Monthly update...

It has been a habit of mine for several years now to write a letter once a month to a collection of friends and family. (At least, once a month was my intention, I have very rarely lived up to it.) The idea was to stay in touch with people and keep them up with where I was and what I was doing since I moved around so much. This was in 2000, just after I had commissioned and started my military service, while I was in Delaware; This was in the dark ages: before Twitter, before Facebook, before blogs, when all we had was email.

It was surprisingly difficult to make myself write a two page letter once a month. Anyway, starting this blog really put the final nail in the coffin of this process, since blogging is so much easier than writing an email and maintaining a list of emails to send it to. It is useful, however, to actually write entries like that, a summary of what I've been up to. One of my old email subscribers wrote recently and noted that I haven't written in awhile, which was the motivation for this entry and to send out an email to my list with a link to my upcoming monthly post.

I can thank my sisters for getting me involved in Facebook (and I do). I wouldn't have started blogging if it weren't for my last deployment...I've had conversations about this with my dad, who noted that people tend to grasp a method of communication and hold onto it at some point. It's not that email isn't faster than snail-mail, but if you only have mail addresses for all you old college buddies, it's hard to get into email. Changing established means of communication (or anything, for that matter) takes energy and a willingess in change and innovate. So anyway, I am trying to get back into the habit of writing once a month, and I will be posting them here.

~~~
minor edit 23jun09, a couple of typos

Kudos

Welcome to the kudos list: people or events getting a thumbs up.

Craig Ferguson

late publish

So if I finish a draft, it appears on the blog, but at the date I originally started writing it. If someone is only scanning the most recent entry, they won't see it, and I don't want to change the date, so I wrote this post.

25 June 08: Ten o'clock phone call


tags:
late publish: a post pointing at an older post that was just finished, so that someone only reading the latest entries will find it.

digital life: pandora; tags

A site that illustrates the movement of life to the internet.

Pandora.com, where you can listen to free music all day. To generate a personalized play list, enter a song or artist you like, and they will find other music like it. An offshoot of the Music Genome project, which involves categorizing all music according to the the included elements (a truly monumental project.) Anne and I have discussed this (she's the one who actually put me onto the site in the first place) and neither of us can think of a way to do this other than to listen to all the music involved and enter it in a database/tag it in some way. Pretty time consuming, and I am grateful to be the beneficiary of the work.

Also a note on labels/tags: I've been meaning to try and define them to make it easier to sort entries. I'm not really going to go back and work on them all, but I will work on it as I go along.

Tags:
geek: things of a nerdy nature, video games, internet applications, math jokes, etc.
blogger: posts dealing with the mechanics of actually using blogger.
tags: a post that includes the definition of a tag
links: a post containing links to some other site or some other post
people: mentions someone other than me