Preparing my Libraries orientation for graduate computer science students, and found this fascinating article on ACM Queue vol. 1, no. 4 - June 2003 - "How Much Storage is Enough?" : "In 1999, the world produced about 1.5 exabytes of storable content (1018 bytes). This is 1.5 billion gigabytes, and is equivalent to about 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. Printed documents of all kinds make up only .003 percent of the total. Magnetic storage is by far the largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard-drive capacity doubling every year. Magnetic storage is rapidly becoming the universal medium for information storage...Although the social impact of the Web has been phenomenal, about 500 times as much e-mail is being produced per year than Web pages. It appears that about 610 billion e-mails are sent per year, compared with 2.1 billion static Web pages. Even the yearly flow of Usenet news is more than three times the stock of Web pages. As Andrew Odlyzko puts it, "Communication, not content, is the killer app." "

Matty (a link I found via Let Me Get This Straight) gives a good overview of Internet trends over the past year. Bang on.

I hear so much about Friendster, and I've signed myself up, but I haven't recommended any friends yet, so I can't surf :-( but it does sound interesting. and it certainly is generating a lot of buzz. I wonder how well something like Friendster would work if you live in what the beautiful people of SF, LA, and NYC would probably consider to be the hinterlands LOL

Oh God, I'm indulging in a Winnipegger's favourite pastime: putting ourselves down. Somebody slap me.

Came across this by accident: Let Me Get This Straight...

Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian: "People become librarians because they know too much."

... just spreading the meme :-) now go worship your nearest librarian...

Well, I have been sucked into blogspace, and I may never return :-)

I listed my Rainbow Lives Blog with the Blog Search Engine, Blogdex, and the Eatonweb portal.

I also went merrily a-blog-hopping using the top 100 lists at BlogStreet. I'm discovering a world that I barely knew existed!

I could sit and watch Geoblog for an hour...it's somewhat mesmerizing when you realize that you're watching bloggers in real time, all over the world.

MemeFirst reports that Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, has come out to avoid being outed by Entertainment Weekly:

So Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, went and audio-blogged a very angry message, talking about the EW writer's suicide attempt and generally coming out because he felt he had no choice in the wake of the publication of the article. (I can't seem to access that message any more: maybe Palahniuk is trying to crawl back into the closet.)

Palahniuk then received a lot of supportive messages – if you consider death threats against the EW writer to be supportive. I guess at this point he went back and actually read the article again, and realised that nowhere was his partner mentioned, and that the closest it came to outing him was to say "he is not married". So he audioblogged a retraction of sorts, in which he urged everybody to calm down and "not kill anybody".

In the world of print media, none of this would have happened. Palahniuk would have been angry upon reading the article, but would have slept on it, and would have realised that if he did nothing, then no one would be any the wiser. Instead, in a fit of passion, he pulls out his cellphone and announces his homosexual partnership of 11 years to the world at large – something which he'd thereunto successfully kept secret. Now the secret's out, and no amount of pulling messages is going to help. Worse, a largely blameless EW writer is probably now petrified that a crazy Palahniuk fan (and there's no shortage of them around) is going to do her some serious harm.

I agree...for God's sake JUST COME OUT already and stop dancing around the subject.

I've set up another test blog on Mo'Time. (Well, O.K., actually three blogs, but who's counting?)

Had a bit of fun going through Joe Clark's Alternadomains, and thinking about some of the fun domain names I could make up. My personal favourite is: http://fel.la (hey.fel.la! fun.fel.la! gay.fel.la!)... but it's not worth shelling out US$200 for that particular pleasure :-)

I thought it was hilarious that this site states "Los Angeles is the world's first and only city to receive its own unique Internet address; .la." Uh, I hate to break it to you Angelenos, but .la stands for Laos, not Los Angeles.

Here's the article on blogs that got me started on my investigation of blogging: The Intimacy of Blogs (Maclean's magazine, September 15th, 2003). I first heard about Layne Johnson and her blog here. So if I have to blame somebody, she's it... j/k :-)

Over lunch, I printed off and read an article in The Altantic by Paul Davies about the impact of finding extraterrestrial life would have on Earth's organized religions: "...the discovery of just a single bacterium somewhere beyond Earth would force us to revise our understanding of who we are and where we fit into the cosmic scheme of things, throwing us into a deep spiritual identity crisis that would be every bit as dramatic as the one Copernicus brought about in the early 1500s, when he asserted that Earth was not at the center of the universe."

Wow. Blogdex is full of very good stuff today. A quote from an article on why weblogs should be allowed to apply for International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSNs): Compatibility of Weblogs and ISSN: "For the first time in history, A.J. Liebling’s maxim that freedom of the press belongs to whoever owns one has actually come true. In the past, only corporations and institutions could afford to publish. Now it is possible for individuals and groups to publish. "

Bravo and Amen.

