Is this some sort of sign?
I admit that for the past few months it's been difficult to produce Boidem columns.
Partially this has been due to being engulfed by too many other tasks, primarily
of the unavoidable maintaining-a-livelihood sort, which, whether I like it or
not, take precedence. Partially it's been due to other writing tasks which have
dominated my thinking, and my writing style. And
there's an additional reason, one which also demands to be acknowledged. Early
signs of the encroachment of this reason were visible nine years ago when, referring
to the fact that I didn't mind not having an updated
personal web site because I'd discovered that those web sites had ceased to
truly captivate me, I wrote that "the thrill is
gone". But that was only one step in a rather inevitable long march leading,
three years ago, to a more general confession:
the internet - at least as a tool, but perhaps also as a concept - has so thoroughly penetrated our culture, that it's ceased to be interesting
In other words, there are times, and some of these become rather lengthy stretches,
during which I wonder whether a continued examination of "computers and information
technologies in everyday life" still merits a monthly examination of the
sort I try to conduct.
Which lead me to this month's date tie-in, a tie-in found in the Wikipedia entry
for this column's upload date. It's there
that I learned that in 1669, almost 340 years ago:
Citing poor eyesight, Samuel Pepys records the last event in his diary.
I follow Pepys' diary in my RSS reader.
Or more precisely, I receive updates to the wonderfully blogged version of this
diary in my RSS reader. I've drastically cut back on actually reading the entries
to the diary. Somehow keeping abreast of what was happening in London, day by
day, over 300 years ago just doesn't seem to be a high priority item for me. But
Pepys can most certainly be considered a proto-blogger, and the coincidence of
my acknowledging the difficulty of maintaining this project with reading that
(yes, on this day) he brought an end to his ten year project might even be seen
as an omen of some sort.
By the way, though it's been a few years now that I've had to remove my glasses
in order to read a book or a newspaper, my eyesight is still fully passable.
Go to: It's nothing personal.