Writing

So I'm trying to think of something to write about.

It's not that I don't have things to say, but rather that sometimes I forget them before I ever make it to the "write" phase.

I found a neat post on writing today that's been making the blog rounds.

Mostly I'm thinking that I need to enforce a policy of writing even if it's about not knowing what to write, or else I'll be missing the target with my reasons for blogging. Kapeesh?

Negative News

Today I was reading a post about a school asking a teacher to stop pushing blogs and wikis in his school and remembered the tale of the blogger who was fired from her job as an airline attendant for writing a semi-fictional account of her life in the sky and all of the bad news about e-voting machines and such. I was thinking about why all of these accounts tend to be negative, when I had an epiphany - it wouldn't be news if it weren't!

I think there is a natural tendency in blogs to report on the outrageous because bloggers do what they do out of a passion for it, and it's natural to become passionately engaged in defending something you see as an injustice. The "things are just peachy" entries (which are probably rarer to begin with) tend to get ignored by the blogging community. Who but "the man" would blog about how great working for some company is?

del.icio.us

For those of you who've been diligent at following the recent tech buzz this will be old hat, but I use a social bookmarks manager called del.icio.us to keep all of my bookmarks organized. Essentially, it provides you with a little bookmarklet (a java button you can click in your toolbar) to post the new pages you find and want to save. Then, you can see who else has that page bookmarked, see how they categorized it, what other pages they have saved, and more. It also syndicates every page with RSS, so if you find a user or a tag that you wish to keep tabs on, it's easy to do so. It's completely public, so it does raise privacy questions, but regardless it is a very powerful tool. You can find my bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/jaresty/.

Getting Started

Welcome to my brand new blog!

I decided today that I need to start getting serious about keeping a blog. Two good reasons I can think of are:
1. To improve my writing skills.
2. To share what I have to say.

I'm a 24-year old Software Engineer from Boston. I graduated from Tufts a year and a half ago, and am currently working on the receiving software (in Ruby) for an ASP. I follow ~70 blogs daily on subjects ranging from human computer interaction and technology to copyright law to educational technology, so, I guess you could say I'm interested in new and future technology.

I hope you enjoy reading.