9 June 03
The Worth of a Blog
A Brazilian blogging friend recently told us that, last year, there was a service offered in Brazil’s burgeoning blogosphere (estimated at more than 300,000 strong, most using Blogger) where someone would leave a comment on your weblog—for a fee. Not just a “me too,” or “right on,” or trite comment (see Fred First’s chuckler on this, where he discusses comment anxiety), but something of substance.
Apparently that didn’t fly, because now there’s another enterprising Brazilian movement afoot: “I’ll leave a comment on your blog if you leave a comment on mine, and in less than a month you’ll have five thousand comments…” Comment CHAIN LETTERS?
Gosh. I guess I have a different idea of what makes someone’s writing worth reading. We were more than a little amused, then, to dicover we’d been listed in Blogshares. Our blogworth is apparently $2,002.51 as of 6:00 pm today. The value seems to be calculated by, among other things, inbound links, which will surely exacerbate the “please blogroll me” pleadings. If we add the Blogshares logo onto our homepage, we’ll apparently be “verified” and able to trade.
An interesting measure of one’s existence. Insider place blog trading, anyone?
6 June 03
Commencement is my Life
I was wearing a T-shirt today that said “Commencement is my Life”; I silkscreened the calligraphy onto a white shirt a couple of years ago. Among other things, I’m responsible for making sure that 500 graduate students and their faculty go across the stage next Thursday in the Recreation Hall at UC Davis in an orderly manner; that the 70 or so volunteers show up and make this happen; that there are enough chairs, not too close together to impede movement nor too far apart to overrun the space; that the faculty who say they are going to show up to get their PhD students hooded in fact do so and go to the correct side of the building; that the food for the volunteers, food for the orchestra, food for the police, and food for the guests and students gets to where it needs to be in time; that students have their academic dress on the right way around and the correct names on their reader cards and an adequate pronunciation guide of their name in case it’s needed; that guests not place themselves and others in mortal danger by hanging over parapets with tripods. I’ve never been a mother but I imagine this is what it’s like to have several children under the age of five.
And yet….
It’s not quite true. Commencement isn’t really my life. Certainly, the graduation ceremony does occupy an inordinate amount of my time at work these days, but it will be over soon. To be honest, I was tossing and turning at three this morning, but it wasn’t because of commencement stress; I was mentally composing an essay in response to our first collective “Bloggers of Place” assignment (see the Ecotone Wiki, Collective Blogs). I did get up. I did write the essay. And now I can sit and watch it percolate (it’s not due until June 15, but who knows what my life will look like between now and then), while the last few stragglers (“I don’t really want to walk at graduation but my mother wants a picture”) beg for late, atrociously late, admission, while the details of who hands out programs (which of course omit the names of the atrociously late) and where the sign language interpreters stand and what the Dean says (which depends on what the Provost says) and where the bigwigs sit and what position the flowers take and how to explain to the conductor that no, we can’t have the orchestra fill the entire auditorium, because there are nine hundred people that have to file past it—take up my day to the point of breaking.
I’ve been thinking hard about place. My heart has been in Venice today.
26 April 03
Riding Again After Twenty Years
I’ve been riding again after a long absence. Horses are large, unpredictable creatures that seem to have a soul that resonates with mine. I know that spending even a short time around them makes me forget everything else. The smell is something we used to dream of distilling as adolescents. Basically, you either love it or hate it.
Like riding a bicycle, riding a horse is a skill remembered mostly in muscles that don’t necessarily work as well as they used to. But the old instincts are still there: I can still tell when a horse, frisky in the north wind, is about to bolt. Not that this will necessarily save me!
The UC Davis Equestrian Center is adjacent to Highway 113. There are about 60 lesson horses and many others that are owned privately. It’s time for it to move on. There’s a ranch out on Russell Boulevard which has been earmarked for the new Equestrian Center and which is being celebrated this coming week. I hope there will be an indoor arena: riding in the mud in winter and searing heat in summer is no fun. If Davis is successful in its bid to get the new Biosafety Level 4 Lab from NIH, it will sit on the current site of the Equestrian Center.
16 April 03
Interruptions
Feathers of Hope is back online after all sorts of hardware woes on the server. It’s been moved to a new server at the ISP which will hopefully have better luck. Such interruptions definitely break the writing rhythm.
Back at home, the Davis Enterprise had a feature article on blogging yesterday, but once again they fail to put it online. If the local rag has a full-page article, I guess it means blogging really has gone mainstream.
1 April 03
We’re Live!
Feathers of Hope goes live, as I finally got my archiving scheme up and working. There are all sorts of template and stylesheet tweaking to do, but that will come in time.
Oh, the title of the blog refers to the Emily Dickinson poem.
31 March 03
The Earliest Blogger
Samuel Pepys has a weblog. Today’s entry is for 31 March 1660.
31 March 03
Primroses
I have always loved primroses, coming as they do after the daffodils—the first really bright colors of spring. The snails like them, though, and I have to keep a good eye out. The weeds grow here faster than I can keep up with them.
27 March 03
First MT Post!
This is my first weblog post ever!