Divide by Zero

Friday July 30, 2004

20th Anniversary blog entry.... As I tried to find the words for the title of my "hello world" in the pantheon of blog'ing, I realized I'm really on or at the 20th anniversary of the first onset of the symptoms of this particular PDO (Personal Digital Obsession). It all started at my summer freshman college orientation - when we were given email accounts on the all powerful VAX Populi. So, this isn't my first post to a public forum by any account, inside or outside of Sun. However, it counts as my first blog post'ing ever, and so whereever that road starts, I'll have to live with it for the rest of my blog'ging life - however short or long lived that may be. Ah, the irony of having to live with my first words, not my last. Not the epitaph of "goodbye cruel world", but the irony of "hello (cruel?) world". In the Internet Age, that last sentence should resonate most especially for anyone who can recall the (relative) chumliness and innocence of the Internet when it was ARPANET/DARPANET. All you had was (sortof) email - no im, no spam, no url's, no web banners, no worldwide flames, no downloadable beheadings, and no blogs. The silence was deafening, and we can wax nostalgically about it as long as we want, but there's no going back. Now it's all different - way different. Computers, computer networking, the Internet and people all went from READONLY to READ/WRITE/MODIFY on a 24/7 galactic basis, literally overnight. Great job everyone! Now get back to work! Now everyone's an expert. Now everyone has not just an opinion, but a URL that you can search on to find their opinion, linked to their blog, which is now a public conversation with the world at large. Even better, you can subscribe to it. Not only can you find it, but it can find you. How weird is that? Someone could care so much what you or I would have to say that the mere click of a mouse by the proverbial Helen of e-Troy could send 100,000 BlackBerry's into vibrational nirvana. It was weird enough walking through airports around the planet and getting used to the hands-free elite waving their hands into the air madly and shouting at walls with a cell phone in their hand or strapped to their waist (I'm guilty if not late to that game as well). Now we get to broadcast the inner workings of the technocrati and the rest of the unwashed masses out into the digital airwaves. In the category of "Do try this one at home", how many of you are posting your blog's from speech to text engines? How many of you are listening to my blog now as text to speech? I've got my Mac scanning this site and mixing text to speech blog postings into the perpetual web music stream I usually tune my web browser to. Talk about weird. You should hear yourselves talking to me right now.... :^) Perhaps we could just record our blogs on our mobile phones and post them as mp3's to our sites....why not hear it live from the source, instead of going to the trouble of actually having to read? Question is, how credible is the source? I'll leave it to future postings to tell you a bit more about me and to get started on a thread that may be a bit more to do with Sun than the above. For now, this will have to do. Got to get back to work. -barton (2004-07-30 13:46:47.0) Permalink