For quite some time, I haven't been using Wordpress for my blog. I'll be experimenting with it again as I understand it is vastly improved!
There's Always Something...
reflections of a well-ripened pilgrim …
September 22, 2010
April 30, 2010
A Bird Singing...
Yesterday I was out in our little backyard trying to learn how to make short videos on my camera (to use on my blog). I was shooting tomato plants, flowers, odd patches of uninteresting gravel and unrelated leaves - and all the while mumbling little comments that meant nothing, unless trying to learn something new is meaningful in itself.
Anyway I wound up the session with the realization that I would never be a Clint Eastwood or a Mike Nichols and headed inside to put it on the computer and see if I could edit it into something coherent, if not significant. I wrestled it onto my laptop and sat back to enjoy my masterpiece.
As the video unfolded I liked a few things, hated a few others and wondered at the skill of those who did a good job of such matters. Gradually, however, I became aware of something the camera picked up that I had not been aware of at all. A happy little bird was singing clearly, invisibly an beautifully throughout the entire film. It was a lovely moment.
I had never even heard a note. Therein lies a message.
Grace is the theologian's name for it.
May 17, 2009
On Having Something to Say...
Regular readers may note that I haven't blogged much lately. My rule of thumb is to only write when I have something to say or something to share. Usually, as a life-long preacher, this is no problem.
Recently though I've had a dry spell. Not sure why. Dickens' death? Minor health issue? General minor periodic burn-out? Just good old laziness? I don't know. And it doesn't really matter.
Anyway, I want to assure you that I'm still around, alive and kicking. And should have my writing/sharing discipline back on an even keel before long. Keep those cards and letters coming.
April 30, 2009
Restructure Time for Blogs and FaceBook...
I'm in the process of rethinking and restructuring my 2 blogs and FaceBook work. Good for the soul from time to time. I find that I burn out a bit every year or so and have to renew. Hence my occasional sabbaticals. That's where I am right now. No hurry!
On the FaceBook page, I reduced my friends (contacts) from 84 to the low 60's. Just couldn't keep up with that many people. Will be cutting at least 25 more in next few weeks. I believe that FaceBook exists for its subscriber, not subscribers for FaceBook.
I want to have a small group of interesting people on my page - who actually communicate on FB - as opposed to just passively watching, lurking. Not necessarily with each other, but just saying something interesting now and then. I realize that FB is primarily a vehicle for lonely young people - or, maybe bored young people. It is their turf, not mine! At the same time, I see it as a potentially valuable tool for staying in touch with some folks, sharing things of interest and keeping one another alive. This isn't as easy as it sounds. It takes a lot of tweaking and adjusting to mould FaceBook into a tool that fits one's personal style, needs and interests.
The endless tests, tweets and cutesys that keep cropping up on its pages make FB what it naturally is, I suppose, but they drive me nuts. There is too much trivia in life as it is. After all one's FB page is one's own and should be tempered to be useful and friendly on an individual basis, not as part of some popular herd mentality.
Call me grumpy or a rugged individualist, but I really do believe FB can be a positive useful tool in daily life. Something like a second cup of coffee - bracing, reflective, and constructive. I haven't given up on it yet, but am determined to give it a fair chance to be a regular on my daily personal essentials list.
April 19, 2009
Why Twitter is a Trap...
Here's an extremely thoughtful piece from Virginia Heffernan. It appears in today's New York Times.
Let Them Eat Tweets
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: April 16, 2009
Twitter — the microblogging service that lets you post and read fragmentary communications at high speed — is fun, but it’s embarrassing. You subscribe to the yawps of a bunch of people; they subscribe to your yawps; and you produce and consume yawps for the rest of your days. The me-me-me clamor brings to mind Emily Dickinson’s poem about the disgrace of fame, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”: “How public — like a Frog — / To tell one’s name — the livelong June — / To an admiring Bog!”
Now that I inhabit the Twitter bog, though, I don’t complain. Twitter can be entertaining, and useful — and, really, who doesn’t like the illusion, from time to time, of lots of company? I have only lately begun to wonder whether I’d use Twitter if I were fully at liberty to do what I liked. In other words, I’m not sure I’d use Twitter if I were rich. Swampy, boggy, inescapable connectivity: it seems my middle-class existence has stuck me here.
These worries started to surface for me last month, when Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on “connections” like the Internet, Skype and texting. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” he said.
In his speech, Sterling seemed to affect Nietzschean disdain for regular people. If the goal was to provoke, it worked. To a crowd that typically prefers onward-and-upward news about technology, Sterling’s was a sadistically successful rhetorical strategy. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” had the ring of one of those haughty but unforgettable expressions of condescension, like the Middle Eastern gem “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.”
“Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.
Nice, right? The implications of Sterling’s idea are painful for Twitter types. The connections that feel like wealth to many of us — call us the impoverished, we who treasure our smartphones and tally our Facebook friends — are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because — it suddenly seems so obvious — we can’t afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home!
Twitter is no longer new. It’s nearly three years old. Early enthusiasts who used it for barhopping bulletins have cooled on it. Corporations, institutions and public-relations firms now tweet like maniacs. Google has been rumored to be interested in buying the company. The “ambient awareness” that Twitter promotes — the feeling of incessant online contact — is still intact. But the emotional force of all this contact may have changed in the context of the economic collapse. Where once it was “hypnotic” and “mesmerizing” (words often used to describe Twitter) to read about a friend’s fever or a cousin’s job complaints, today the same kind of posts, and from broader and broader audiences, seem . . . threatening. Encroaching. Suffocating. Twitter may now be like a jampacked, polluted city where the ambient awareness we all have of one another’s bodies might seem picturesque to sociologists (who coined “ambient awareness” to describe this sense of physical proximity) but has become stifling to those in the middle of it.
A typical hour on my Twitter account, which I use to follow the updates of about 250 people, has some wonderfully cryptic tweets from Murray Hill, a drag-king entertainer, and Touré, the novelist and critic, alongside some less-inspired posts from P.R. people and cultural institutions trying to pass as normal Twitterers. I myself mostly post links to this column, hoping that the self-promotion is transparent enough that people can easily ignore a link or click it if they’re curious. But don’t get me wrong: I’m also just shouting my name the livelong June to a subscribing bog.
If this way of using Twitter bothers you, never fear: people like me get their comeuppance. If you hang out in the bog, a Twitter search might turn up commentary about you like this: “X might be the dumbest person I’ve encountered in print” and “X writes like a dog about to be gassed at the shelter.” (X here equals, sadly, “Virginia Heffernan.”)
I used to think that writers on the Web who feared hate mail and carping bloggers were just being old-fashioned and precious. But now, while I brood on the maxim “connectivity is poverty,” I can’t help wondering if I’ve turned into some banged-up street kid, stuck in a cruel and crowded neighborhood, trying to convince everyone that regular beatings give you character. Maybe the truth is that I wish I could get out of this place and live as I imagine some nondigital or predigital writers do: among family and friends, in big, beautiful houses, with precious, irreplaceable objects.
If I’ve come to be wary of social networks, which I once embraced with zeal, maybe it’s because I take my cues from those very networks. In the old days, Facebook updaters and Twitterers mostly posted about banal stuff, like sandwiches. But that was September. It’s spring now. Look at Twistori, a new site that sorts and organizes Twitter posts that use emotionally laden words like “wish” or “hate” or “love,” thereby building an image of the collective Twitter psyche. The vibe of Twitter seems to have changed: a surprising number of people now seem to tweet about how much they want to be free from encumbrances like Twitter.
“I wish I didn’t have obligations,” someone posted not long ago. “I wish I had somewhere to go,” wrote another. “I wish things were different.” “I wish I grew up in the ’60s.” “I wish I didn’t feel the need to write pointless things here.” “I wish I could get out of this hellhole.”
And finally, “I wish I was rich and had personal assistants.” Right on. And those assistants, presumably, could do our Twitterwork for us.
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: April 16, 2009
Twitter — the microblogging service that lets you post and read fragmentary communications at high speed — is fun, but it’s embarrassing. You subscribe to the yawps of a bunch of people; they subscribe to your yawps; and you produce and consume yawps for the rest of your days. The me-me-me clamor brings to mind Emily Dickinson’s poem about the disgrace of fame, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”: “How public — like a Frog — / To tell one’s name — the livelong June — / To an admiring Bog!”
Now that I inhabit the Twitter bog, though, I don’t complain. Twitter can be entertaining, and useful — and, really, who doesn’t like the illusion, from time to time, of lots of company? I have only lately begun to wonder whether I’d use Twitter if I were fully at liberty to do what I liked. In other words, I’m not sure I’d use Twitter if I were rich. Swampy, boggy, inescapable connectivity: it seems my middle-class existence has stuck me here.
These worries started to surface for me last month, when Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on “connections” like the Internet, Skype and texting. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” he said.
In his speech, Sterling seemed to affect Nietzschean disdain for regular people. If the goal was to provoke, it worked. To a crowd that typically prefers onward-and-upward news about technology, Sterling’s was a sadistically successful rhetorical strategy. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” had the ring of one of those haughty but unforgettable expressions of condescension, like the Middle Eastern gem “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.”
“Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.
