Mac Apps

THIS is a meme I’ve seen around here and there, offered as a fun way to introduce yourself to new readers, which seems about right as NaBloPoMo kicks off here. The idea is to pick 26 words that somehow describe you. Some of them may be a bit of a stretch since the letters that are worth more in Scrabble are harder to work into things like this.

• A is for Aardvark, or more formally, the Aardvark Computing Society, the geekiest of the geek clubs in my high school. Legend has it that the name was chosen as a “hack” so they’d be listed first in the yearbook.
• B is for board games. I have always had a love for playing interesting board games. “Interesting” in this sense tends to have a direct correlation to how many little pieces come in the box, and how many scores of pages the rule book is. Complexity can be fun! My current favorite is Return to Dark Tower, but there are many that have held my interest at this point.
• C is for Computer Science, my field of expertise, what my degrees are in, and what I’m grateful every day that people actually pay me to do for a living, despite the fact I’d do it for fun anyway.
• D is for D&D, a game I’ve enjoyed playing since I was a teenager. (Although technically we moved from D&D to Pathfinder a few years ago.)
• E is for Eagle. I slid onto the plate with this one, finishing the requirements too close for comfort before my 18th birthday, but I’m glad now, looking back on it, that I put in the effort to get this rank while I was in Scouts. It proved to me that I was capable of doing something challenging and was something I encouraged my kids to reach for as well.
• F is for family. One of the most important things in my life.
• G is for The Gashlycrumb Tinies, a macabre little book by Edward Gorey that describes the unpleasant fates of 26 children in A-B-C style. (“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears,” and so forth.) I had a poster form of the book up in my apartment at college, just showing off my darker sense of humor, but it ended up creeping out my roommates too much, which was also amusing but I took pity on them and took it down.
• H is for hovercraft. As a fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus since I was a teenager, I made sure that as long as I was going to the trouble to learn another language, I had to learn how to say that iconic phrase, “My hovercraft is full of eels.” (Which, if you’re curious, is something like 我的氣墊船充滿了鱔魚—wǒde qìdiánchuàn chōngmǎn le shànyú.)
• I is for ice storms, something we survived several winters when I was a kid. It usually amounted to a week without power sometime in January while the city was paralyzed with all the streets covered in a layer of ice.
• J is for journal, this thing I’m writing in now, which has proven to be a great way to remember all the things that have happened in my life over the last few decades.
• K is for Kermit, in tribute to how much I used to love the Muppets as a kid.
• L is for labels. Our family started a tradition of using barcode labels instead of gift tags at Christmas, so the kids wouldn’t peek or open any gifts until Christmas Day (and more to the point, a reasonable time on Christmas Day) because they couldn’t tell which gifts were theirs until we unlocked the codes so they could scan them to find out.
• M is for Magic: the Gathering, a great card game I’ve enjoyed. Also, an indicator of how geeky my wife and I are—we brought our Magic cards with us on our honeymoon and played a game or two in the card room on the cruise ship.
• N is for nature, a place I like to occasionally go visit to relax and unwind.
• O is for optimistic, something I tend to be, probably to a fault.
• P is for programming, my favorite pastime.
• Q is for quilts. A lot of my childhood memories involve my mom’s quilt frames set up in the living room as she worked on sewing one quilt after another.
• R is for Ragnarok, the best Multi-User Dungeon game on the Internet. And where I met my wife, so it’s kind of special to us.
• S is for Science Fiction, one of my favorite genres of fiction (along with Fantasy). Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Lathe of Heaven, so many more, each with an interesting story to tell.
• T is for Tolkien, who contributed so much to Fantasy literature and folklore that I’ve enjoyed most of my life.
• U is for unusual. I love being unconventional in creative ways.
• V is for volcano, something I live in the shadow of. A few volcanoes, actually. Never gave them much thought until the spring of 1980, when one we thought had been extinct decided to erupt and wipe out the summer camp we were planning to go to that year. And dumped volcanic ash all over us just to complete the bargain.
• W is for whodunit. I don’t read mysteries often enough, but I enjoy trying to figure them out before the big reveal.
• X is sort of for eXtreme programming, a novel new way of organizing the work of a team of programmers, invented by a friend of mine and his associates.
• Y is for Yendor. I spent many hours earlier in my life in pursuit of the Amulet of Yendor, the ultimate prize in the computer game Rogue.
• Z is for zen. I don’t subscribe specifically to the discipline of that name, but the general appeal of finding my mental place of calm and focus is something I often feel, to recharge in the middle of the hectic chaos of my life.

