Things I've Noticed

Happy Thanksgiving from T.I.N.

I just wanted to wish all of you, including my loyal readers, a Happy Thanksgiving. I'll be saving a turkey by not eating one, but all the other food will be delicious. Speaking of turkeys, we also now have wild turkeys in our neighborhood, just like this Oregon town in the video I've linked to.  Our neighborhood team won our 18th Annual Turkey Bowl and I had a fumble recovery for a touchdown.  I'm now getting sensation back in my toes so it's good.  It will be a different and somewhat sad Thanksgiving without my dad, but we still have a lot to be thankful for.  Good friends, family, food, shelter, employment, and health should not be taken for granted.  Let's just hope the world comes around and becomes more peaceful. 

+ Atul

Passing on The Blogging Bug to Students

First of all, I apologize for the delay in posting.  I have no excuse other than just being busy.  But I'm getting back into the swing of things and I wanted to write about a great opportunity I had a couple of weeks ago.  Thanks to friend, volleyball captain, and frequent T.I.N.  visitor Dave P.'s current teaching job at a local university called Madonna University, he asked me to present to one of his classes about blogging.  I was temporarily considered a blogging expert.  So I put together a presentation to go through with his class and the students learned about blogging at a general level.  I called it, "Blogging:  What It's All About, Why You Might Want to Do It, and How To Do It Too."  My intent was to introduce them to the world of blogging and to get them interested in blogging to the point that some of them might even start one.  I don't know if I was successful, but one of the assignments Dave handed out, was for the students to comment on one of my blogposts.  (You might have noticed the sudden increase in comments).  I appreciated the insightful comments from the class members.  I want to thank Dave, his class for paying attention and being nice considering how late in the day it was.  Thanks also to them for the gift certificate to a local vegetarian restaurant which I will use soon. 

In addition to presenting, somebody else Dave works with, Dan, was nice enough to record my whole presentation as a podcast you can download here --> Download Atul_Blogging_Things_Ive_Noticed.mp3 .  This is great if you want to learn about blogging or if you want to hear what I sound like the night after staying up late to finish a presentation.  Thanks Dan.  Overall, presenting to students about blogging was a great experience and made me feel like becoming a professor.  It sure beats presenting to management.

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Sidebars: Confusion-Creating Mini Articles

I like to read magazines and newspapers... a lot, even more than books.  Automotive ones, news ones, business ones, science ones…  They're all good in their own unique way, but the one thing that magazines all seem to have are sidebars.  These are those sectioned off or shaded areas containing short articles within long articles, ones that talk about a topic related to the one you already began reading.  They're usually interesting little tidbits.  But what confuses me is that I never know when I should read them.  If I read them after I finish the main article, I might forget.  If I interrupt my flow of reading the main article and read the sidebar, it might have the most relevance, but then I might not remember where I left off in the main article.  Then I'll waste time by rereading stuff I already read.  I know this sidebar stuff is not a huge deal, but it comes up often as I read lots of magazines and newspapers.  On a sidenote, what's interesting is that when I searched on the word "sidebar" for images, this is the only picture that I found that shows one, (and it's at the bottom).  Yet, these things are everywhere in newspaper and magazine articles.  I could always boycott sidebars, but I might miss some really good writing. 

I wonder who invented this idea.  I'm guessing some newspaper editor realized that they couldn't use all their space in a given issue and they gave an assignment to a junior writer to write a short article to fill in space with one requirement.  It had to have something to do with the main article.

Today I see that the whole sidebar phenomenon has migrated to the internet web page world.  In this context, it's not so bad.  Everything on the page is typically in sections anyway and are all meant to be read whenever in any order.  Chances are the sidebar is unrelated to anything else on the web page.

When do you read sidebar articles?  Do you like them or wish they would be banned?

+ Atul

Lost Writing And The Inferior Re-write

We've all been there.  You see a great blogpost, (perhaps like this one), and you feel the urge to comment.  Or, you write an intense, well-thought out email to a close friend expressing your every emotion in just the right way.  But the one way you don't think things through is not having the foresight to back up what you wrote "just in case".  And then the worst case just in case happens.  Your masterpiece of writing doesn't get accepted by the blog site you commented on and when you hit BACK, you find that your writing is completely gone.  This also happens with emails more often than it should.  Well, this minor incident in isolation may not seem like such a big deal, but when considered collectively, it is a wasteland of masterpieces.  How many times do you lose some great work, and then force yourself to re-write it?  After you scream out in frustration, the reality of the situation sets in and then you have to decide what to do next.

