding than spending those days in the Black Rock Desert.

Obviously, I can’t speak for the delegates, protestors, service providers, real journalists or even for other bloggers, but for me it’s a lot like going to a sports arena and watching a sport that consists of talking loud. — David Weinberger

ROFL. I love David.