I own a dog, which may explain why I think about them from time to time.

On a walk with him today I became somewhat preoccupied again, wondering about how he views the world. Dogs communicate, a little, through their various barks and things, but I believe it's true that they don't have language.

Which gets me to wondering.

I think it's fair to say that I'm pretty dependent on language. To be honest, I can't imagine going more than a minute or two without using a word or two to think about things, but I think my dog has managed to go through his entire life without thinking about anything using any words at all. I cannot fathom what such a life would be like.

An early scene in the movie Brainstorm featured an advanced technology that let people experience what was going on in someone else's head, in this case, a monkey's. They didn't spend much time on that, but I wonder if we could even begin to understand the thinking of anything that didn't use words.

How does my dog view me? I know he looks at me, but it's unlikely he knows my name as well as he seems to know his own. Then again, I don't pay enough attention to what first goes through my mind when I see someone I know. I doubt I first think "Rob" or "Debi," but I might. It's simply too quick for me to notice.

Still, I do wonder what my dog thinks hampered as he must be by having no language. Is life, for him, a series of sensations? Of instinct? Does he simply ignore everything that falls outside his limited view of the world?

He must be able to identify some things, but doing so without having names for them is beyond my ability to understand. How he sees the world is a mystery to me, and I have no idea how much overlap there is between his view and mine.

Still, when I'm not wondering about his dreams, I wonder about his waking hours.

While everyone around me is getting ready for the holidays, or just getting over them, I'm stuck here wondering about the human condition.

It's no surprise that there are things I like and things I don't care so much about, but it might be surprising that I don't really consider myself to be a fan of much of anything, not even of those things I really, really enjoy.

I see this all the time on the Internet, people rushing to the defense of things they like or cheering on their teams, and I just don't get it. In sports, it looks like when you root for one side you're required to see nothing your team does as deserving of a penalty while everything the other side does is wrong and a flagrant foul. In books, games, movies, and literature, people who are fans seem to go out of their way to justify what others see as flaws, and fanwaking takes up most of their time.

Fanwaking, of course, is one of my favorite words, and might even be a real one. It's pretty much the term used to describe going out of one's way to explain something that any normal person would see as a plot hole, but mostly just reflects our human need to justify.

I don't know why, but I can't feel this need, and I can't even call myself a fan of just about anything. Maybe I am, but just stubbornly refuse to admit it, or maybe I'm lacking what it takes to commit myself wholeheartedly to things.

I'll be among the first to defend something or someone if they're being wronged, but I'd like to think my support isn't blind. When someone criticizes something I like, I can get hurt, sure, but if there's some value in what's said, I have to consider that. Maybe it's part of it, but when someone or something I claim to love is criticized, I don't feel personally threatened and usually don't take it personally.

It may be, though, that I'm so reluctant to defend others because I'm not often defended and never learned that's how things are supposed to work. I do know, though, that if I say anything bad about Dragon Age or some other popular game that I'll be attacked up and down the Internet by fans of the game who will dismiss and diminish anything I say without even considering it.

And I can't do much about it. Maybe I'm built in such a way as to always first attempt to see the other side and not just instictively close my mind to anything and everything said by those with whom I disagree. I don't much care for Sarah Palin's views, but I don't hate her, and whenever she comes up with some new pronouncement, my first reaction is to try to understand where she's coming from.

This entry is rambling, at best, but it's mostly just a test to see if this blogging software works with my updated Wordpress. If you've read this far, enjoy the holidays!

It's about time I remembered this blog.

Before I write anything, I had to upgrade my installation and, as they always do, the end of the upgrade directions contains the helpful advice that I should consider "rewarding yourself with a blog post about the upgrade." Well, I'm not sure how rewarding it will be for me or anyone else, but here it is.

It's quite an extensive upgrade because I haven't done one in quite some time. This new version has a way for me to add not only pictures to my entries, but video and audio, as well. I can only hope that means that the music comes on automatically when people load the page and plays all the time the page is open. It would be even better if I can find some of that old MIDI music we loved so well on the Geocity pages!

The good news about those enhancements, which may have been incorporated a few years ago, is that I don't have to bother with those annoying ways of including pictures I had to use in the past. They involved special coding, which I invariably forgot, but I'll have to check where these uploaded pictures are stored, if they appear as thumbnails, and all that.

Also, I have no reason to believe any of the old images will show up, not unless I move them.

See, this is what's great about living in this day and age. Computers allow us (me) to spend roughly forever completing tasks that were once unheard of. We think they're faster, more efficient, and let us be more productive, but that's not true at all. Sure, they let us do more, but we spend far more time managing them than we ever had to spend changing typewriter ribbons.

The good news is, this is a new post. Maybe I should try to get back in the habit of writing here, using it as a way to warm up for other writing I need to do during the day. Maybe I can even say something interesting some day.

Or, add a picture.

I think too highly of NaNoWriMo to make a mockery of it.

In years past I remember being thrilled by the prospect of writing a novel and simply amazed that I was able to do it. I looked forward to November with eager anticipation and traditionally wrote a page or so at the stroke of midnight on November first before settling off to bed.

When I got up the next morning, there it was: the start of my novel and it was as if fairies had started it for me while I slept!

I've finished enough novels during NaNoWriMo to know that I can do it. That's no longer a challenge. Now, none of them are what you'd call good by any stretch of the imagination, but they were all over fifty thousand words and most of them even had a hint of story or character development.

A few years ago, when I quit, it was because I was mocking NaNo, and that made me feel bad. The idea, and the wondrous joy I shared in when I first became aware of the project, was fading quickly as I realized all I was doing was a typing exercise. Instead of writing a story I needed to tell, to explore my writing abilities and strengthen them, all I was doing was writing for the sake of writing, just so I could say I won.