Nice, right? The implications of Sterling’s idea are painful for Twitter types. The connections that feel like wealth to many of us — call us the impoverished, we who treasure our smartphones and tally our Facebook friends — are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because — it suddenly seems so obvious — we can’t afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home!
Twitter is no longer new. It’s nearly three years old. Early enthusiasts who used it for barhopping bulletins have cooled on it. Corporations, institutions and public-relations firms now tweet like maniacs. Google has been rumored to be interested in buying the company. The “ambient awareness” that Twitter promotes — the feeling of incessant online contact — is still intact. But the emotional force of all this contact may have changed in the context of the economic collapse. Where once it was “hypnotic” and “mesmerizing” (words often used to describe Twitter) to read about a friend’s fever or a cousin’s job complaints, today the same kind of posts, and from broader and broader audiences, seem . . . threatening. Encroaching. Suffocating. Twitter may now be like a jampacked, polluted city where the ambient awareness we all have of one another’s bodies might seem picturesque to sociologists (who coined “ambient awareness” to describe this sense of physical proximity) but has become stifling to those in the middle of it.
A typical hour on my Twitter account, which I use to follow the updates of about 250 people, has some wonderfully cryptic tweets from Murray Hill, a drag-king entertainer, and Touré, the novelist and critic, alongside some less-inspired posts from P.R. people and cultural institutions trying to pass as normal Twitterers. I myself mostly post links to this column, hoping that the self-promotion is transparent enough that people can easily ignore a link or click it if they’re curious. But don’t get me wrong: I’m also just shouting my name the livelong June to a subscribing bog.
If this way of using Twitter bothers you, never fear: people like me get their comeuppance. If you hang out in the bog, a Twitter search might turn up commentary about you like this: “X might be the dumbest person I’ve encountered in print” and “X writes like a dog about to be gassed at the shelter.” (X here equals, sadly, “Virginia Heffernan.”)
I used to think that writers on the Web who feared hate mail and carping bloggers were just being old-fashioned and precious. But now, while I brood on the maxim “connectivity is poverty,” I can’t help wondering if I’ve turned into some banged-up street kid, stuck in a cruel and crowded neighborhood, trying to convince everyone that regular beatings give you character. Maybe the truth is that I wish I could get out of this place and live as I imagine some nondigital or predigital writers do: among family and friends, in big, beautiful houses, with precious, irreplaceable objects.
If I’ve come to be wary of social networks, which I once embraced with zeal, maybe it’s because I take my cues from those very networks. In the old days, Facebook updaters and Twitterers mostly posted about banal stuff, like sandwiches. But that was September. It’s spring now. Look at Twistori, a new site that sorts and organizes Twitter posts that use emotionally laden words like “wish” or “hate” or “love,” thereby building an image of the collective Twitter psyche. The vibe of Twitter seems to have changed: a surprising number of people now seem to tweet about how much they want to be free from encumbrances like Twitter.
“I wish I didn’t have obligations,” someone posted not long ago. “I wish I had somewhere to go,” wrote another. “I wish things were different.” “I wish I grew up in the ’60s.” “I wish I didn’t feel the need to write pointless things here.” “I wish I could get out of this hellhole.”
And finally, “I wish I was rich and had personal assistants.” Right on. And those assistants, presumably, could do our Twitterwork for us.
March 05, 2009
More FaceBook Stuff...
Here's the latest FaceBook forecast for those of us who are somewhat hooked on this strange internet program.
NEW YORK - A bit of a facelift for Facebook.
And it's one that will have the site looking and feeling a lot more like Twitter. The online hangout is shifting around its home page so Facebook users can more easily choose the types of information they see.
The site will let users follow public figures like President Barack Obama or swimmer Michael Phelps or their favorite bands or sports teams.
Starting next week, Facebook will also launch a new home page that lets users get continuous updates from their friends, rather than getting them every 10 or 15 minutes.
And for those of us who have those friends who are always sending updates that we aren't all that interested in? Facebook will let you add a filter that will keep those updates at a minimum without "de-friending" them
And it's one that will have the site looking and feeling a lot more like Twitter. The online hangout is shifting around its home page so Facebook users can more easily choose the types of information they see.
The site will let users follow public figures like President Barack Obama or swimmer Michael Phelps or their favorite bands or sports teams.
Starting next week, Facebook will also launch a new home page that lets users get continuous updates from their friends, rather than getting them every 10 or 15 minutes.
And for those of us who have those friends who are always sending updates that we aren't all that interested in? Facebook will let you add a filter that will keep those updates at a minimum without "de-friending" them
I found this on MSNBC.
March 02, 2009
February 22, 2009
Around the World with "Something"...
