OFF COLOUR...

“Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.” - Edvard Munch

I’ve been stretching myself too far, spreading myself too thin, and have felt a bit off colour the last few days. I’ve been cutting back some of my activities and hope to resume “normal transmission” soon. Thanks to a couple of you who have been kind enough to enquire where I have been. Your concern is appreciated, I'll be back to normal in a couple of days...

WHY DO I BLOG?

“Only on the Internet can a person be lonely and popular at the same time.” - Allison Burnett

I was reading last week about people’s blogging habits and the reason behind their blogging. This prompted me to think more about the topic and question further my own personal reasons for blogging. Firstly, I contextualised my own needs for this form of communication and where it sits with me and my own life. It was easier to think of reasons that I don’t blog for, initially. I don’t blog for fame or fortune, as this is neither the place to do it in, nor am I searching for either. Besides I have yet to hear of a blogger who received a huge cheque in the mail because of their blog!

I don’t blog to attract a huge following, proselytise people to my religion, convert them to my moral or ethical precepts, my way of life or ideas, or make money out of them. My list of blog friends comes from people who read my blog and want to connect, or the other way around - because I read others’ blogs and wish to have them on my list for easy access. I like my blog readers to be varied and representative of as many different kinds of people as possible, each with their own ideas and convictions, living in all kinds of places around the world and having different lifestyles, beliefs, values. I don’t want all my blog readers to believe the same things I do, nor do I wish them all to agree with me. However, what I do like in my readers is an enquiring, curious, open mind, one which is ready to engage in discussion and which is willing to open up to new ideas, as I am.

I do not blog to meet a partner, wife, girlfriend, lover, soulmate. I am happily partnered, but always welcome new friends into my life. Because of the nature of the electronic medium, making new friends on the internet is both easy and difficult at the same time. Easy because of the wide availability of a large cross section of people that one is constantly exposed to and the simplicity with which one may connect to them. Difficult because of the ease with which one may offend, disgruntle, bore, cause misunderstanding, lose contact with others. Difficult also because of that lack of real face-to-face conversation, sharing of everyday interaction, social gatherings, etc. However, this situation of creating long-distance friendships is far from impossible and is not unprecedented - in the past, several long-term and genuine friendships were contracted and maintained by correspondence. The charming and poignant memoir “84 Charing Cross Rd”  is a case in point.

I don’t blog to keep contact with my family. I prefer to see them face-to-face, talk on the phone, visit them. Even the ones who live thousands of miles away I prefer to contact individually, as privacy is important to me and they respect mine as I respect theirs. An ancient Greek proverb that was drummed into me as I was growing up stated “What goes on in your house should not be made public” and I am afraid that I have lived according to that. Incidentally, that makes me a good person to keep secrets, in the same way that I expect my friends and family to keep mine.

Another reason I don’t blog is because I don’t want to keep a diary of my daily occurrences of my life, my innermost feelings, thoughts, hopes and fears online and in public. I have a diary that I write in, should I wish to do that, and that (as most diaries are) is a personal affair, kept for my own reasons, my own perusal and represents a part of me that only I should see.

I don’t blog and subsequently send chain emails to people about my posts, believing this will bring me good luck, fortune, health, wealth or the like. I don’t blog to break any records, achieve honours in some hall of fame of Blogland, or be a featured site. I don’t blog to waste my time and hopefully my blogging doesn’t waste other people’s time (although there is an easy way to deal with that, should they decide that is the case - the magic “unfollow” button).

So, secondly, why do I blog? I have painted myself into a corner, you may think after listing all the reasons I gave above in the negative.  I blog because I enjoy communicating, and enjoy sharing things. What I learn, I wish to pass on to others. What I enjoy, and I believe can be enjoyed by others, I wish to share with them. I am delighted when someone tells me, “Here is a book that I have just read and really enjoyed. I think you will enjoy it too, because of a, b, c reasons…”  And what a delight when I do read that book by an author I was unaware of and I enjoy it too. I wish to do the same unto others…

I love learning and I shall continue to learn till my dying breath. I wish to learn about other countries, other cultures, other religions, other values, other lifestyles. What better forum to learn that in, than Blogland, which is peopled by a rich variety of ethnicities, nationalities, religions, geographies, political convictions, etc… It is a wonderful place to learn first-hand, straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, about these other lives all around the world.

Blogland is the country where many creative people live. Amateurs, dilettantes as well as professionals. These people are very generous with their art and every now and then I get a real buzz when I discover some wonderful talents that they so generously share. I view, enjoy, praise and constructively criticise their work, if that is what is invited. In my own way, I too create and I also share my creations. All human beings wish to receive praise and encouragement for what they do, when they believe that it is done well. I am no different. Sometimes one feels that close friends and family will praise one because of an obligation to do so or because of a tactful loyalty. The praise of strangers is often much more appreciated, as one always feels it is more spontaneous and genuine. However, that is not my sole reason for blogging and fishing for compliments is not what I do in real life either. Besides, if one is willing to offer one’s creations to public scrutiny, one may always attract the criticisms of the professional, which can give one some exceedingly good advice for one's improvement, but what should be kept in mind is that the criticism may at times be quite scathing!

