Wednesday, January 22, 2003

Hilary Rosen Is A Dangerous Moron Today's Wired article covering Ms. Rosen's idiocy is quite a read. I particularly liked this bit, wherein security consultant Robert Farrell gives Hilary the what-for: "Well, Ms. Rosen, I'll tell you what: You forward all your e-mail unedited to a public mailing list, scan and post all your private written correspondence to the same list, give us all-read access to your hard drives and post 24-7 webcams in your boudoir and bathroom, and then I'll believe you understand the invasion of privacy your shrill insistence on flushing what's left of the Constitution down the toilet entails," Ferrell suggested. What is it with women named Hilary, by the way? Yikes! 6:37:42 AM

I've taken a lot of time off, not writing in this weblog for two weeks. In that time I've recovered (mostly) from the holidays, gotten back to work in a big way, and have gotten the professional site Pervasive Computing News up and running. So I haven't been lazy. It's more like I'm trying to decide what to do with my time and energy in 2003. January is always an opportunity for a fresh start, but this January is more so. I can feel the last bits of my old life falling away, and what's left is...different. Perhaps not better, certainly not worse, but different. It's hard to explain. I do know that writing simply about technology just doesn't "do it" for me. In creating the other site, I hoped to be so consumed with the subject matter that I could leave the introspective, semi-random reflections about life behind. But that doesn't work. The tech-only writing gets old fast. I need either fiction writing (made up lives) or commentary on my own journey to really scratch the writing itch. Much criticism has been aimed at the new generation of diarists, created by the weblog boom. After all, how many recounts of puerile adolesence can one stand? Just living through the teen and early 20's years is bad enough; living it again through another's writing can be pure torture. Though I may not want to read those weblogs, I feel a certain kinship with the authors. They've got the itch, and some will pull out of the self-reflective black hole. Others won't, but there's room for them too. The Net is a big place. I'm still not sure what makes web-published journals useful or even desirable, but once you've really got the bug, it's hard to shake. So I'll continue to strive for a balance between writing for professional reasons and writing for personal reasons. I don't think I'm there yet. But as I told a group of people yesterday, pessimism is the belief that the bad things in our past are good indicators of the future. Optimism is the sureness that they aren't. And that means I've come full circle - a year ago I believed I had lost my optimism, that life ahead looked decidedly downhill. Today I know that's not true. 6:12:50 AM

© Copyright 2003 Jeff Nichols.