Why Blog

I've been using the internet since July 1990, when Hal, this guy I met at Kerrville Folk Festival (the first time I attended) told me about it as a cheap way we could "chat" via computer between my home in Austin, where I was working at and about to become a student at the University of Texas, and College Station, where he was enrolled in pursuit of a Ph.D. in computer science. Back then, my desktop Mac (the first one I had didn't even have a hard drive, I loaded the operating system and maybe some rudimentary word processing program with one floppy, then had another floppy to save my work on) was a dummy terminal, connecting to a much bigger computer at the University of Texas via a SLIP account. I think the mainframe was Uncle Walt, and the computers we dialed into were various Disney characters (Donald, Daisy, Mickey, et al.)

Hal talked me into signing up for an account. I had never heard of this thing, but it was free by virtue of me being a student. I was one of the first liberal arts majors to get an email address and an internet access account. Hal and I could then use the Unix command TALK to talk to each other---totally non-graphic, just text. Hal also showed me Usenet. He had been using Usenet back when it was possible to keep abreast of every Usenet group, back in his days as a math major at the University of Rochester, than a programmer at the Naval Research Labs. Later, I learned to FTP and how to use this program called Fetch. This was hot shit in the research world---you had to know the address and where and how to find it, but you could look up information on another computer thousands of miles away.

In December 1993, I left for the UK, where I had a 6 month work visa. I worked at the Centre for Tropical Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. CTVM was out away from the city of Edinburgh some 4 or 5 miles---it was maybe a half mile from where Dolly the first cloned sheep was, er, conceived. The University of Edinburgh proper had internet access, but CTVM was just getting it when I was there, and I found myself the unlikely candidate for Resident Email Guru, since I knew more about how it worked, and had used it much more, than anyone else there (kind of scary, considering how little I knew).

When I returned to Texas in July 1994, Hal sat me down in front of one of the big Sun workstations at Texas A&M University, where he worked, and fired up this program called Mosaic. He then introduced me to the World Wide Web, which seemed to have sprung up in the 8 months I had been away. He went to one page, clicked a link, clicked on another link from there, and..... it was magic!!! Suddenly I could look up information on the computers at the University of Cardiff (Wales) without knowing the exact FTP address of the files. It was amazing!

Suddenly, everyone who was any kind of computer geek had to have a web page. The problem was, there was really nothing to put up. People posted their resumes, and web pages about themselves, talking about how wonderful their fascination with Van Halen was, or talking about their farts, or..... it was almost all completely juvenile, puerile, and pointless. Very few web pages said anything of any real interest worth saying. I never learned HTML (which I regret) because I wasn't narcissistic enough to fancy that people actually gave a shit about the minute details of my life.

Fast forward to 2009. There are so many blogs (web logs) that we have the "blogosphere". People seem to substitute interest in other people's doings for interesting things in their own lives. People live virtual lives instead of real ones.

So what's a ruminative woman to do? I sometimes post journal-type writings to an email list I'm on, the Unofficial St. John's College Alumni List, but it's an email list, not my own personal journal. So finally, in November 2009, I decided that I would join the narcissistic hordes and create my own blog. Read it or not, as you please. It's a free country and a free internet.