A Blog A Day Keeps Boredom Away

What if you could pick someone from the past and select them to be a blogger? Whose posts would you want to read? This is the question asked by Lorelle VanFossen on this week’s blog challenge.

The idea seemed like a lot of fun (and a good way to generate material for Focal Plane, as well). I thought about the topic for awhile, and came up with a few historical figures I’d like to read — Alexander the Great, King Arthur, and the American civil-war era photographer Mathew Brady.

I figure that most writers of yore have either already written about themselves or their writing processes, or just prefer to be recluses. I decided to look elsewhere for stories, to the people who were making history.

Brady interests me because I am a photographer, and I’ve just completed a photojournalism class. I’ve always felt a bit of a chill looking at his civil war photos, and it would be interesting to find out what Brady was thinking as he planned his shots. But, it’s the shadowy figures from the Classical Age of Greece and Rome, or the Age of Chivalry that appeal to my sense of adventure. But would any of those people make good bloggers?

It’s the shadowy figures from the Classical Age … or the Age of Chivalry that appeal to my sense of adventure. But would any of those people make good bloggers?

I decided that Alex probably was too busy conquering the world to bother putting stylus to slate, so I nixed that idea. I didn’t know if the historians had concluded whether or not King Arthur is a real figure or a legend, so that idea went down the middens. Mathew Brady would be interesting, but his darkroom work would probably have kept him from having too much time to write.

Then, it came to me. Benjamin Franklin! He’d not only be a natural — he’d also be a prolific blogger. His posts would be witty and full of common sense, not the least because they would all be posted early in the morning! He would be probably be offline by 7 p.m., though, so he could get to bed early.

Actually, Franklin would probably have several blogs. One would be the online version of Poor Richard’s Almanac, and would feature posts about business, thrift, saving, and other budget-wise topics. It would also contain a calendar, weather predictions, and astronomical information for farmers. The pages on this blog would contain a compendium of Franklin’s famous sayings.

Franklin’s second blog would detail all the juicy court gossip and intrigues during his trips abroad as a diplomat. There would be all sorts of stories from France, where Franklin served as ambassador. He apparently went about dressed in a coonskin hat and charmed the society ladies with his “frontier” dress. This blog would overshadow any of today’s society pages with tales of his diplomatic hijinks.

Benjamin Franklin would be a prolific blogger, and probably have more than one blog.

A third blog would be about American politics, and be named after his political discussion club, Junto. This blog would feature serious political discussions, although it might contain a political cartoon or two (just to get a point across) to help make the blog more visual and user-friendly. Franklin would write about the philosophy of the fledgling American republic, and actively encourage readers to comment on this blog. Lively debates would ensue and overload servers across the nation!

A fourth blog would be the online compendium of Franklin’s autobiography, which took him at least 17 years to write. That’s a lot of blogging, isn’t it? This blog could also serve as a family photo album.

And finally, Franklin would have a blog about science. This blog would feature animations and technical drawings showing how the Franklin stove, bifocal glasses, and lightning rod worked. Franklin would also definitely include YouTube video clips of his now-famous kite-flying experiment.

Well, there you have it. Franklin had a lot to write about back in his day, and if he had access to a word processor he probably would have been even more prolific a writer, if that’s at all possible. Access to blogging software and social networking sites might have involved Franklin in even more areas of pursuit, as he came across people on the internet from many more countries and walks of life. He would have been an active reader and commenter on the blogs and forums that he came upon.

But that’s all my conjecture, anyway, and I certainly don’t claim to be a historian even if I am an avid History Channel viewer. One thing that is definte — the blog challenge has not only given me a good way to spark my writing, it has helped produce the longest post I’ve written so far. I hope you enjoyed reading it.

Tech Haiku #1

I took a creative writing class last semester as part of my degree requirements. I’m working towards a Communications degree and I had burned out a little after so much technical writing and expository writing, so I wanted a fun break.

For our class assignments we wrote some poetry as well as short stories. The poems included haiku and sonnet work. While I found that writing sonnets is actually quite difficult, the haiku poems were intriguing to me. I’ve already posted one of my class haiku poems Winter earlier on Focal Plane.

I recently came across a contest on the ThinkGeek.com website for writing tech haiku. I decided to try my hand at writing some of them, and it turned out to be a good way to pass a few spare minutes at work. Instead of entering the contest, though, I am presenting the haiku here on Focal Plane. So now, for your amusement (I hope), I present my first tech haiku:

cooling towers soar
overclocked memory chips
render polygons

Although haiku are only three lines, they have a lot of rules to follow. The rule that is probably most well-known is that haiku must contain a certain number of syllables. The standard syllable count is 5-7-5. That’s five syllables for the first line, seven for the second, and five for the third. Tech Haiku #1 follows this standard count.

I have also found web references to other syllable counts which I found worked much better for some of my poems. I used a 3-5-3 count for the Winter haiku .

Well, my lunch break isn’t quite over, so I have a few minutes to spare to start another tech haiku. Here goes…

keyboard jams

Stay tuned.

End of an Era

The area we live in has been changing, sometimes quickly, sometimes too quickly. It’s not that new stores are being built in addition to the old familiar things, but that the one-of-a-kind stores are being run out of business and replaced by clone stores. Now I know that Tastee-freez is a franchise and that there are more than one of them, but in the Washington D.C. metro area they are very rare.

The TasteeFreez sign. Aperture: f/22; 20mm lens.

Laurel is about 8 miles away from us, and we end up doing a lot of shopping there. At least, there are several stores there that we visit on a fairly regular basis, anyway. One of our rituals was to drive to Laurel, stop at the Tastee-freez for cheeseburgers and the world’s best french fries, get a Starbucks coffee, and be fueled to do a bit of shopping.

Oh no! No more french fries!

It was with horror that we ended up in an empty Tastee-freez parking lot one Saturday only to find “going out of business” signs plastered on the windows. Was it our fault? Didn’t we buy enough cones, enough fries, to keep them in business? When Ben asks me what I want to do for lunch on Saturday, I keep having to check myself to keep from saying “Let’s go to TasteeFreez.”

I miss TasteeFreez. But I did what photographers do; I took some shots of the store, the sign, the empty parking lot. Like they say, “Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”

Slow Going

I knew at some point I’d get so busy working on other things that I wouldn’t get around to writing anything for Focal Plane. So many things are happening, or else pending, that it makes my head spin. I rebel by sitting and playing Guild Wars on my computer until nearly midnight so I don’t have to think about all the things I have to do!

Our online store was just getting off to a really slow start when the CafePress servers had a massive crash that affected a lot of stores. I’ve been waiting for them to get the hardware back up and running before I upload more images. In the meantime, I’m also working on getting software to put a really nice photo gallery on the Tangent Graphics website to replace the “thrown together” look which now dominates the site.

I know it’s not pretty. Yet. It’s just that everything I want to do requires learning more and more software and programming, in addition to still doing the writing and photography. And on top of that, I’m finishing off two 300-level college classes in the next week and a half, one of which I’m putting a slideshow together for (more software!). Plus, we’ve been interviewing contractors in preparation for doing some massive home repair and renovation that could have us living in two rooms for five or more months. Ugh. That means we need to clean out the house…

I’ll leave you with this photograph of a stone turtle that stands guard in front of the reptile house at the National Zoo. It was easy to photograph because it wasn’t moving, unlike other zoo denizens. The image was captured using a Nikon FE2 with Kodak slide film.