My favourite Michael Moore quote about librarians, from a Buzzflash interview:

"I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group...They are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man."

I just love this quote.

Oh my God! Michael Moore has a Web site. I should have known he would (duh!), it's an obvious medium for him, but I cannot believe I have never stumbled across it before in all my Web surfing. Or maybe I had, filed it away somewhere, and forgot about it.

Michael Moore.com (found this due to a story linked via Blogdex)

I got the Archives thing working again (yay!) Now I just have to fix it for my other blog Rainbow Lives: Queer Biography and History.

I'm also experimenting with blog-city, another free software program. It has some nice features. Still investigating, looking at options...

ARGH!! I am having problems getting the archives feature working on this blog, so I temporarily disabled archives and posted a message to the Blogger FAQ blog. Thank God for people like Phil Ringnalda to help out us clueless newbies :-)

glbtq.com: the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender & queer encyclopedia is a marvelous Web site, and I participate in the discussion forums there.

I've decided to move a lot of these blog links to myInternet Treasure Map, rather than just leave them here in the blog. I'm still not so sure what I'll be using this thing for (certainly not for pouring out my heart on my sleeve...boy, I guess I have really changed from when I was younger).

The BradLands: Must See HTTP...another fun site.

Weblog Awards -- woohoo!

On a coffee break at work. You know, I am really starting to have serious second thoughts about this whole blog business. Plain Layne writes how she's afraid that her girlfriend will find out she writes a blog. I don't know that I feel comfortable about hiding something I do, like it's shameful or something. I mean, if you put it up on the Internet, why the fuck don't you just tell her already?!? She's gonna find out anyway. And if you have serious doubts about anybody seeing what you wrote... and that's where I have to do some more thinking about this endeavour. Maybe I don't want to do this after all, or maybe I will do it in a more de-personalized area of my life. I dunno, just thinking out loud right now. I may decide to gut this whole thing and start over.

And another one...QueerFilter GLBT Blogs & Journals

And here's another list worth a ramble...

Another favourite list that I've been using as a starting-point for some blogsurfing: East West: Top 30 Gay Blogs

One of my favourite blogs from back in early 2002 when I first started exploring blogspace (only to set it aside until now): Ernie's little. yellow. different. And some classic posts...

Another interesting blog I found thru Layne's list: intellectual properties, by Amy Leblanc.

Puttering around in my housecoat, still feeling sick. Housecleaning gets put aside again, as I plunk myself down in front of the TV to watch La Barbra in Timeless. (I didn't plan it, I just came across it while channel-surfing.) I came to Streisand late, and I haven't been playing it much lately, but it's fun to hear her belt out the tunes.

Aaaah... she's doing Evergreen. "You and I will make each night a first; every day a beginning / Spirits rise and their dance is unrehearsed / They warm and excite us because we have the brightest love / Two lights that shine as one / Morning glory and midnight sun" mmmm....

Exhibit A on how having a blog can impact your life...
Heather B. Armstrong (a.k.a. dooce): "I am that girl who lost her job because of her website. It was really cool. You can read about that here."

Matthew Baldwin of Defective Yeti has some very funny posts, as I discover while blogsurfing late on a Saturday afternoon, nursing some sort of cold or flu bug, sucking back orange juice in the mistaken belief that massive doses of Vitamin C are actually going to fix anything at this point. ARGH.

Here's another one: Confessions of Shameless Agitator... another intelligent, well-written, well-argued blog. Hallelujah!

A Question to Live: How much of a shameless agitator do I want to be?

Still trolling thru blogpsace, using Layne as my jump-off. A few links led me to Space Waitress Gate A, where she posts about the problems she is having with depression and thoughts of suicide.

Having struggled with that myself in the past, I felt compelled to respond. So I actually posted a comment on a blog: my first ever.

In her most recent post, spacewaitress talks about getting drunk. Nuh-uh. Bad move. There's a lot of drunks in bars who are medicating away their depressions with alcohol... trading one problem for an even bigger one. But I can't seem to bring myself to say that. Why? Am I afraid of offending someone? Maybe.

Another question to live: How involved in others' lives do I get?

Someone at work wanted to know what "phat" meant and I did a Google search at the reference desk and came up with this. I must admit it's a good idea: have the slang-users define the slang. It beats having some eighty-year-old lexicographer do it :-)

I spent a very enjoyable lunchtime skimming through 50 Years of DNA, an engagingly-written overview of the first fifty years of the discovery of DNA's structure and the implications of that discovery. (2003 marks the 50th anniversay of Watson and Crick's paper on their discovery of the double-helix.)

Here's another one I like...

Ooh, and Rebecca's got a list of reference sites, rebecca's guide to the perplexed. She gets major points from this librarian :-)

Still up, still blogsurfing. I kinda like what's in rebecca's pocket? as well; I can remember following this site a year or two ago (becuz it's in my IE Favourites list), but looking at it again, it's refreshing to see someone who uses their blog for more than this-is-what-I-did-today.