I blog to expand my horizons, to educate myself, to find new interests, discover new ways of looking at the familiar and unearth exciting things that I was unaware of. In the process, I feel that I must give something back to the Blogland community. I offer back into it my own discoveries, my own amazement and wonder of this world that we all live in. Often when I write my blog I will look up something on the net, a reference book, another book on my shelf and forget the blog altogether for quite some time. Blogging is yet another stimulus for my curiosity and need to learn.

In my time as a denizen of Blogland I have communicated with some people that are facing a time that is truly difficult and trying for them. Some of these people have chosen to use their blog as a safety valve, a path to catharsis, an avenue for liberating their emotions and feelings. Sometimes, their stories touch me and move me and I do what comes naturally - what I would do if I met someone wanting help next to me, someone close to me or even a stranger in need by the side of the road. I do what I wish others would do for me when I am in need. A kind word, a personal message, a thoughtful gesture may make an enormous difference in a life. Sometimes it is easier to speak to a complete stranger and bare your soul than it is to do so to your partner, your family, your friends. Sometimes a person who is completely neutral and uninvolved may see the situation from such a perspective that it sheds a new light onto your predicament.

I blog with what I hope is an open mind - I am not a fanatic and will change an opinion gladly if it is shown to me to be erroneous. I respect all people from different backgrounds, religions, countries, cultures. I appreciate the differences between us, tolerate other ideas and views that may be diametrically opposed to mine. I value freedom of thought and the right of each and every person to express it, provided they do not actively insult, demean or belittle others.

Seriously now, perhaps I should leave it to Albert Einstein to sum up for me:

“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed towards ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.”

For me blogging is a way of communicating, of generating friendships and creating understanding, sharing information and knowledge, exchanging points of view, enjoying others’ virtual company around the world. It is a manifestation of personal freedom and a demonstration of the power of ideas, the liberty of our thoughts. Blogging can contribute to our learning and our ennoblement, it can entertain and amuse us, it can move us and touch our lives in unexpected ways. Let us blog on!

ON INFORMAVORES

“Which of these activities occupies more of your time: Foraging for food or surfing the Web? Probably the latter. We’re all informavores now, hunting down and consuming data as our ancestors once sought woolly mammoths and witchetty grubs. You may even buy your groceries online.” - Rachel Chalmers
 

Each year the Macquarie Dictionary names a Word of the Year from a shortlist of words that have made a valuable contribution to the language. And it has declared 2013 to be the year of the “infovore”. The Macquarie defines an infovore as “a person who craves information, especially one who takes advantage of their ready access to it on digital devices”.
 

The term infovore or informavore (also spelled informivore) describes a person that consumes information. It is meant to be a description of human behaviour in modern information society, and the word is formed in comparison to omnivore, as a description of humans consuming food.
 

George A. Miller coined the term in 1983 as an analogy to how organisms survive by consuming negative entropy (as suggested by Erwin Schrödinger). Miller states, “Just as the body survives by ingesting negative entropy, so the mind survives by ingesting information. In a very general sense, all higher organisms are informavores.”
 

An early use of the term was in a newspaper article by Jonathan Chevreau where he quotes a speech made by Zenon Pylyshyn of the University of Western Ontario’s Centre for Cognitive Science:

“Zenon Pylyshyn closed the conference with an apt description of Homo sapiens in the information age — Man the Information Processor, or Informavore.”

Jonathan Chevreau, “Some A1 applications wishful thinking”, The Globe and Mail, March 30, 1984
 

Soon after, the term appeared in the introduction of Pylyshyn’s seminal book on Cognitive Science, “Computation and Cognition”. More recently the term has been popularised by philosopher Daniel Dennett in his book Kinds of Minds and by cognitive scientist Steven Pinker.
 

Humans are active information foragers who gather and consume new knowledge, unlike a passive sponge that sits in the sea depths and relies on whatever the sea currents bring its way. From controlling the movement of our eyes to determining which sources of news to consult, judging the quality of alternative sources of information is a critical part of our behaviour.  Researchers are now investigating, explaining and predicting how people shape their information seeking behaviours to their information environments. Nowadays a lot of this relies  on the Web, Twitter, social tagging systems, media, etc.
 

