a trailblazer, but among my family and friends, and in the case of blogs, I am one. While I’m not precisely an early adopter of the technology, my blog is turning 2 at the end of August, and as everyone does on birthdays and anniversaries, I’ve been having a little mental retrospective about blogs and blogging and my experiences therewith (yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not a word). And because this is, after all, a blog, here’s some rambling on the subject.

At first, I started because I found myself sending more and more links to neat articles or websites I found while surfing to my friends, and I noticed that the volume was very shortly going to pass the annoyance threshold (some might argue that the threshold was long past, but we’ll ignore them for the moment). So, having recently started reading some blogs, and often having a lot to say but no one to say it to (say, at 3 AM), I thought I’d start a blog.

The rest is more or less history, but I’ve learned a few things along the way:

• The blog has caused me to become a lot more articulate than I was; reading myself in print usually caused me, after I stopped laughing, to start thinking about how I said what I said a lot more, and to more intelligently formulate my opinions before I went spouting them to all and sundry.
• The whole blog-catharsis thing is severely underrated. I feel so much better after ranting here that even I’m surprised. And sometimes, getting it in print makes it look so ridiculous that I wonder why I was even angry in the first place. Either way, it’s been beneficial to my mental health, which is always a good thing.
• This kind of goes along with my first point, but I think that blogging has made me smarter. I have pretty strong opinions on, well, just about everything, and writing about them on as wide a forum as the internet has really made me think more critically about what I’m saying and why I’m saying it. Also, I started thinking more about how people could argue with me on various topics I blog about, which in turn makes me hone my reasoning and, usually, discard frivolous or unsubstantiated ideas in favor of more logical ones. It’s made me think.

But I digress. To get back to the original topic—trailblazing—I have, I like to flatter myself, instigated the gradual build-up of a nice little group of friends and family who also blog, who are interested in reading and commenting on others’ blogs, and whom I am getting to know better not just by reading the minutiae of their daily lives, but how they choose to communicate them to the world. I love it!

All of them appear in my blogroll in the sidebar, but here are the sites of my little online family:

• Prachee – my sister.
• Matt – roommate and good friend.
• Jieun – roommate and good friend.
• Lori – good friend who is so busy I never get to talk to her, who is almost as opinionated as me, and who I am glad is finally blogging.
• Ila – my crazy friend whom it seems I talked to five minutes ago even though it’s been months or even years. As of this writing, hours, but still, you get the picture.
• Dev – Ila’s brother, my friend, and faithful and regular blog commenter (which rocks!).

OK, you caught me. I didn’t really instigate any of these people to start their blogs, but I’m going to take credit for it anyway.

God of the Machine is a recently-returned literary blog that looks very promising; Aaron Haspel is a very good writer, and I look forward to reading more of his blog in the future. (Via InstaPundit)

From Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame):

Recently we had a heat wave in California. My air conditioner broke because, I assume, it is not designed to operate in hot weather. That was the bad news. The good news is that I solved the problems in the Middle East. Allow me to explain.

During the several days that it was 112 degrees and I had no AC, all I wanted to do was build an IED and kill the AC guy who kept driving right past my office and helping other people. In fact, I wanted to kill everyone who didn’t agree with me on just about any point whatsoever.

And I realized that the problem with the Middle East is insufficient AC. If you think about it, virtually all of the organized violence in the world is originating from places where they have poor air conditioning. And in the desert, 112 degrees is considered a pleasant day. Imagine how grumpy you would be at 125 degrees. And guess what I never see on TV when they show footage of the Middle East?

Shade.

Every frickin’ person they interview in the Middle East is standing directly in the sun. Some shade would be a good step toward world peace.

You know, he just might have a point.

I can tell you that during the heat wave here in San Francisco (where it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was inland—nobody died in our apartment)—city of virtually no AC, since the average annual temperature is 57.1 degrees Fahrenheit (statistic courtesy of cityrating.com)—I was ready to perform violence on anything and anyone who caused even a minute rise in my body temperature. Let’s get some swamp coolers over there posthaste! (Via InstaPundit)

Day 6. It’ll be back online tomorrow. Woo!

According to this, France Telecom just announced that they will begin offering 2.5 Gb/s internet connections to select cities in the Paris region. With 1.2 Gb/s upload speeds. For $85/month. Which includes free phone and TV. Seriously. I’m paying $85/month right now for 1.5 Mb/s down/768 kb/s up DSL. If it weren’t, well, France, I’d so be moving there. Sigh.

Day 5.

From Ars Technica:

In an effort to remain relevant, venerable board game Monopoly has been given an electronic European makeover. Capitalist robber barons in the UK will now have the option of making a cashless fortune thanks to a new version of the game that features an electronic card from Visa instead of paper money.

The new card, which resembles a debit card, is inserted into a small plastic reader/writer that can display and update the balance on the card. Traditional money is gone altogether, though purists can still purchase the original version. Visa’s partnership with Parker Bros. seems designed to bolster the belief that using paper money is baffling and insecure.

I don’t even know what to think. (Via Slashdot)

I’ve found a bug. I looked briefly on trac and the WP forums, and couldn’t find any mention of it, so I posted a message asking about it. The gist of it:

I recently upgraded from WP 2.0.2 to 2.0.3 and noticed a problem. If I add a link or comment with apostrophes or quotes to WP, it gets added to the database properly and displayed properly. However, if I then edit the link or comment and save it, the data in the database suddenly contains escape characters (backslashes) before all the single and double quotes, and these backslashes can’t be removed by editing again. You have to go into the database (in my case, I used phpMyAdmin) to manually edit the entries to remove the erroneous backslashes. I am not too familiar with the WP code, but I’m guessing that the problem lies in the save-after-edit functionality.

Like I said, I looked briefly, so if anyone knows of this topic already being raised to the WP developer team, please do let me know.

Day 4.

In no particular order:

• The Tamir Trilogy (The Bone Doll’s Twin, Hidden Warrior, and The Oracle’s Queen) by Lynn Flewelling—I loved loved loved the first two books in this trilogy, but due to the very long hiatus (I think the author had to deal with some medical problems for a year or so) between the second and third books, I am planning on rereading the first two before tackling the third one. I am excited to start!
• The Book of Ash (A Secret History, Carthage Ascendant, The Wild Machines, and Lost Burgundy) by Mary Gentle—I’ve only read the first few pages^* of this, but it looks promising so far.
• The Hard Way by Lee Child—I’m very excited about this one as well, as the Reacher books are compulsively readable.
• A Song of Ice and Fire (A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows) by George R.R. Martin—Yes, still. I got sidetracked.

There are actually a lot more on the queue, but this is enough to keep me busy for the next few months, at least.
^* A policy of mine. I’ve discovered the hard way that if you’re picky like me, you can’t judge the quality of an unknown book by reviews or, god forbid, by the book jacket description. You just have to read the first few pages of any book that looks interesting to see if you like the writing (or at least that it’s relatively inoffensive).