Writing for Writing's Sake

Today I am going to writing for writing's sake. What does that mean? Well I find that I often stop myself from writing because I don't think that I have anything interesting to write or what I am going to write isn't important.

I think that audience has a lot to do with my motivation to write. In the past much of my writing has been done for an audience. Mostly that was blogging. There is something different about writing for an audience.

Much of my writing in the recent past has been for myself. Things like journal entries or writing that I don't intend to show anyone else. There is something private but also something a bit dead about writing for yourself. Or maybe it is better to say that there is something a bit more "alive" about writing for others.

Speaking about writing for others I think it is important that I am writing this inside the Blogger.com editing window rather then writing it in a text document and then pasting like I normally do when writing for myself.

For me there is something about being in that editing window ready to post after you are done. There is a certain kind of immediacy to it that really isn't there when writing in a document that you can simply save and close at any time.

Also I tend to write these days in text documents that are stored on Dropbox so that I can edit there on multiple devices and also that they aren't really locked into once service. A text document can be saved almost anywhere and edited by almost anything as compared to something like a Google Sheet that while still able to be edited in any web browser and able to be exported and worked on elsewhere really resides and lives inside Google servers for the most part.

Well this wraps it up for this post. I need to go do the dishes. I don't think that I will worry too much about the length of these posts as they really are writing for writing sake but also I often find that having 3 children (with one more on the way!) makes it so that your time really isn't yours but that's OK with me.

My New Year's Resolutions for 2018

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It's January 2nd, 2018 and I've been in the New Years spirit the last few days. New Year's Eve is by far my favorite holiday. I just love taking stock of our lives over the last year and looking forward to what lies ahead in the next. I love the idea of new beginnings.

I thought I would take a bit of time to share my New Year's resolutions and what I've done to change things in the last few days.

The Facebook Dilemma - Ads, Data Usage & the NSA vs. My Friends & Family

I posted the following on my Facebook account on August 30, 2013. I won't say much upfront baca use the post says it all. With the latest potential upcoming data usage changes from Facebook I may have finally hit my Facebook tipping point where the negatives (as I see them) might outweigh the positives.

Originally posted on my Facebook:

"Since the new year I've been using Facebook less and less. Since the Edward Snowden/NSA revelations I've been cutting down how much of my information goes up on any online service.

With the upcoming Facebook data use policy changes and all the ads they've added over the last few years I don't think the positives of Facebook outweigh the negatives anymore.

As has been widely noted online: "if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold".

Three Year Old Me Vs A Kitchen Timer

The earliest instance that I can find of my relationship with technology was when I was 2 or 3 years old. My family was living in a small Spartanette trailer and I had done something to make my mother angry with me. She placed me on the bed and set a round kitchen timer and placed it on the bed with me. "When this goes off you can get off the bed."

After about twenty minutes he realized that she hadn't heard the timer go off. She came to the bed to find me still there with pieces of the timer all around me. In her absence I had apparently decided I needed to take apart the timer perhaps to see how it worked.

This story is a portent of what my relationship with technology would be like as well as an early indication of the fascination I would develop for technology over the rest of my life.