By hunting around for reliable information that satisfies our need to learn we construct Personal Learning Networks (PLNs). A PLN is an informal structure of information sources around a learner (or informavore!), with which he/she interacts and derives knowledge from in an environment that is adapted to the individual’s own needs. In a PLN, a person makes a connection with another information source with the specific intent that some type of learning will occur because of that connection. Generally, in a PLN, individuals are involved and the interactions between them is how information is transferred.
 

An important part of this concept of PLNs is the theory of connectivism developed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Learners create connections and develop a network that contributes to their personal development and knowledge.
 

A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is very much related to a PLN and is sometimes used synonymously with it. PLEs can be created independently, by building and collecting content sources from the Web, including creating content through blogs, podcasts, slideshares, etc. A natural extension of one’s PLE is the development of relationships with individuals that emerge from the process of building the PLE, which is how the PLN develops. When connections from a PLN are engaged, knowledge creation becomes interdependent.
 

In Dryden and Vos’s book on learning networks (Dryden, Gordon; Vos, Jeannette (2005). “The New Learning Revolution: How Britain Can Lead the World in Learning, Education, and Schooling”. UK: Network Educational Press Ltd), we read:

“For the first time in history, we know now how to store virtually all humanity’s most important information and make it available, almost instantly, in almost any form, to almost anyone on earth. We also know how to do that in great new ways so that people can interact with it, and learn from it.”

TOO MUCH TO DO

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” - C. S. Lewis
 

Inundated with things to do at work again means that I have very little time to devote to other pursuits, even after I get home. It seems that there are some periods during the year (and they are getting more frequent and seem to last longer!) when everything seems to be happening at the same time. Time management skills, effective delegation and prioritisation of tasks are all very well, however, when one has several major projects with deadlines looming over the horizon regularly, something has to give.
 

Hence the brevity of today’s entry, with a couple of interesting links that are work related!
 

Mayo Clinic - Time management: Tips to reduce stress and improve productivity
 

Sydney Morning Herald: Work-Life Balance
 

Making time for personal goals
 

Now I’ll have to sign off as I have to go and take a dose of my own medicine!

WORK-LIFE BALANCE

“By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.” - Robert Frost
 
I have been extremely busy the past two days at work as I was attending some high level strategy meetings. These were very useful and interesting, however, they left very little for anything else. Hence this lapse from my daily routine of blogging and collecting a few thoughts together here…
 
I am certainly looking forward to the weekend where I plan to spend some time on myself –although there are also responsibilities and a long list of chores waiting to be done at home. It is very difficult to balance the demands of work, family and personal needs and wants at the moment. I await eagerly my retirement, where hopefully I will be able to spend more time on things that I have not had the ability to fit into my busy schedule at the moment.

BEST AUSTRALIAN BLOG?

The 2013 competition is now open for entries. Entries in the competition will close on Thursday 28 March 2013.
 
There is over $18,000 worth of prizes, including cash, writing courses and books, to be won by finalists and winners.
 
You can follow the centre and the competition on Twitter. The hashtag is #bestblogs13

INTERNET USAGE

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.” - Eric Schmidt

I came across an interesting website that features up to date world Internet Usage, Population Statistics and Internet Market Research Data, for over 233 individual countries and world regions. There are some amazing figures that are published there, including the number of users and the penetration rate in the population.

For example, in the USA there are 239,893,600 Internet users as of June 2010, which represents a 77.3% penetration; while in Australia, there are 17,033,380 users as of March/11, with a 78.3% penetration. Contrast this with Ethiopia where there are 445,400 Internet users as of June 2010, representing 0.3% of the population. In terms of the highest penetration, Iceland boasts 301,600 Internet users as of June 2010, but has the highest penetration worldwide at 97.6%. In terms of the highest number of users, China has 477,000,000 Internet users as of March 2011, with only 35.7% penetration. India is an interesting case with 81,000,000 Indians being internet users, yet this representing only 7% of the Indian population.

Nevertheless, the Internet is a busy place! It is interesting to contemplate that in 60 seconds, Google will receive 700,000 queries around the world, 168,000,000 emails will be sent and 98,000 tweets will be posted on Twitter. 13,000 iPhone Apps are downloaded every 60 seconds while in 60 seconds there will have been more than 370,000 voice calls on Skype. It is estimated that on 31st March 2011, there were 2,095,006,005 Internet users worldwide.

It is encouraging to think that from a tool that was initially developed and used for military intelligence in the 1960s, the world wide web in its present form is an indispensable part of the lives of billions of people worldwide.

As it is Poetry Wednesday today, here is an amusing poem found (where else, on the internet) about social networking and blogging:

Community Creatures

A colony of bloggers secure in their topic
ranging in size from massive to microscopic.
The lesser ones surround and support the great
who set the direction for the others to debate.

A flock of forums grazing on knowledge
their shepherds guiding them to fresh foliage.
Free to chew the cud and relax within their walls
trusting the guardians to banish the jackals.

