For the first time in about three years we are having a really nice snow and the temperatures are not supposed to change dramatically enough to mess with things.
The above image is at ISO-800, so not a really great image, but I believe it shows the gist of things 
Photography in the snow is not easy.
The status page and the status module use an emotion list. I have played with the list a little in the past few days, trying to come up with emotions that work. The present list is way too lengthy (mostly obtained from http://www.mytherapistnc.org/emotions.htm). The list is also ineffective. At first glance it looks like it covers everything, but it doesn’t. I am considering no longer using a master list and simply entering emotions as I have them and then using those as the list, but that seems so hard, especially on those days when I feel “blah”, but can still pull an emotion out when prompted.
Back to the LiveCurt.net project concepts again. How much do people want to know about me and how do they want to know it?
My status page is fairly basic information that is just putting stuff commonly available in one easy to access place, but LiveCurt is supposed to be more, it’s more than just my status, it is putting all parts of myself together, in both a public (not very exposed) and more private (probably TMI) way, depending upon access level.
I was just thinking about the fact I have an outstanding order for DVDs, which upon arrival will be registered in GITI Library, which is a public-facing module. The DVDs will just simply get registered in GITI and the library system will silently update, giving no one a clue of what has changed. Perhaps that is the type of information that people might want to see on LiveCurt.net?
Oscar brought up a point the other day, mentioning that he thought the whole idea of recording what one is doing at any moment in an electronic form seems a little strange. Wouldn’t all of the Twits be disappointed to hear that? I look to Oscar’s opinion as a more traditional value aspect of things, and I am starting to think he is right, being that connected is a little strange. I ignore the opinion as it relates to my personal status system because my actual status message thing is more of a self-analysis psychological experiment than anything else. I find the process of recording the statuses to be very difficult, just because when I am at home and not working on something academic, my status changes from minute to minute, and my level of conscious involvement in it changes about as often. Identifying my emotions (an aspect that Twitter does not include) is even more challenging, first because there is no standard list of emotions beyond basic emotions (look for another post on that later), and second, because it is hard to really identify how I feel, which I suppose is the reason why I set up the little experiment in the first place. For the Internet accessible portion of my status message, no one I know really wants to pop in to my website to check to see what I am doing, they would prefer to hear it from me. I agree with the concept of getting it from me, but there are times when the status message can be useful, such as when I need to leave the electronic world suddenly, it is just easier if my status is available like that, so no one is wondering where I am (since I am usually reliably within 10 feet of a computer).
I have been having so much of a problem getting things together for LiveCurt.net because I have several concepts of what it COULD be, but no ideas as to what it SHOULD be. Thinking about the site, I wonder if things like the last time I logged into GITI should be present, but then I think about the reason it is on status, it is like my pulse, it indicates that I am at least awake and alert, even if I have not bookmarked anything, stated a status or posted a blog entry. I am almost always logged into GITI, so when I first wake up, I check e-mail and log into GITI, those are predictable events, even though I may not get immediately dressed or immediately do anything (a status of “?” with an emotion of “comatose” doens’t seem helpful).
I am learning to be a more expressive person through having status running, and I feel like I keep less things to myself since it has been operational. The pressure to get LiveCurt running is based on several factors, including the status page becoming too verbose and overshadowing the future role of the LC system.
For the past few days it has seemed like my birthday has gone from being not even thought of to being a trigger to talk to me. Chris, my mother, Oscar and Jared (in order of query) have all asked what I have planned and what I want to do for my birthday. My honest answer is that I simply do not know. Birthdays in my family end up being very food oriented, so that is the primary concern, what to eat and where to eat it. Perfectly valid thing to ask I suppose, except I plan what to cook and I cook it every other day of the year, why can someone else not have an opinion on this and let me have a culinary adventure and not fall victim to my own habits and concerns for what everyone else likes. Funny thing is, I get asked these questions every year, but it never matters, by the time everything is done my plan for my birthday ends up manipulated, mutilated and mucked around with by my mother and my aunt.
I do not know what I specifically want to do yet, but the general gist is I would like to spend a quiet evening dining with the parts of my family (including Chris) that I like, but my mother says it would be impolite to ask my father to stay at home. Funny thing about my birthday, it is the only family occasion that my father will not manage to duck out on. Maybe there is a sense of obligation there, or perhaps guilt?
I am steering away from a diner with my family at home, that seems almost too drab and non-acknowledging of my birth, and also, if someone other than me cooks, I know I will end up in the kitchen anyway because whoever is cooking will either not know how to do something, or I will not like the way things are being done, I’m over-anal like that. I guess that means I definitely want to go out.
Cakes are another topic I love. People suggest that for my birthday I should want cake, well… I don’t really like cake in general. The only cakes I really like are frozen yogurt cakes. I’m not going to mention this to anyone this year, I’m just going to let them sweat it out themselves and figure it out (only member of my family that reads this blog is Chris).
More topics of interest, I have been eligible to drink alcohol for 3 years now, and I have yet to have my first drink, and I do not anticipate having a great need for trying for it this year. I suppose not drinking probably brings down the level of festivity just a bit.
Upon replying to a blog post on a friend’s private blog, I questioned why I did it, and then I questioned why I blog. The answer seems to be simple, but also a little complicated. The simple of it is that if I were to verbally reply to that friend’s post, what I said may be forgotten, or I may forget to say something, as things sometimes happen in conversation. I have been doing too much reading about STM, LTM and VLTM (Short, Long, Very Long Term Memory) lately to allow things to be only seen by such a delicate system, especially when there are so many things that can hinder it in the first place. I like for things to be recallable later. It is part of what is the basis for our collective global history. The written word survives in ways that nothing else can.
