The Shallows

It's been a while.  Forgot completely about the blog in light of the pending move to Denver.

Anyway, started reading Nicholas Carr's The Shallows and was immediately taken by the premise of the Internet reshaping our brains.  He talked early on about his difficulty in reading a book from start to finish.  I have noticed the same problem in myself.  This year, I must have started reading about thirty different books, but have been unable to finish one of them.  Hopefully, I can finish his. :)

First YouTube Video

Well, I posted my first YouTube video, found here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/rkseward?feature=mhee

It is sloppy and pointless.  My cat rarely cooperates.

Still trying to figure out the editing portion. I'm just ecstatic that I was able to post something.

Tweet Button

I attempted to add a Tweet button to the blog, but I could not determine where I should place the code.  I tried a couple of places, but when previewed the blog was replaced with a screen of gibberish, possibly some kind of error code.

In any case, I wonder if the button would be redundant since there exists a tweet button with each post anyway..

Misadventures with Jing

The image I captured from Jing is pretty simplistic.  I feel I have a lot to learn about this particular application.  It took me a significant amount of time just to get the link to include in this blog.  Definitely, further practicing is required to get a better handle on what Jing can do.

 Jing Capture

Blogging as a New Fictional Medium

I think I have started somewhere between 7 and 10 blogs in the past, but I have never been able to muster the discipline to follow through with any of them.  Of these, my favorite was an attempt to write an epistolary novel told through a series of blog posts.  The attempt lasted about seven posts because I never had a clear vision of where the story was going.  I likened this method of storytelling not only to the traditional epistolary novel where the story is told through a series of letters, but also to the Dickensian serial where portions of the work are published in increments. 

I bring this up, because in light of the proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies, blogging still has a foot in the realm of traditional information dissemination.  In many ways, it is the simplest of the new information tools because it is a recognizable cousin of the "archaic" personal journal or diary.

With this in mind, with this blog I will attempt to not only share whatever musings happen to tickle my fancy at any given time (such as books I am reading, movies I have seen, my pets, etc.) I will also try to touch on aspects of technology and how they are reshaping our world into something that is still not altogether alien.