A hydra, a multi-headed oracle, it must be a wiki
tackling all problems from the simple to the tricky.
The multiple heads give it so much knowledge you see.
The only problem is... they do not always agree.

A mob of social bookmarkers, much like meerkats
take turns looking out and deciding what's good to peer at.
Hoping none of the sentinels is actually a pretender
directing them all according to their own agenda.

In the distance, a herd of social networkers
dashing all over the place. There's no room for shirkers.
Without any shepherds they all, every day,
have a role to play in keeping predators at bay.

©Adam Rulli-Gibbs 2007

SAY HELLO!

“There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

If you are visiting this page for the first time, welcome!

If you are returning, welcome back!

Take some time to leave a comment and say “Hello”, in your own language if you like!

It seems that there is a lot of traffic on this page, but people rarely say anything.

Don't be shy, say hello!

WORLD INTERNET DAY & GEORGE GRIE

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw

According to some sources, today is World Internet Day. We depend on the web for communication, entertainment, ease and efficiency of data transfer, for research, recreation and task convenience. Our daily speech has been peppered with numerous neologisms that relate to web-based activities and services it offers. Nowadays, doing business without the internet is inconceivable. Like any other good invention, the net can be used for criminal activities and there are numerous cases relating to internet crime, stealing of personal data and identity, phishing, scamming, illegal activities of all kinds, racism, exploitation, pornography, etc. Use of the internet has made life easier and more pleasant, but also it has created many monsters that threaten us.

As today is also Art Sunday, I shall introduce to those of my readers who do not know of his work, George Grie (1962- ), an internet artist extraordinaire whose digital, neo-surrealist images can be widely accessed on the net. Grie is a Russian-Canadian artist whose classical art training stood him in good stead when he started his career as a professional fine art painter and graphic artist. His work is influenced by the well-known surrealists Dali, Magritte and neosurrealists Zdzisław Beksiński and Wojciech Siudmak.

Has art has strong visual impact and uses confronting images that engage the viewers, making them try to rationalise and question what they see. There is an underlying unstated philosophisation, inner reflection and sense of wonder in the oxymoronic images he produces. Some of his works are a social commentary on contemporary mores, others are playful imaginings, or even clever illustrations based on word play or extension of symbolic meanings into territory not explored. His palette is limited and the images are often rendered in grisaille with only occasional touches of colour. This suits the fantastical and dream-like visions he produces and contributes to the graphical quality of his work.

The image above is Grie's “The Langoliers or Inevitable Entropy”.  The Artist states the following about this work of his:
“ ‘The ultimate purpose of life is to facilitate entropy. We are the langoliers of the present reality.’ - Kurt Vonnegut

Stephen King's “The Langoliers” Book summary:
When a plane passes through a mysterious time warp, several people find themselves utterly alone when the rest of the passengers and all of the crew vanish. The survivors manage to land, where as they discover that time seems to stand still and that they seem to be the only people left on the planet. To complicate matters, mysterious creatures called Langoliers are chasing them. The Langoliers’ work is to erase moments in time that have already passed into history.

Entropy
The concept of entropy has entered the domain of sociology, generally as a metaphor for chaos, disorder or dissipation of energy, rather than as a direct measure of thermodynamic or information entropy. In the nineteenth century, a well-liked scientific notion suggested that entropy was gradually increasing, and therefore the universe was running down and eventually all motion would cease. When people realized that this would not happen for billions of years, if it happened at all, concern about this notion generally disappeared.

Entropy, historically, has often been associated with the amount of order, disorder, and or chaos in a thermodynamic system. The traditional definition of entropy is that it refers to changes in the status quo of the system and is a measure of "molecular disorder" and the amount of wasted energy in a dynamical energy transformation from one state or form to another.”
George Grie, August 2007

JULIE & JULIA

“Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.” - Harriet van Horne

I was in Brisbane today for work and it was an exhausting day. It is not very good to commute over such long distances as the day becomes tiring and one’s body objects somewhat. I must be getting old! I spent the whole day in a small room with the auditors that we had around, but at least all went well and the trip was successful.

At the weekend we saw an interesting little film, which on reflection was mildly amusing, but otherwise nothing to write home about. It was Nora Ephron’s 2009 “Julie & Julia”. The film is a double biography of famous American cook Julia Child and the less famous Julie Powell, also a cook and author. Meryl Streep who played Child overacted somewhat, just to ensure that everyone knew who the star was in the movie, while the rest of the cast were fairly competent.

The film is a constant hashing backward and forward in time (and place), between 1949 Paris and 2002 New York. In 1949, Julia Child, the wife of a diplomat, tries to spend her days constructively while her hubby (played in a laid back way by Stanley Tucci) works in the embassy. She tries millinery, bridge, and then cooking lessons at the Cordon Bleu school. There she discovers her passion for food and we follow her life until she writes her first cookbook. In 2002, Julie Powell, a public servant and unpublished author, decides to cook her way through Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in a year and to blog about it.