The complicated of why I write replies and why I write blog entries is so that they may be part of the human record. Anything that is known about anyone who is deceased is usually from their notes and diaries or from such articles of the people closest to them. Additionally, I like blogging because it is a written record for myself. I have already discovered the joy of needing to look something up that I had done previously, and then happily ran across a blog entry for it, although, it is rather odd to do a Google search and run across something you wrote yourself to answer your own question.
In short, conversations can be lost, but the written word is forever.
As I mentioned in a previous post, there are things that do not get mentioned here, they are considered too “private” to share here, but yet I share them with people I know even less about than the primary target audience of this blog. I do not know a lot of people that do not already know about the more private aspects of my life, and anyone new will likely be temporary or will be informed soon enough. I am a very open person when it comes to expressing myself, and sometimes I self censor too much. There was a time I avoided mentioning that I am gay on this blog, but now, a simple Google search of this blog will reveal my sexuality rather quickly. What am I afraid of? Do I think a little kink and perhaps some emotion about it might run people off? There is a wide spectrum of searches that end up with people thrown at one page or another of this site, and honestly, I would much rather come across as myself, not some watered down filtered version of myself. Maybe my fear rests in the idea that no one will be freaked out by my freakyness?
Another topic that has come up for me is the layout of the blog, its a standard MT template with a few customizations, but mostly, its a MT template, and I don’t like that very much. I noticed the other day when looking through some blogger blogs that almost everyone there uses the same template (the black one) and if I were to search a little, I’m sure I would find an ass-load of blogs that use the same style. I don’t like being so unoriginal. Perhaps a task for another day will be to work on giving my blog some personality, other than in text. I have been using more images lately, but that does not seem to be enough to make the blog seem alive.
As of this moment there are 1006 blog posts residing on my blog engine (Moveable Type) that I have written. I have made a total of 6 cross-posted posts in my blogging history, so this brings me to my present total of 1000 unique blog posts. Over 850 of those posts belong to this blog. I feel a bit unaccomplished at this point as this blog has been in existence of close to 5 years. I guess I thought I would have been a little farther along by now.
In some ways the total number of posts is irrelevant, but the distribution of posts is more descriptive of my life. Lately I have had a somewhat higher number of posts per month than I have had for years in the past. When I am active as a person, I am active as a blogger. When I do nothing as a blogger, I am a depressed person.
Maybe before I reach my next 1000 posts I will go through my blogs and properly tag and categorize each and every entry. It is quite a bit of work, so it will likely take a while.
Last night after taking my Theories of Personality midterm, I began thinking about the Collectivist vs. Individualistic cultural theories. In the modern understanding of these theories, most societies on the North American continent are individualistic, meaning we seek to further ourselves more than our society as a whole. This theory also supports that people in an individualistic culture will tend to seek to be as individual as possible, seek to stand out from the group. If this is true, then why do so many people try to follow the group appearance in public? Compare the way people generally look in public, compared to something like the people in a Carmen Sandiego video game. People tend to not have any distinguishing traits anymore, only false fascades. Look at people you may meet at a place, for example, a college campus. There may be the “frat type” or “skater type” guys, but they are just that “type”, unless you interact with them or they happen to be boarding or are in a group of guys wearing similar shirts with greek letters on them, then there really is no way to truly identify in this world. Very few people have distinguishing characteristics of what they truly are. It seems to be something that is seen negatively in society.
For varying reasons, people are not themselves when in public, usually only when they are with others in their “group” (isn’t it fun how often we associate with groups in an INDIVIDUALISTIC society?). Skaters are discouraged from having their boards anywhere but skate parks, members of the military are discouraged from wearing their uniforms in civilian environments (concerns for their safety), photographers with their cameras are seen as potential terrorists (but yet the Google Maps-mobile roams free) and construction workers are considered to be rude if they do not clean up before going into public. These standards, whether they are real, imagined or just perceived, do exist in some form and limit the options for self-expression and for really being an individual.
Complete individualism and complete collectivism do not exist in the normal free world. Pure individualism exists only for people roaming loose on their own in lands that have not been tainted by the industrial world, and pure collectivism only exists in very harsh cultures (think Hitler and his “perfect” population).
Where do you fit into society? How are you an individual? (if you answer the same thing to both questions, you are not trying hard enough)
I have been “working” on my personal portal for weeks now. Mostly that “work” has been staring at it and wondering what it is supposed to be. I have made no progress building the thing from scratch, just seems to be too abstract to tackle that way. The technical aspects of everything I want to do are well understood, but the design aspects are lacking, and in my world, design comes before code. The exception to that would be my status page, which is technically the project that comes before the portal. For the status page, it is not meant to be pretty, just simple, and straight forward.
Things that come from GITI I am comfortable displaying, because I know how they should be displayed, and I have a general feeling of what I want it to be. Also helps that I wrote (most of) what comes from GITI, so I know what to expect for output. OK, so maybe I do have a few technical issues to work out with the personal portal before I can fully write it. The technical aspects are not what block me from making actual code though, it is the aesthetic confusion. Artistically, my code makes no sense.
How many years have I written this post?
Anyway, Happy St. Valentine’s Day to the special boy in my life 🙂
And to the rest of, may you find true love on this very commercial of holidays.