You at first try to re-trace your mental steps and rewrite the text exactly as you did the first time.  But it's never as good the second time around.  Even if it's important writing, we still put less effort into the "second work" after the first piece is gone.  And I suppose this makes sense.  Why try to recreate original thoughts when they are no longer as original and succinct?  I find that I start off my second writing the same, but then I take the writing in a slightly different direction.  There is a chance that some of our second works have been better than our lost original works, but I doubt that happens very often.

Make sure to over-use the SAVE button on any email program.  I also highly recommend copying and pasting blogposts or blogpost comments into a word processor before you SUBMIT.  These techniques have saved me numerous times, but I occasionally fall into the trap of creative carelessness.  Perhaps it's just fate that certain "original works" of writing on the computer were never meant to be posted or published.  That gets into philosophy of technology, a relatively new branch of philosophy which I intend to explore further.

+ Atul

I'll be 36 in 15 minutes

I'll be glad to leave this last year behind, but I don't feel much like celebrating.

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On Hiatus

Due to a death in my immediate family, I will not be writing any blogposts for a little while.  When I feel up to it, I will be back.

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Bachelor Reality Shows and Beautiful but Desperate(?) Women

I believe it started with "Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire" and the agony continues with "Age of Love," which is this new show where a set of attractive 20-somethings compete with a set of attractive 30-somethings for the heart (and body) of a 30-something guy.  Am I the only one to have wondered why all these attractive women that could get a date just about anywhere, go gaga for one (usually dull) guy.  They fall in love, get jealous, have visions of family and marriage with this guy within two episodes.  Some of them even resort to name-calling and backstabbing.  I suppose this makes it entertaining, but these women are either great actresses or they have serious issues.  The women that lose end up in tears, thinking that their life is about over once the guy rejects her.  Maybe they just want to be famous, but I guess getting it at the expense of their dignity is OK.

And they put up with the guy dating and being intimate with many women at one time.  If only women not on the TV shows would be amenable to this.  What's interesting is how the one guy / many women show phenomenon seems to have more staying power than the one women / many guys format shows like "The Bachelorette".

If you enjoy the shows, keep having fun.  I don't want to stop anybody.  The only reason I might watch is to see how ridiculously attached the women are to the featured man, and of course to observe the attractive women who are dressing to impress.  (They tend to impress me too).  But I do wonder how many shows like this we can stomach.  There are only so many ways this set up can be spun to be considered fresh and unique.  Perhaps it's time to move on to the next better reality TV show idea.

+ Atul

Your Favorite Pre-VCR Childhood Memories

Beige is the new black.  And here he is in his blog Missives from The Beige this week asking us to dig up those great childhood memories of cartoons, books, toys that made us so happy.  If only things could work on us like that as we got older.  Anyway, have a visit to this week's Roundtable post and re-live the good old days by listing out the great entertainment of your time.  If you can, dig up some links to share with the rest of us.  We're not the only nostalgic ones, and lots of the others have time to put videos and pictures on YouTube and other sites.

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Recall Some Dates You'd Rather Forget

Suzanne just had to do it this week for the Roundtable post.  She is making us dig up our worst dating experience, although they're probably the best ones to read about.  I've had my share, in fact more than my share and I talk about one horrid dating saga over the course of a weekend.  If you're interested, head on over to Suzanne's blog Perfecting Procrastination and read... and contribute.  It would only be fair to share in the miserable memories.

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The Soundtrack of Our Jive

Stephen is taking a cosmic approach to his Roundtable post for this week.  Remember the 70's when NASA launched two Voyager space probes and they put gold records on it with the sounds of the earth?  Well, where's the payback?  Either the aliens haven't found it yet, or they have and they weren't impressed enough to call us or stop by.  So, over at his blog Serenade in Green, Stephen is asking you to comment with what you would put on a mix tape version two for intergalactic communication.  He will be the judge and jury as he will decide what goes on the final version.  The playlist will be posted on Monday so be sure to check back there.

Also, if you're reading this, you are a possible candidate to join the Roundtablers.  You get to comment on the Roundtabler of the week's Thursday post and your turn to post comes up once every couple of months or so.  You get traffic to your site, join a fun group, and grow smarter and funnier each week.  As Stephen puts it, "All you need is a blog, a brain, and a well-stocked bar -- Read all about it and contact one of us for more info..."

+ Atul