The stories and the two women’s lives become tangled as there many common elements: Good friends (mostly), loving husbands, and of course the food. The zest of French cooking is conveyed well and the 1949 Paris scenes are well shot. I began to watch the film with interest, but halfway through I started drifting off. It was too long, too repetitive and Julia Child was too much, while Julie Powell was too bratty and had too many tantrums.

Nothing much happens in the film except for cooking and people talking at  one another. I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t in the mood…

ALL ABOUT GOOGLE

 “A blog is a message in a bottle, both in purpose and likely readership.” - Robert Brault

I have a liking for those special days when Google changes its logo to reflect some anniversary, holiday or other day of special significance. For example, at Easter or Christmas or Tchaikovsky’s birthday or Earth Day. It’s a very nifty way of drawing attention to those special days and some of the graphic designs are quite ingenious, amusing, beautiful or fetching. If you wish to see some of these from different parts of the world, why not visit this Google page:
http://www.google.com/logos/

Now for some fun. How about personalising your Google search page so that it displays a message of your choice: Your name or your dog’s, or some expletive that is your personal favourite? Go to this site and set the display text you want instead of “Google”, and then set it up as your home page:
http://www.funny-google.com/

How about a search engine in Pig Latin? What a fun way to remember your school days!
http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-piglatin

And if you are really into the techie stuff, how about this version of Google Hacker with its choice use of numbers and symbols to spell out the words?
http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-hacker

If you are feeling bad, how about putting a little devil in the Google logo?
http://www.google.com/bsd

Or if you are really hip, either emo or goth, how about these?
http://googleemo.com/
http://www.gothengine.com/
http://www.googoth.co.in/

Seriously now, Google is also the scholar’s friend and is there to make internet searches more efficient and scientific. Here is Google Scholar:
http://scholar.google.com.au/

And Google search in quadruplicate, so you can do four separate concurrent searches.
http://www.googlegooglegooglegoogle.com.br/

Ah, isn’t the internet wonderful? And by the way did you know why Google is called that? It is a misspelling of “googol”:
googol |ˈgoōˌgôl| cardinal number
equivalent to ten raised to the power of a hundred (10 100).
ORIGIN 1940s: said to have been coined by the nine-year-old nephew of E. Kasner (1878–1955), American mathematician, at Kasner's request.

Google the company, was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the “Google Guys”, who proved you don’t have to be good spellers to become billionaires…

GOOGLING GOGGLES

“Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.” - C.P. Snow

You may recall a few weeks ago when I blogged about an image I had found on the web and did not know who it was painted by. I bemoaned the fact that I wasn’t able to upload it and get Google to search the web for me to find out what it was (I since did find out what the image was through some detective work and the help of one of my readers). Well, it looks like that I did not have to wait that long to see my request made into reality! Well, in principle, anyway!

Google has launched a new application for the Google Android mobile phone that allows you to search for more information about a landmark by taking a picture of it with your Android phone and submitting it to a Google application known as “Google Goggles”. At this stage, the application can recognise landmarks, works of art, books, wine labels and company logos. In the near future, I can see it recognising famous faces, and as we move into the future other images will taggle along…

The way that it works is that when the user takes a picture of the feature in question, the phone sends it to the Google databases where elements of the photographed image are compared with features of images on the Google databases. When a match is made, Google notifies the user what they are looking at and provide a list of web references and news stories relating to that identified item. What also helps is that Google can use the user’s location (through the GPS locator in the phone) to aid in the ID process (take a picture of a faraway landmark in a poster at your place of residence and see if that will confuse the poor dear!).

Google maintains that tens of millions of locations, landmarks, logos, etc can be recognised. As I pointed out in my earlier blog, searching by an image is so much more convenient in many cases, and an image search on a mobile phone through a captured image can be so much easier than text searches.

The whole concept brings to the fore the developing technology in computer vision (and by extension of course, robot vision). This is technology still in its infancy, but one can see the tremendous potential of applications such as Google Goggles. We may be soon approaching the time where we may simply point our finger at something and through our special decorative ring-cum-camera-cum-phone, and then through our speaker-enabled sunglasses hearing a description of what we are pointing to…

Google has also started to add real-time results to its search engine, channelling feeds from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and other user content that has just been added by web users, in response to queries. This means that the person doing the search gets answers to their query on a results page as the content is being generated on the source website. Google once again claims that this is the first time a search engine has integrated real-time web-content into a web search results page.