My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!
—Dr. Seuss
On Beyond Zebra

I  have been holding onto this Friday Fiver for a couple of weeks, mostly just because I haven’t got around to posting anything for a while. But somehow it seems apropos enough to bring out here as I start NaBloPoMo and have the topic of online journaling on my mind.

As usual, this Friday Five is brought to you by the letter F and the number 5, courtesy of sumrsue79 and posted to thefridayfive by anais_pf.¹

1. How long ago did you join LJ (or DW)?

   I started my LiveJournal in October, 2003. This comes after a lifetime of growing up being taught that keeping a personal journal or diary is one of life’s highest virtues and something I was really strongly encouraged to do from an early age. The small stack of empty journals I was given as gifts over the years attests to how well that worked out. Having not had my ADHD diagnosed until much, much later in life may have been a factor, but generally speaking it was just very difficult for me to sit down and organize my thoughts in a permanent fashion like a pre-bound journal in ink. And when I did, I was paralyzed any time I missed writing anything because I couldn’t just carry on with a gap without completely and perfectly filling in all the missing bits first, so I could never catch up and thus every attempt was soon abandoned.

   Fast forward to 2003. I’m allegedly a grown-up with a real life, job, marriage, pets, house, and as a father of young kids, I realized that there were a lot of memories, experiences, and thoughts going by that would be lost in the wind if I didn’t somehow manage to get myself to write them down along the way.

   I found that a few of my friends were blogging on LiveJournal and on an impulsive whim I signed up, thinking I’d just post an occasional random thought here or there, but before I knew it I was full-on chronicling my life. Somehow I found the medium where that actually worked for me.

   After a while, LJ was bought out by a company that changed the terms of service—including the concerning bit about everything posted there being subject to terms that were only available in Russian.² Plus, apparently it included something about how everything posted would be considered under Russian law as if posted by a media outlet with serious consequences if you said anything that in their view was controversial or restricted.

   I didn’t sign up for any of that nonsense just to keep my personal journal, which isn’t a political media outlet at all, other than as a human being I have a few opinions about things. So along with a number of other LJ refugees, I moved my journal over to Dreamwidth, which is a nearly identical platform (technically) which still has the home-grown volunteer-effort feel to it.

2. How did you find out about LJ (or DW)?

   I guess I already answered that in the previous question.

3. If someone introduced you to LJ (or DW), is s/he still on your friends list?

   Yes, technically, but sadly times have changed. The crowds of people I used to follow and interact with between all our LJ and DW journals (and blogs on other sites as well) faded away as people were more drawn to quick sound bites on Facebook (etc.) over writing longer, more thoughtful discourse in the blogosphere.

   So while the friends who were the ones who introduced me to LJ originally are still on my friends list, they’re not active there anymore (or on DW).

4. Have you introduced anyone to LJ (or DW)?

   Yes, a few, mostly just in the same way I was introduced. In a casual conversation, something I wrote about in my blog would come up and I would suggest the idea of checking out blogs to them, or some similar way of introduction.

5. Is your LJ (or DW) public or friends only, and why?

   It started out friends-only because at the time my kids were still growing up and I was writing a lot about our family activities and life experiences, and just for the sake of due diligence of online safety, I didn’t want the entire universe unchecked access to all of that, so I managed access to those who asked first so at least there was some sense I knew who my audience was.

   These days, now that those days are past us, I’ve opened up my journal to be mostly public and the content is more focused on more general life topics since I’m not raising kids anymore at this point in my life.

The bravest journey is the one within.
—Amanda Lee

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¹To play along, copy these questions to your journal/blog, answer them and post a link back as a comment in thefridayfive.
²They provided an English translation for our convenience but didn’t guarantee anything about its accuracy in any legally-binding way, so we were still at the mercy of whatever the Russian text said.