Since I’m typing this on a computer, odds are it’s legible. I’m fairly confident it makes sense, too, so that’s a plus, but whether or not it expresses my thoughts accurately is another thing entirely.

And that, as they say, is the rub.

When I was in my twenties I first started hearing from people that I didn’t talk like everyone else, and I took some pride in that. Maybe even too much. Maybe part of it is a family thing since I also heard that my younger sister, who’s still older than me, and I talked alike. But I hoped it was something more than that.

In my schooling I was forced to learn to be specific and clear in my thoughts and how I presented them. That took time and effort, but I ended up thinking that it was something I was good at, unlike many sports, life outside of school, or having any idea what to do with my emotions. I could, when I made the effort, be specfic about things, could replace the way we commonly used speech with less ambiguous words and phrasing, and, I thought, let people know exactly what I was thinking.

I may or may not have been right then, but I’ve I don’t think it’s true any more.

Since that was one of the very few things I’ve ever been proud of, it only makes sense that it’s been removed. I never had much in the way of looks, maybe some boyhood cuteness in my face, but never the type of body that anyone gave more than a first glance at. And, then, only if they had to.

I wasn’t a great student, so I never really thought of myself as all that bright, but I was pretty sure I had a way of thinking that wasn’t ordinary. Just for the sake of argument, I called it “conceptual,” feeling that I was more comfortable thinking in terms of concepts instead of their individual instances, and being far more interested in the ideas of things than their concrete examples.

But that’s not the point, which is good because I doubt it’s very clear. Let’s just say, for example, that I’m more intrigued by talking about the proper role of government (which has no definite answer) than I am about arguing about whether or not our current U.S. president is a dictatorial, tyrannical, socialist Muslim communist or not, at least until they define what the hell it is they mean by all those adjectives.

Anyway, later in life I took up writing the usual kind of things: short stories and tried my hand at a couple novels. I enjoyed it immensely and for awhile, thought I was pretty good at it. When I had something I wanted to say, I thought I had the ability to say it and, more importantly, to let others know what I thinking without getting all confused.

It turns out, if I ever could do that, I can’t any more.

Without much in the way of physical attraction (I liked Edison’s comment along the lines of being concerned with his body only as a way of carrying his brain around), all I had was what was between my ears and behind my eyeballs. I’ve always been eager to be liked and developed a pretty good sense of humor. Sometimes I could actually be really funny, and I enjoyed that. Other times, pretty much no matter the subject, I liked to think that I could add something to the conversation, if only some tangentially related point.

Now, when you think in terms of concepts, you can relate concepts more than what is being talked about so that when people are talking about 1987 Ford pickups, it’s as easy to jump to boats, which also move people around on the planet, as the 1986 pickup. Everyone can do this, and does, but it was very comfortable for me.

None of which matters.

The one thing I was most proud of has been taken, perhaps because of my age and declining mental acuity. Instead of speaking or writing with clarity, everyone gets confused at what I say and this hurts me more than it should. I often have bad dreams where I end up yelling in an effort to be understood, but I feel no one gets what I’m trying to say.

I’m not sure what I should do about this. Yeah, it hurts to see myself as not as capable any more, to be less than I always thought I was. I never prepared for this and am worried that I may never be understood. I still want to be liked, but now I may have lost my best weapon in that fight.

I feel like just giving up. It’s too much to learn all over again, if I ever did know it, and to end up being so completely misunderstood should be a lesson. When all I ever had was words, when those fail me, I’m not sure where to turn.

The desert is changing me, or at least my behavior. Then again, it could be age.

This part of the world has a lot of rugged individualists, but in at least one sense I'm finding that I'm becoming the exact opposite. I've never been a fan of torture or cruelty, not that most people are, but I'm getting further and further away from acting in my own self-interest or justifying my actions because something is easier for me or simply because I want it.

To be specific, I'm talking about plants and animals.