Once again, this latest development raises some questions. How reliable will such search results be, if all sorts of live, real-time results are given from the myriad of blogs, tweets, and other content, which may be (and often definitely is) quite spurious? How do we tell rubbish is rubbish? There was much adverse publicity lately about the reliability of information in Wikipedia. This was because of malicious feeding of specious or fallacious information into Wikipedia articles by malfeasants and other people with ulterior motives. We live in an age of excess information. Being able to filter this information and derive form it the useful, genuine and reliable bits is quite an art. It will become an even bigger art in the future as we are surrounded by even more information, which will become increasingly more easily available. How do we go about navigating through this dangerous sea of excess data? Will this superabundance of information be a boon or a curse?

What do you think?

A MYSTERY

“Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.” - Julia Cameron

For Art Sunday today something different. In these days of the internet and high technology, the readiness with which we can lay our hands on information is quite astounding. Billions of facts and figures are only a click away and we can find some of the most obscure and recondite information in the blink of an eye. We can find people interested in similar things we are interested in, halfway around the world. We can listen to voices of friends in distant places, exchange almost immediate messages, send information instantaneously even to the Antipodes.

And yet there are still some things that remain difficult. For example, the painting you see above was sent to me several years ago by a friend as an attachment to an email. I had liked it then and saved it on my computer. Cleaning up my archived files, I came across it and to my irritation I had found that I had not kept any details of the painting, artist, where it was from. Having found it after all these years, I am glad to say I still like the painting, but now I am at a loss as to how to identify the artist who painted it.

I thought, how wonderful it would be if I could go somewhere on the internet and find an image search engine, where I simply upload an image and it does a search, comparing it to other images and it comes up with a possible ID. Wouldn’t you find that useful? I daresay, it may exist before not too long, if it doesn’t already exist.

I like the painting because primarily its colours and composition are pleasing to me. The blues, greens and turquoises shine out of the gloomy dark navy of the background, which even in itself is quite interesting visually. The interweaving of the pattern of the chaise longue with the real flowers is playful but sombre at the same time. The framing of the recumbent figure in flowers makes me think of death, funerals and the grave. Ophelia comes to mind, but so does Titania, or even Miranda to keep it all Shakespearean. The setting yellow moon in the distant sky and the dark blue poppies with the red centres are suggestive of sleep and oblivion. The face is interesting, but ever so sad. Betrayal is written on it, as is “Nevermore”, the eyes infinitely sad but devoid of tears, as if there were none left to cry.

I guess I can appeal to the readers of this blog! Firstly, do you like the painting? Secondly, do you know who painted it, and when? Who the sitter is? What the title of the painting is? Any other information about the painting?

SOCIAL NETWORKING & REFUSENIKS

“Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hands on the strings to stop their vibration as in twanging them to bring out their music.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Where would be in today’s world without social networking on the internet? It has become a part of most people lives and has created some wonderful opportunities to connect with people in distant places whom otherwise you may never have known existed. I remember when I was a child I used to have a penfriend for a little while. While it lasted it was a good experience, but how difficult it was to maintain that type of relationship when one relied on snailmail to communicate! Also, being forced to do it in a language that was not my own (English) while I was learning it, made it all the more difficult. Nevertheless, I think it sowed the seeds of my future social networking and my blogging…

The choice of social networking platforms nowadays is an embarrassment of riches. It seems that everywhere one turns on the net one is able to find a platform for connecting with family, friends, neighbours, acquaintances, but also of course, perfect (or imperfect!) strangers. I remember my first attempt at blogging on 23/3/06 on the now defunct Yahoo 360, and I quote this first blog in full:

“My first day of blogging, this being the beginning of a southern autumn and northern spring. According to the Roman Catholic calendar, this is St Niza's feast day while the Greek Orthodox calendar would fete St Nikon and his 199 Students (rather remiss of him not find another one and make it an even 200 students!). Reading at the moment: "Ripe for the Picking" by Annie Hawes. An amusing journal of an Englishwoman's experiences in Liguria, northern Italy. Today is World Meteorology Day, rather fitting for Australia, as we have just had the terrible effects of cyclone Larry to contend with up in northern Queensland and getting ready for the next one - cyclone Wati. This morning I listened to an old favourite of mine, Couperin’s “Les Barricades Mystérieuses”. Very hypnotic music, highly ornamented and forward-moving. A puzzling title especially as the music seems to be so vivacious and has no trace of hesitation as one would imagine from the “barricades” of the title – perhaps thence the mystery!”

A little unsure of myself, wary of putting my thoughts out there on the web in public view for everyone to read and comment on, the blogging experience was an interesting enough one for me to continue with and maintain daily for nearly three-and-a-half years. I have met (virtually) some wonderful people and have been learning so much! I have broadened my mind and have kept in contact with some friends in distant places. Since the days of my first blogging on Yahoo 360, I have experimented with a few other platforms and also maintain a blog at work, which deals with matters related to my job. Yahoo 360 died, and after trying both Multiply and Blogger I chose the latter. It was good to see some of my Yahoo 360 friends join me, but a little sad to lose some others who either gave up blogging or moved to another platform.