Goodness! I've had this "clustermaps" program on this blog for a long time, but never took time to look at it. (You can find it on the right side of the page.)
It tracks people who read your blog according to their location. I opened it today and was amazed at how far this little squib has traveled.
Here's the big picture. http://clustrmaps.com/counter/maps.php?url=http://viewfromarizona.typepad.com/citrus/
Guess I'm not big in Libya or Syria. That's OK. There's always someone.
February 17, 2009
Time Out...
Back in few days. My cup is runneth-ing over.
December 17, 2008
So You Want to Write for The Internet...
Every once in awhile, someone asks me how to get started with writing for the internet. I can well remember how lost I was when I started out three years ago. I was helped by two sons who had experience and knew their ways around. It is infinitely more complex today - and in many ways much easier.
This blog by Michael Blowhard and the link included in his post, give quite good suggestions for tools of the trade.
Word processing is basic writing for the internet. My favorite these days is Bean, a simple and neat little program. Apple has a program of its own, AppleWorks, which I also frequently use.
I use Typepad and Wordpress for my two blogs. They are wonderful vehicles for blogging. Lately I have been exploring Squarespace as another publishing option.
Michael mentions Facebook for social networking and I have an account with them. You have to check it out to see if that is your cup of tea. Adults are increasingly discovering it and visiting back and forth in a public way. I don't know what I think about it. Oddly fascinating. Twitter is an abreviated device that does roughly the same thing but with message limited to a few sentences. I haven't tried it and have found most of what I've seen of it inane. Facebook is twitter on steroids.
Here's what Michael has to say:
Online Writing Tools
Michael Blowhard writes:
Dear Blowhards --
Paul Glazowski recommends 35 online tools for writers. Me, I'm using Google Docs as my main word processor these days. It's a nothing-special writing tool in many ways, but it's responsive, its filing system is swell, and I do love being able to get at my writing from whatever computer I happen to be at. I've also tried and liked Zoho Writer and Adobe Buzzword -- but, since there's such a thing as juggling too many logins and passwords, I've settled on Google Docs instead.
As for the rest of Glazowski's tips, I can endorse Facebook (which I love), and Squarespace, which strikes me as really brilliant. If you want easy fun on the web -- commenting, linking, posting, etc -- Facebook is hard to beat. A visit to Facebook can be like a stop at the neighborhood bar, full of chance and casual interactions. And, recently, it hasn't just been the young 'uns who have been showing up on Facebook. The chances of a grownup finding old classmates, friends, and colleagues have in fact gotten pretty good.
(Wired thinks that people who are thinking of becoming bloggers ought to forget it and take to Twitter or Facebook instead. I'm with Wired on this. I think that Facebook offers 99% of what most people are hoping to get from blogging while demanding about a tenth the work and effort.)
If a complete website of your own is a goal, Squarespace is genius. Using drag-and-drop modules, you can create (and then revise to your heart's content) as elaborate a website as you could possibly want. It took me about an hour to become competent at using Squarespace, and within a couple of days I had myself a fun personal website that I continue to amuse myself with. Compare that to the effort involved in getting up to speed with HTML and/or Dreamweaver.
Best,
Michael
Michael Blowhard writes:
Dear Blowhards --
Paul Glazowski recommends 35 online tools for writers. Me, I'm using Google Docs as my main word processor these days. It's a nothing-special writing tool in many ways, but it's responsive, its filing system is swell, and I do love being able to get at my writing from whatever computer I happen to be at. I've also tried and liked Zoho Writer and Adobe Buzzword -- but, since there's such a thing as juggling too many logins and passwords, I've settled on Google Docs instead.
As for the rest of Glazowski's tips, I can endorse Facebook (which I love), and Squarespace, which strikes me as really brilliant. If you want easy fun on the web -- commenting, linking, posting, etc -- Facebook is hard to beat. A visit to Facebook can be like a stop at the neighborhood bar, full of chance and casual interactions. And, recently, it hasn't just been the young 'uns who have been showing up on Facebook. The chances of a grownup finding old classmates, friends, and colleagues have in fact gotten pretty good.
(Wired thinks that people who are thinking of becoming bloggers ought to forget it and take to Twitter or Facebook instead. I'm with Wired on this. I think that Facebook offers 99% of what most people are hoping to get from blogging while demanding about a tenth the work and effort.)
If a complete website of your own is a goal, Squarespace is genius. Using drag-and-drop modules, you can create (and then revise to your heart's content) as elaborate a website as you could possibly want. It took me about an hour to become competent at using Squarespace, and within a couple of days I had myself a fun personal website that I continue to amuse myself with. Compare that to the effort involved in getting up to speed with HTML and/or Dreamweaver.
Best,
Michael
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