Four Years, Now What?

Four years ago today we created a blog called "Y2Ten" and proceeded to become a blogoholic, putting up a blizzard of blogging for what seemed like forever.  The years passed.  This morning as we look back, we see we've put 1605 blog posts, even though only 200 were written in Year 2013.

What happened to the past six months?  Where do we stand?  How will we proceed?

Facebook consumed us during the second half of Year 2013.  If Facebook provided a most coherent archive, we'd probably continue putting all our energy into Facebook.  However, Facebook's archives are a joke.  Yesterday, we downloaded our entire Facebook dossier.  It's impossible to make true sense of it.  Yes, everything shard and speck of everything we ever did on Facebook is in the portfolio.  But it's an incoherent, chaotic mess.

The true Beauty of a Blog, particularly THIS blog, is its archival relevance.  Whenever we wish to see whatever it was we did on a certain date or during a certain time period, VIOLA, it's SOOOO Simple!  We just go back to that time period with a few mouse clicks and all the photos and narratives are readily available.  Everything is so neatly arranged in a logical chronological order.

We are danged proud of putting up 1605 blog posts here in the past four years.  We have to admit, we are sheepish and somewhat shamed by neglecting this blog during the past six months.  There really has been no excuse.  Facebook is a mere toy compared to the solid structure of a blog such as this.  Facebook is also quite probably an addiction that holds easy appeal to OCD people such as ourselves.

After studying our Facebook portfolio yesterday, we really had to look ourselves in the mirror and ask, "Self, what are you doing?"  We simply can't justify spending so much time and putting so much stuff onto Facebook.  It runs totally against the grain of why we started this blog in the first place four years ago.

Yes, it's going to be tough to turn our back on Facebook and walk away but we have to do it.  As of yesterday, that simple fact became crystal clear.  if we wish to truly create the equivalent of a "life archive," then there is no other choice.  Facebook is pure entertainment.  Facebook can even be pure fun, too.  But Facebook is definitely not a "life archive."  That's just not part of the Facebook business model and the billionaires who run the asylum have no intentions of creating such an arcane thing as a "life archive".  Only a blog can do that.  Only a blog is suitable for such a thing.

As we read what we wrote four years ago, we really feel a stronger resolve to stand tall and eschew Facebook.  Very few people will ever read this blog. Frankly, very few EVER read this blog--at least compared to the readership we have enjoyed on Facebook.  But readership is not the point.

Readership is here today and gone tomorrow.  However, a blog is forever and it withstands the test of time.
So....there you have it.  Will we or won't we?  The proof will be in the doing.  Talk is cheap, Johnny.  Let's see you stand and deliver, Dude!

And with that, we'd like to resurrect one of our very first blog posts from four years ago.  It was written on January 3rd, 2010 and sums up the happiness and joy this blog brought to my life.  It was entitled: "This Blog's For Me."

It's only been a couple of days since I created this blog and I can already tell you it fits me like a comfortable slipper.  I didn't realize that I didn't have a blog just for my own miscellaneous ramblings.  Of those 34 or more blogs I mentioned the other day--this is really the only one that doesn't have a truly specific and focused purpose.  It's great to be able to write whatever I want about anything under the sun.  Heck, I should have been doing this a long time ago.  I think the last time I did this sort of recreational writing was back in earl 2001 when we were in Rocky Point, Mexico.  Blogs weren't very well established back then and the word "blog" wasn't a household word like it is today.  I woke up in the middle of the night in a poptop camper on the beach and wrote on Notepad on an old Windows 3.1 machine and saved to a floppy disk.  Then, we'd go into town and rent a computer for 20 pesos an hour.  I'd transfer the ASCII files to the WIN95 machine and then upload to a website, painstakingly creating a new web page for each entry.  It was terribly complex and time consuming.  People really enjoyed reading my stuff and I still get comments about that writing.

I enjoy writing aimlessly.  I enjoy writing stuff that's focused, too, of course.  But writing about nothing in particular is a fat lot of fun.  It's like taking a mental hike through some pleasant landscapes.  I can go off trail any time I want without the Trail Police giving me a ticket.  Be forewarned that this blog actually DOES have some slim purpose.  As noted in the original post, we're going to attempt to use it to help make some big lifestyle transitions this year.  However, in the meantime, I am having fun letting the fingers roam at will hither and yon across this QWERTY keyboard.

Susun asked me the other day why it's called a QWERTY keyboard.  Well, look at the first six letters on the left side of the top row.  It dates clear back to 1874 and you can read the Wiki about it by clicking here.

I never took a typing lesson so I generally use only 4-6 fingers at any given time, usually four.  Perhaps that explains the plethora of typos.  I don't much care about typos.  I know typos drive some people to the edge of insanity.  Back in the 1970's, I actually had newspaper readers come to my office and yell and scream at me about my typos.  It rolled harmlessly off my back.  Back then, typos where a Big Mortal Sin.  Now, they are merely annoying and as our illiterate younger generation comes of age, typos are much more accepted.  Heck, look at the texting lingo.  It's all one great big typo!  Who cares any more?  Certainly not me.