Facebook and Twitter became THE places to do one’s social networking for a while, but both of these extremely popular platforms are now becoming shunned by a new breed of internetters, who have become known as “refuseniks”. These people are seen by the Facebookers as a little up themselves and emotionally manipulative, or even snobbish. However, the new breed of social networkers regard Facebook and Twitter as “old hat’ and also much too controlled by “Big Brother”. The unsavoury interference of the Facebook administrators in the membership and content, the leakage of users’ private information, the misuse of the platform, and the sheer pushiness of the thing put me right off straight away. Even though nowadays not having a Facebook page is like not having a mobile phone or email, I must confess that yes, I am not only a Nick, but I am also a Refusenik!

refusenik |riˈfyoōznik| noun
1 A person in the former Soviet Union who was refused permission to emigrate, in particular, a Jew forbidden to emigrate to Israel.
2 A person who refuses to follow orders or obey the law, esp. as a protest.
3 A person who refuses to follow popular trends and buckle under peer pressure.
ORIGIN 1970s: from refuse (Middle English: from Old French refuser, probably an alteration of Latin recusare ‘to refuse,’ influenced by refutare ‘refute.’) + -nik (from Russian (on the pattern of (sput)nik) and Yiddish).

(Incidentally if sheet music isn’t your thing and you would rather hear the Couperin piece referred to above, here it is, courtesy of YouTube).



Jacqui BB is hosting Word Thursday!

MEDIOCRITY

“The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one--and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! ...So the poet is actually a thief of Fire!” - Arthur Rimbaud

A poem for a thief of words – a poem that will not easily be “borrowed”. I thought that what was freely given could hardly be stolen, except by one whose joy derives from the act of kleptomania…

Mediocrity

Hail, all-bright Lady Mediocrity!
You shine on radiantly, unashamedly
Although your light is but reflected.

You utter well-turned phrases
Your ears so used to accolades,
Even if the applause you hear is for mouthing stolen wit.

Magnanimously you bend low
Giving alms to the needy all around you,
But your munificence runs on borrowed funds.

Hail bright, if slightly tarnished star,
Lord help preserve us from your indiscretions,
There is so much of your second-hand originality around us.

Jacqui BB hosts Poetry Wednesday

FOR THE PERSON WHO HAS EVERYTHING...

“To speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.” - Ben Jonson

Seeing that Yahoo 360 is soon closing, and the bloggers here are looking for a new home, it is apt that I share with you an interesting snippet of news I read in the newspaper today. “Twitter” is the new rage, it seems, and is threatening “Facebook” in supremacy. This is no surprise as we live a society where communication seems to be in a process of ever-shrinking dimensions. The “140 character message limit” of Twitter constitutes a “tweet” and is perfectly suited to the SMS, telegraph-like brevity of the communication of the modern person. Our ancestors once communicated effectively with short grunts, so why not us? Let’s get back to our roots…

Twitter and Facebook, Yahoo 360 and Blogger, MySpace and Multiply, just to mention a few of these social networking sites, are big business. There is much money to be made wherever people congregate in large numbers and that goes for the virtual community, not only the real one. Hence the big competition in the popularity stakes and the extreme marketing associated with each of these platforms for ascendancy. Alas for some, popularity (ever fickle), has by-passed them and hence the decadence of Yahoo 360 that we have witnessed lately.

Seeing that Twitter is the new wunderkind on the block, is it a surprise that various para-service industries have sprung up to cater to the advertising needs of the twitterer market? Brisbane-based company uSocial has launched a service that allows twitterers to buy “packages of followers” if they can’t attract any of their own. For only $87 you can purchase 1,000 followers and for $3497 you can buy the maximum of 100,000 followers!

So how is that? You can buy yourself admirers! You can purchase your own fan club! So when you write: “I am now thinking of going out for a stroll because it’s a nice day here in Melbourne, and I feel like a leisurely walk.” (122 characters), your fan club can know about it and rejoice in your excellent thought so pithily communicated. The world must know of course about such important events in your life.

Humour aside, if a company buys 100,000 followers on Twitter and keeps bombarding them with advertising, it’s well worth the $3497 investment. Another uSocial service puts paying customers’ websites on the prestigious front pages of social networking sites such as Digg, Buzz and StumbleUpon. Another revolves around positions of prominence for your company in search engine results. What did I tell you before? It’s big business!

