Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Playing chess online
After an 8 or 10 month break, I've started to regain interest in playing chess online. For "normal", realtime games FICS (Free Internet Chess Server) is nice. A couple of days ago I found a free corresponence chess service: Net-Chess.Com, on which I've started a handful of games. We'll see how it goes.
My handle is AndroFlux on FICS, and jcreigh on net-chess, in case anybody wants to play me.
Sunday, January 08, 2006
Why blog?
Lots of people, including me, have a blog.
Why?
Most blogs are senseless, stream-of-consciousness drivel. Including this one. There are, of course, bloggers whose posts are well written, thought provoking and profound. But they are the exception, not the rule.
So my first guess would be that blogs are journals for nerds. That theory fits me. But there's this whole other class of bloggers. You know the ones I'm talking about. They're in their teens, their twenties. They've got a blog on Xanga. They IM. They email. They use the internet (actually, most of them don't know that the internet is. They just use the word "internet" to mean "the web") as primarily a social tool. Why do they blog?
Couldn't tell you. Probably, they know people to whom their posts are significant. But it's hard for me to imagine, because the posts all seem to look like this:
Woke up this morning. Happens every morning, but still surprising. Couldn't decide whether to have eggs and bacon or a muffin. Had both. Wasn't as good as I had hoped. In fact, was the worst breakfast I've ever had. Wanted to kill myself. Listened to Green Day to try and cheer me up. Didn't work. Went to my sucky job. Took the interstate, which I usually don't do, so I got stuck in traffic and was late. My boss yelled at me. Had a bad day. Got home. Decided to blog about my most trivial experiences, decisions and emotions in short, incoherent sentences.
I read posts like that and think, "Who cares about you and your stupid problems? Write about something interesting! Write about something important!". Then I decide to be part of the problem by blogging about it.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Pet Peeve of the day
Ebay makes you logon in order to search completed items. Why do they do this? Do they think that making me jump through hoops to use their service will make me want to buy more stuff on ebay? Do they like to put obstacles in front of their users? Probably they just like to tick me off.
