Geeks have their uses

My tame geek has finally conquered the wide yellow column down the left side. First we tried to do it off-line, by downloading the page and re-hashing it. This appeared to work until we posted another column at which point the great yellow slab re-appeared. Finally the tame geek had a go at the Template section and did something that has now made the page look like it belongs to a normal blogger (if such a thing exists and not to a mad artist from the fifties).

I'd like to continue the vein of Mike Crowl's Scribble Pad and write about writing and the arts generally in this blog - give it some focus, so that it's not just a blob (as opposed to a blog - the blobber has a certain valid ring to it too, especially in regard to some of the blogs I have read).

Of course, if I'm going to write about writing, I'd have to start with the frustration of having sent off another query to InfoTech only to have them ignore me again. But then I expect instant reaction from emails - though don't know why I should, as obviously there are plenty of people out there who regard emails as some kind of mysterious creature that you should never reply to on the same day as you receive it. That gives it a sense of being real post as opposed to this fancy electronic stuff.

I guess I'm also frustrated at being on this writers' list and hearing of the successes people on it have, while I'm struggling to get one piece off the ground. Of course, I do have to take into consideration the fact that at present I'm also trying to produce/musical direct a show of just under two hours which is badly in need of being further forward than it is, and that there are only so many rehearsals in a week, and so many days to rehearse in. Nevertheless, the people in Opera Alive are doing well all things considered.

I keep feeling as though I should be adding links here, left right and centre and upwards and downwards probably too. But nothing so far that I've written appears to need to be linked to anything, so blandly unlinked it all remains.

I am going to do an article about being bored with the Net, though I find it's not a frequent occurrence with me. But certainly I can see the possibility of such a thing, even if I don't quite appreciate how it could be. There's a great tendency to spend your time not actually surfing, but paddling. It's easy to stay close to the shore and not get into those shoals where oddball creatures lurk ready to corrupt your brain with their conspiracy theories or pervert your morality with their ugly views on life, sex and more sex. And if you stay close to the shore where the little waves are, it's unlikely you'll have that kind of serendipitous experience that the Net can give. So much of the oddball lies quite close to the shore in fact - you don't have to be a good swimmer to get to it. Put a word or phrase in the average search engine and all manner of strange things turn up unbidden (well, in the sense that you never expected to come across them while you were searching for something straightforward, like how many other people have the same name as you). There's a quirkiness about the Net - it's one of its greatest features. I don't know how many times I've gone searching for a basic bit of background material to a fairly ordinary idea and wound up discovering stuff I never knew people thought about, let alone experimented with - and I don't mean in the sex and more sex area, either.

I've learned more on the Net in the last few years than I ever learned in school (which doesn't say much) or more to the point, in my normal researching over the years via the paper media. The Net has the ability to pull together all manner of things that lie hidden from your normal daily routine. It's a way of tossing the world around like a salad and coming up with not only the vegetables that were hidden below, but a couple of caterpillars that had made their way in, as well.