Meanwhile, keep on blogging!

confabulate |kənˈfabyəˌlāt| verb [ intrans. ]
1 [formal] Engage in conversation; talk : She could be heard on the telephone confabulating with someone.
2 [Psychiatry] Fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory.
DERIVATIVES
confabulation |-ˌfabyəˈlā sh ən| noun
confabulatory |-ləˌtôrē| adjective
ORIGIN early 17th century: From Latin confabulat- ‘chatted together,’ from the verb confabulari, from con- ‘together’ + fabulari (from fabula ‘fable’ ).

Jacqui BB is hosting Word Thursday

FAREWELL YAHOO 360!

“No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth.” - Robert Southey

Well it’s official, Yahoo 360 is closing down… I guess we could all see it coming for a long while, but now that it is official, it is easier to accept it and move on. I left the following comment on the Yahoo 360 Australia site:

“I am rather disappointed to see 360 go, although its steady decline over the past couple of years, frequent bugs, lack of technical support, rumour-mongering amongst its users, and their progressive exodus have foreshadowed this announcement.

I first started blogging here on 23/3/06 and since then have produced a daily blog. I have met many fine people on 360, have exercised my mind, have been moved, have laughed, and have been creative. It will be hard to say goodbye, but such is the way of the world. Nothing is permanent, all is in a state of flux, all changes (as Heraclitus has said...).

I for one will not move to Profiles, it is a sad and poor relative of 360 (just like Mash was). I shall be changing my home page from Yahoo to something else (Google?). Whether I continue to blog or not once 360 goes, I have not decided yet.

It is appropriate to thank Yahoo at this stage for having created one of the best blogging sites on the net. In its heyday it was elegant, simple, well-supported, popular, ground-breaking. In its decline it has retained the quiet and melancholy dignity of a beautiful corpse.

Vale, Yahoo 360!”

MICRO-BLOGGING

“No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune.” - Plutarch

A full day today with a whole day offsite workshop. Only managed to get home now. Getting up early tomorrow for a trip to Brisbane.
Micro-blogging (noun)
A form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates or micromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group, which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, digital audio or the web.

ORIGIN 2006-7: From Greek mikros ‘small’ and web in the sense [World Wide Web] and log in the sense [regular record of incidents.]

NIPPED IN THE BUD

“True Friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.” - Charles Caleb Colton

The virtual world of 360 is a strange one, sometimes funny, at other times sad, perhaps distressing or maybe even frightening, but always interesting. It is a microcosm fashioned in the likeness of reality and one may find in it all of the human types one may encounter in one’s immediate neighbourhood. I always take people at face value and try to be as honest as I can be without betraying confidences, by respecting sensibilities and by protecting those whom I love. However, even with such a policy how often is it that what we write here can be misinterpreted, misconstrued, misunderstood? How often is it that what a reader reads will reflect what he or she wants to understand, rather than what we write simply, honestly and without artifice?

How much more clearly can I say to people than this: “I am not here to search for a partner, a wife or a lover”? Is there any better way to say to someone: “If you do not allow replies to messages sent from your blog, I cannot reply”? Or how much more clearly can one say the following: “I cannot add you to my friends list as I have reached the maximum number of friends allowed by Yahoo”? One tries to be gentle, considerate, polite, urbane, tactful and respectful of others, and one may reap abuse and inarticulate ramblings in reply.

I am blogging here because I like to share some of my thoughts with others. What I know I wish to share with others. I think that what I write here may interest a small number of people and many of you have become dear friends, even though may thousands of kilometres separate us. In the past I had more time to enjoy reading many more of my friends’ blogs. My work and personal commitments lately have meant that I have had to curtail much of that agreeable activity. It is hard enough to keep up with writing my daily blogs sometimes, but I persist as they are a welcome break from my busy schedule and a way of resting my mind. An intellectual meditation in a sphere distant from my everyday mental gymnastics at work. A noetic workout that relaxes me and clears my mind from the matters at work that demand much care and responsible decision-making.

I wrote this poem recently and dedicate it to lost friends, here on Yahoo 360.

Of Friendship Nipped in the Bud

I smiled as my open hand I stretched,
My gift so generous, was misconstrued,
And from a giver, I was made a mendicant.

A singing bird my heart was perched
On greenwood branch; but soon the warble rued
My wings were clipped, I turned into a flightless elephant.

To share with joy, all my possessions fetched,
But my offerings were thrown out and strewed
And my frankness - dismissed as mere cant.

You yearned for love, I offered companionship
You searched for passion’s fire, I gave you fellowship.
Just as the flower of friendship was to bloom,
You nipped it in the bud - now emptiness, now gloom
Where bright flowers could have been.

JUST A TRY-OUT

I have a blog on Yahoo's 360 and have tried out their unimpressive Mash. As Yahoo is phasing out 360 over the next few months, I thought I may try out this blog space, which seems to have a reasonable enough interface. I'll be interested to see how many of my Yahoo 360 friends migrate to this blogging arena.

LET THE BLOGS BEGIN...