mongooseblog

“If you start a blog, I’ll never hear from you again!” –A friend of mine, warning another friend to stay away from the evils of blogging.

Isn’t the ironing delicious? Doesn’t one start a weblog in order to facilitate communication? And here is someone worried that they’ll fall out of touch because of blogging.

It’s true, to a certain extent. It depends on whether one intends one’s blog to become the primary means of communication with others. If you have a great number of people you wish to keep in contact with, this might make some sense. It has no pretenses to being something personal, as a mass mail via bcc might seem. It’s also convenient–all you need is a functioning Web browser. (Arguments in favor of shell-based accounts and using text-based mail readers notwithstanding.)

But in changing one’s mindset from writing to a single, specific person to a shapeless, faceless audience, it can affect the character of one’s writing. The personal nature of an email is lost. In fact, just by switching media, the personal nature is already lost: weblogs don’t have a To: header at the top. You may now also have the potential to reach a lot more people via the Web, but there also exists the potential for the quality of each interaction to diminish accordingly.

If you are one normally accustomed to writing a lot of emails to distant friends and you switch to a weblog format, you’ll probably stop writing emails. Depending, of course, on whether you intend your weblog to replace the emails you send out. This is what my friend above worried about, especially since he isn’t one who reads blogs normally.

Though, from a functional standpoint, I’m not sure where the difference lies. You had to accustom yourself to something called “checking your email,” after all. It could be a case of refusing to change with the times, though we’re used to the concept of checking for mail in a general sense, I suppose. On the other hand, it requires effort to read someone’s blog–navigating your browser to the desired URL and all that. But, in my experience, it only takes a little bit of behavior modification to incorporate blogreading into one’s daily routine.

So all I’m left with is the plausible reason that weblogs are necessarily impersonal when compared to email. Well, email seems to me to be impersonal when compared to handwritten letters, so where do you draw the line?

I’m sure the majority of us don’t intend our weblogs to supplant email. We all know the joy of receiving an email from a close friend, and that is infinitely pleasurable compared to blogreading. It kind of makes you think, though.

Personally? My posting here isn’t supposed to be a replacement for one-on-one conversations conducted via email, or IM, or telephone, or face-to-face. Rather, I like to stick the more mundane things here, or my ramblings that aren’t necessarily directed towards any one person. You could think of this as your introduction to me, if you and I are not personally acquainted; and if you found me sufficiently interesting or worthy, perhaps you would be motivated to drop me a line, and another friendship would be formed. This weblog serves to keep my friends aware of my continued existence, since I am notorious for being horrible at replying to email and returning phone calls (but no one emails me or calls me, anyway, so it’s a moot point). In fact, I had hoped that this might spark some conversations via email with long-lost friends, but unfortunately that hasn’t happened yet.

Another thought that occurs to me, at least with respect to my own situation, is that I don’t feel close enough to anyone to be involved in email-trading, or alternately I already keep in touch with the important people by other means, like IM and good ol’ fashioned Unix write. So the need for lengthy personal emails is not very great.

I mean, in my experience, the email threads I’ve participated in die out after awhile (kind of like my failed penpal experiment a long long time ago–I don’t remember her name, but she lived in Beaverton, OR). I take this to indicate that I have no particular investment in maintaining a line of communication with said person, which in turn implies that there’s no one I know that is worth it. If that isn’t faulty reasoning and a defeatist attitude, I don’t know what is!

Your turn. I’d like to hear what you have to say.

Pittsburgh Madness (part one in a series)

Parallel parking: Convention (and the law, too) dictates that when you park on the side of the street, your car should be facing the direction of traffic for that side. If you do so, this will never happen.

It has been explained to me that many of Pittsburgh’s streets are narrow and, moreover, two-way, so when people find a parking spot, they pull into it regardless of what side of the street it’s on and don’t bother to reorient their cars properly, since it’s not worth the hassle to, and the spot might get snatched while you’re taking the time to conform to the law.

Hill parking: One of the things I learned in driver’s ed (and never really needed, since Chicago’s pretty flat and NYC is as well, to some extent) is the proper way to park when on an incline, so that should your parking brake fail, your car does not roll into traffic or otherwise cause death and destruction. For the uninitiated, this is the way you park:

- If you are parked uphill and there is a curb, you turn your wheels sharply away from the curb. That way, the wheels will hook onto the curb and prevent the car from rolling backwards.

- If you are parked uphill with no curb, or you are parked downhill, you turn your wheels towards the curb.

Here, though, it seems no one knows that they’re supposed to do that, or they’re just lazy, or they don’t teach that anymore.

PAT Buses: In Chicago and New York, buses have two sets of doors, one in the front and one towards the back. All boarding takes place through the front, where the farebox is, of course. Riders have two options for exiting the bus, however. They can exit through the front or the back. The back doors are self-operated assisted doors, meaning that the doors are locked until the driver (B/O or bus operator) unlocks it. A green light comes on when the bus stops at the bus stop, clearing you to exit. In Chicago, all you have to do is push on the doors, and a pressure-release mechanism assists in opening the doors. In New York, you can push on the doors, but you don’t get the assist mechanism unless you push the yellow tape. There are instructions that clearly inform passengers how to operate the doors, of course.

In Pittsburgh, that’s not the case. In most situations, all ingress and egress takes place through the front doors. It makes some sense, in the context of the transit system here. If a bus is downtown-bound, you pay as you enter. If a bus is outbound, you pay as you leave. Those rules change after 7pm, when all fares are pay-as-you-enter; some routes are always pay-as-you-enter.

It does NOT make for a very efficient system, however, when the bus is packed and you have to make your way from the back (where you sat because you’re a good passenger) to the front to get off. Sometimes the bus driver will open the back door, but from my (admittedly limited) experience, they are inconsistent in that practice. I’ve seen some cases where a passenger shouts “BACK DOOR!” to get the driver to open it but he or she refuses. What happens, in the end, is that the bus sits idling longer than it needs to be while the passengers wishing to exit make they way to the front to get off, and only then can people board. Meanwhile, because many streets are two-lane two-way roads, traffic gets backed up behind the bus.

Could a system that’s a little more sane be implemented? Probably.