Well, I've decided to go ahead and rename this blog As I Live the Questions, with reference to the Rilke quote I mentioned below (Sept. 11th). I'll try the name on for a little while and see how it fits...

Wow. WOW. The woman behind Plain Layne can really write: "I remember walking along that sugar cane field like it was earlier today, skirting its knife-edged emerald fringe in the moist torrid heat. Everything was plastered to me with sweat -- hair, clothes, dirt. Even my backpack was soaked. Jungle-coated mountains were slicing open the bellies of clouds and I could smell the unmistakeable odor of a diesel-powered cane grinder, all smoky exhaust and sweet aroma."

I've decided to use Plain Layne as my starting point for blogspace exploration (why not? gotta start somewhere, right?)

At lunch today I created a couple of new gay.com userids. I find it hilarious when I sign on as someone new and immediately get hit upon as "fresh meat". I'm also carrying around this crazy idea of visiting several chatrooms under the username rainbowlives and putting a link to the Rainbow Lives Web site into my bio line, to promote my hobby Web site.

Sigh... God, I have just got to get myself a real life :-(

I was reading Maclean's (the Sept. 15, 2003 issue) on my morning coffee-break when I came across the article on blogs, and I surfed over to Plain Layne to take a peek (she's discussed at length in the article). Fascinating. The idea of posting the most intimate details of your life, then actually encouraging feedback from strangers (and fans...this woman has fans!!!) is still a little strange to me, even someone so out-there-and-open-book-and-here-is-my-life as me. But I think I will investigate blogspace further. Anyways, back 2 work, gotta catalogue orientation to update to match the latest makeover (sigh) . I have a class of Environmental Science students at 2:30 that this needs to be ready for... One last thing. I was worried about how self-absorbed I would look to post a few photos of myself...this woman has dozens and dozens. In comparison I look like I'm in the Witness Protection Program :-)

Well, I finally got around to scanning some pictures of myself and putting them up on my personal Web site. I always think I photograph so terribly, but at least I have a handful of pictures that I don't mind showing to the world :-) I really like the three photos from my trip to Banff and Yoho National Parks this summer.

Came across the Moontaxi site while investigating the impending launch of puretracks.com. Started listening to the Ultimate 80s station while working... sounds pretty good. I can't wait for puretracks to launch :-)

Flash mobs...gotta love'em. I'd go to this one, but I have to go to church and sing with the choir. Damn :-)

I actually had a nice time last night! I actually met someone nice on gay.com (who'dathunkit). Later on I went to Fuel café and met Dr. Mike and Stephen. I had a pretty good evening, but I skipped the bar...I was just too tired.

Tonight I'm meeting somebody who chatted with me Monday on Gay.com, I'm 50% expecting to be stood up, I guess I'm not going into this with any sort of expectations. I'm becoming cynical in my old age :-)

The technolust never goes away--it just transfers to something else. Now that I've had my Blackberry for a while, and integrated it into my life, I find myself longing for an iPod. I just wish they weren't still so expensive. Oh well, I can wait.

I love this Live The Questions quote, in fact, I bought a journal that has this quote on the cover. I was even thinking about calling this blog Live the Questions. But I'm still wondering: Why a blog? Is this meant to replace my paper journal? To supplement it? Do I really want to post things here where anyone with a Web browser can read them? Maybe these are some of the questions I must live :-)

It wasn't until I saw the flags outside the fire station flying at half-mast that I realized it was 9/11, the anniversary day. There's a prayer session at University Centre at 10, but I've got so much work to do (which is why I'm wasting my time with a post to my blog). Well, back 2 work, I've got several student orientations to prepare. Sigh...

Tonight was the first rehearsal for The Rainbow Harmony Project's fifth season. God I am so tired tonight, but I'm glad I decided to take part again this year. I'm looking forward to going to Montreal for the VIIe Festival International GALA Choruses next July.

On Sept. 1st I put a web page counter on my hobby Web site, Rainbow Lives. I'm surprised that the page has had 130 hits in only 4 days! Somebody must be looking at it...even if it's only the Web bots (sigh...). I've been so busy lately that I haven't had time to update it.

The Smoking Gun does it again. Former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers' mugshot... a lot of people had been waiting for that one :-)

My friend Brian took a great picture of me at Yoho National Park this past Tuesday, a week ago today. I put it up on my personal Web site.

I think that The Smoking Gun is a brilliant Web site. They recently broke the Oui interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is going to give him some explaining to do to California voters :-)

Well, I've decided to try my hand at the blog thing. I had an earlier one but it petered out after a few posts. That might happen with this one, too. We'll see. I've decided to call it As I Am because I used that phrase in a headline for my most recent gay.com profile: "As I am, for who you are".