(no subject)

An attempt to update my bio sort of morphed into an impromptu essay on how my perspective has been changing with regard to LJ. Lizbeth and I have been talking a lot lately about what LJ is all about, about the ettiquete around reading and posting to strangers' journals and so forth. It's nothing profound, and the software idea I describe at the end has probably already been done (tell me if anybody knows specifics), but since it ended up reading more like a journal entry than a bio anyway I figured I would just go ahead and post it:

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My bio has been saying the standard "if you're reading this, then you probably know me" thing since I got the account many months ago. But what I'm realizing about LJ is that if you want it to (and sometimes if you don't), that doesn't have to be the case.

So...

What kind of info do you put in a bio that's possibly for total strangers? If I was to pidgeonhole myself into some particular category of netizen then "Linux Geek" would probably be it. That, or "people who hate words like 'netizen'". It's sort of a toss-up.

I work as a technical trainer, which basically means that I fly around the US teaching Linux system adminstration/certification classes. This has me on the road much more often than I am at home. That, plus the fact that "home" has recently changed from California to Florida was what first inspired me to get a Livejournal. I'd been avoiding LJ becase one of my pet php projects was (and still is, when I have time) a site that filled a similar niche and I didn't want to accidentally steal any ideas. But, at some point you've got to just use what's out there and I have to say I've been really happy with it as a tool and as a community (though I'm only just beginning to explore the latter).

So I originally got an LJ to keep in touch with my friends, but I've since become fascinated with it as a means of finding new and interesting people. It's sort of a logical progression from the pros and cons of the web. In the web we have an infinite canvas that people, if they have any access to it at all, have more-or-less equal access to as a means of self-expression. But the web, by becoming such a big thing, has begun to limit its own potential by making it a chore to wade through.

It reminds me of the very first project I gave myself when I wanted to learn programming. There were three or four news sites I visited daily as well as as some online comics I liked. One incredibly frustrating but eductaional perl script later I had a single page that contained all of that stuff on one place. I had to write a seperate routine to get data off of each site but it worked, albeit to varying degrees.

LJ, the blogsphere and other such services use the same sort of idea, but instead of trying to hack together a framework around the existing web, offer a toolkit to create a cohesive framework within it. This framework offers both the power of the web, ie a blank slate to which everyone has equal access, and a mechanism by which one can choose the most appealing elements and have them displayed in a consistent interface with minimal effort. And all this while retaining the ability to link from person to person and idea to idea.

It's implimentations of ideas like that that are going to make the next big leap forward in web accesability. Not so-called "portals" that try to cram all of the web into one inevitably tacky interface (*so* 1999), but tools that allow all information to be
1) written in a common, open format and
2) collated and rearanged in arbitrary ways.

Imagine a common format that would allow easy cross-posting between lj, blogs etc? Wouldn't it be fantastic to be able to add slashdot, blogspot blogs and LJs to a single uberfriendslist? Come to think of it, in the meantime a tool that just pasted them all together wouldn't be that hard to do... I think. Great, now all I need is some free time. *sigh*

So, umm.. that's my bio... 'cept, of course, it's not... more of a rant/essay/self-important spiel that I may or may not agree with in a few days.

*doublesigh*

I'm hungry.

/me wanders off to find some food

(no subject)

So, some of you may have been following the "what is the most disturbing slash in existance?" thread on theferrett's journal. And the rest of you, really, don't you wish you were? [EDIT -- I had misspelled theferrett's name and this was linking to the wrong user before. Whoops!]

Anyway, I had to share a snippet from laurenscavenger who says she was once dared into writing slash between two *buildings*:

Sometimes, late at night, I long to fall against you, to feel your glass window-walls shatter open in a kind of welcoming embrace. We'd both fall to your floor, more fully entwined than humans could dream of with their arms and their legs. But it will never happen. Melbourne just isn't a high-risk zone for earthquakes.

Fan-freakin'-tastic. =:) Full (very short, obviously) story is here

That is all.