In the first year I participated there was some guy who finished the first day or so and did so by copying and pasting one word 50,000 times. I hated that then, but my last couple efforts weren't really any different and I hated myself for that. I was taking something wonderful, something that everyone else was excited about, and crapping on it by just tossing words onto the page and calling it a novel.

This year I still don't have the sense of adventure and excitement I felt those first couple of years, but I hope to make the best out of what I have. I don't know if I'll win or not, but NaNo has never been about winning or bragging rights. I hope to be strong enough to put aside any silly sense of obligation and come up with a draft of a novel during November, one that meets the threshold.

What I won't be doing is demeaning the project I hold so dear by showing I can type enough words to win.

I know I'm aging, and not all that gracefully. It disturbs me that an increasing part of my life revolves around afflictions and even more that I sometimes find myself lapsing into "when I was growing up..." thinking and questioning change.

I don't like to think of myself as stuck in the past, but sometimes the reasoning behind progress leaves me scratching my head (and being thankful for the hair that remains there).

Just the other day my Internet provider, AT&T, sent me yet another e-mail discussing upgrades. I say "yet another" because this is the kind of thing I've received regularly over the years going all the way back to when Pacific Bell was my provider.

This latest notification, once again, as always, promises that I'll have to do nothing to continue receiving the quality service I've enjoyed in the past. That's a good thing because when it comes to doing nothing, I'm right up there at the top. It's one of the few areas that I can honestly say I excel at, so it's great to see that this update is one I can master.

This update, however, reminds me that many people use the Internet, or their ISP, much differently than I do. They're making some changes to their web e-mail client or server, a feature I have to admit I've never used. As long as I've had any ISP I've done all my e-mailing through a client that fetches the mail from their server and deletes it. What mail I've gotten has always been stored on my computer, and I see no reason to change any of that.

Most of my e-mail now is sent to my host, half-dozen, and they've screwed me up by no deleting messages they forward, but that's another story for another time. That service, by the way, is one I can enjoy again if I wish to upgrade my account and spend more money, something I'm loathe to do.

The other big change that AT&T is rolling out is a change to my homepage! As long as I've had them as my service provider, and Pac Bell before, I've had available to me the possibility of creating a home page. This goes all the way back to the Geocities days, and while I *did* have a Geocities page, I've never taken advantage of this generous offer.

When it comes to home pages, I guess I have to say this is it.

I've never met anyone who has some AT&T hosted page for their home page, but I guess there must be enough of them out there clamoring for new features that AT&T is answering their gripes. Maybe the new one lets you embed YouTube videos or something, and I'm sure the kids will be all over that.

There's more than enough real stuff to do. These upgrades that do absolutely nothing I'm interested in either remind me that I'm missing something or make me think I'm out of step with the current, hip world.

Still, I guess any effort on my ISP's part is some indication that they're not totally ignoring their market. But instead of home page advances, I'd rather have reduced costs or increased bandwidth.

I've signed up to join the NaNoWriMo effort again this year, mostly just to see what direction my writing will take this time around. Last time I got an unexpected and somewhat frightening insight into my creative process, but I'm not sure how concerned I should be.

I was lying in bed, it was late at night, and that's a traditional time for me to plan things that I will never actually get around to writing (such as blog entries or witty responses to something I read on some message board hours earlier). Last night I was thinking a little about my upcoming novel, and I realized I was recoiling from the very thought of constructing a plot.

It occurred to me, I almost always do that when faced with a story.

Instead of coming up with a story in my head and then putting it down on paper like most people, good writers, do, I limit my thinking to things about the characters, other people with whom she or he may engage, and tiny scenes that interest me. Oh, I come up with snippets of conversation, but those are quickly forgotten. Mostly what I do is imagine quirks that character might have, how I might show them off, and scenes where they would be exploited.

What I don't do, hardly ever, is develop the story. In fact, I conciously avoid doing that, and part of the reason may be that I want to be as surprised as I hope anyone reading the story will be about what happens. I guess I don't see my role as writer as telling the story so much as describing it as it unfolds.

I don't think is a good way to write at all, but it usually keeps me interested enough to finish. I find I'm not all that excited about transcribing events I know about, but I'm pretty much interested in seeing what happens next or how something plays out. I don't know how most people plan for NaNoWriMo, but from what I've read on the boards there, it seems there's lots of outlining (mental or otherwise) involved. I know I could never match the impressive results of those who write 10,000 words in one sitting (whom I guess know what they're gonna say), but that's because my way of writing is mentally and creatively draining. I just can't think for five to ten hours straight!

According to a local news channel, nine is the second luckiest number in Asian cultures, something I don't think we have in the West. As far as I know, we have seven as a lucky number, and that's it.

Anyway, today's one of those "special" days (9-9-9) that rarely show up and it seems to me we've had quite a few of them lately. Between that and ones involving time, it feels like we get at least one of them a year, but I think a lot of that is lucky chance involving the end of the millenium.

Some people, I guess, make a fuss out of these things. 9-9-99, 8-8-88, and the like were all mentioned, briefly, then passed. I would give these special days a lot more credit if they were memorable, but sad to say I honestly don't remember anything about any of them now that they're gone.

Which is to say, I couldn't for the life of me tell you what I did or what heppened on any of them. I think I was aware of them all and maybe even honored them with a tiny celebration, but nothing of any lasting value.

It's my fault, I guess, since I should have had some wonderful, noteworthy celebration for them all. The days, themselves, aren't memorable: it's what we do with them.