Fleeting, Smothered Gorgonian Bluntness

It's an addictive little game, isn't it? Blogging is the inept's way of saying to a largely unheeding world that they, as Francis Schaeffer put it, are there and are not silent.
Being alone in a foreign country causes one to seek cybercompanionship more than perhaps the simpler but more responsible pleasures of wife and family. Peeking into the world of cybernet curtains, behind which sit fat naked men claiming to be fourteen year old girls from Ipswich, postings on boards that probably few read and the fertility of overfevered imagination whiles away many a twilight. Also, posts are probably so lacking in interest to anyone but their authors that viruses spread their infection elsewhere. This caught my eye, from the guru of bloggers, Robert Scoble & Shel Israel .. An Excerpt from Naked Conversations: Bloggings's Six Pillars: There are six key differences between blogging and any other communications channel. You can find any of them elsewhere. These are the Six Pillars of Blogging:
1.Publishable.Anyone can publish a blog.You can do it cheaply and post often. Each posting is instantly available worldwide.
2.Findable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.
3.Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships unrestricted by geographic borders.
4.Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a newsservice. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.
5.Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free "home delivery" of RSS- enabled blogs into your e-mail software. RSS lets you know when a blog you subscribe to is updated, saving you search time. This process is considerably more efficient than the last- generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.
6.Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.
The seventh is a variation on my own theme:
7. We all hate total brain dumps. We're still metaphorically in our high chair, being fed information in small gobbets with entertaining subplots 'here comes the airplane.....' taking more if we wish after we've digested what we've received so far.

So far, so good. I rather think I'm going to put together a blog of an entirely different water next time. Perhaps something educational, with all sorts of weird overtones to trap the unwary....
The title? Oh, that's an anagram of "Blogging: hours of endless entertainment." Tee hee

Penguins

I am speechless with quite unjustifiable self-admiration. My tiny, frail laptop with an Internet connection no more secure than a line of wet string, has managed to download a fully functional CD bootable version of Linux, which is rather like learning about computing from scratch all over again. It's amazing how one's thinking becomes a resonant image of Windows and you behave as that nice Mr Gates has taught you, it's only when you get out into the fresh air of open source that you realise what you've been missing. There are some quirky litle glitches but at least with a modicum of UNIX nous, most problems are transparent and not difficult to solve. It's faster, cleverer and more intuitive than I could have imagined, and, best of all it is, like advice, free of charge