To get an idea of what I mean, check out this Google satellite image of my immediate neighborhood – http://goo.gl/QVNzU

After being appalled by the ugliness and boring sameness of the desert, look again, maybe zooming in a notch or two and looking around the area. It's not as obvious from ground level, but it didn't take me very long at all living here to see that within just about every property's fenced in area, there's hardly any vegetation (mine included).

And, I've decided that hardly any of this clearing was done on purpose.

Years ago, when I had my first Jeep, I used to love driving around in the mountains and desert, climbing hills, tearing up the land, and working all four wheels for all they were worth. It was fun.

I'd heard some of the concerns, even back then, about off-road driving and riders ruining the fragile ecosystem, but the only part of that that I paid any attention to was driving only in authorized areas. I've always, usually, been pretty much a wuss when it comes to breaking the law.

In the past few weeks, however, after getting both of my gates to work, I've noticed a change in my attitude. In the mornings I usually stroll around my enclosed area, picking up trash, seeing if anything's been damaged or any of my outside possessions have moved, and just checking around to see which of the holes in the ground are active. Also, it must be said, basking in the knowledge that it's mine.

I also check for animal tracks to see if any coyotes or anything has been messing around, and for longer than it should have, puzzling over circular tracks that surrounded some of the plants (I even took some pictures of them, which would make this blog visually appealing, but you don't get to see them yet because they're still locked in the camera). After going outside on one of our particularly windy days, I saw a lower branch on one plant scraping the ground and figured them out.

See, the wind blows, moves the plant, and when it hits the ground it moves some of the sand and small rocks aside, leaving a mark. Since the plant is rooted and can't move much, the branch acts like a compass when the wind moves it about.

In my investigations, I've seen just about all the plants that live on my property. There are probably only, at most, a half-dozen different varieties, but a few of those have examples of them in different stages of growth. Some I've come to recognize as fully grown, others as their earliest arrival on the planet, just past a sprouting seed.

Yeah, I take the time to do that sort of thing when I should be doing something else, something worthwhile and productive.

Even though I've only been here a couple months now, and haven't even lived through one summer, it's pretty obvious to me that everyone who's called the desert a “harsh environment” knows what they're talking about. It's not too much of a stretch to say that what lives here ekes out an existence, and I'd be dead in no time without the nearby town and grocery stores.

For better or worse, it's given me a deep appreciation for what lives here and a sense of respect for all those things. They were here, obviously, before me and have managed to grow, reproduce, and survive for tens or hundreds or thousands of years. I think it's fair to say that something that's figured out how to live here over the past few hundred thousands of years deserves a little respect.

Even bugs. Even stupid little, ugly plants.

When I first drove the Jeep from my house to the front gate, I drove around the large plants if for no other reason than “why mess with them?” By the second trip, I was avoiding driving anywhere that wasn't just sand. Part of that may have been because I saw the tiny shrubs as “mine” and not to be messed with, but a large and growing element of that decision came from a “live and let live” philosophy.

Yes, I'm a member of this planet's dominant species and can pretty much do whatever I want, but there's rarely any reason for me to do so. If they're not actively engaged in trying to kill me or ruin my stuff at the moment, why not just let them live? It's what I'd want them to do.

So, instead of flexing my muscles, doing what I want, and showing these struggling plants who's in charge here, I drive and walk around them. Yep, it only takes a couple seconds to kill them off, but it also only takes a couple seconds to go out of my way and let them live to see another day.

I'm sure that hardly anyone living up here clears the land around their houses. The satellite photos show what the land looks like when we leave it alone, and also how our walking around, driving around, and just generally mucking about strips away the plants. I'm convinced it isn't intentional, just something that happens over the days, weeks, and months of tromping about, carrying things or just moving around.

And, unlike the rest of the world, things just don't grow back the next season. What's learned to live here has, I think, learned to do so slowly. Although we're supposed to get a millimeter or two of rain today, there really isn't enough here for anything to sprout up a foot a day. Or even an inch. The plants up here, hardy as they are, know how to shepherd their time and resources, and it sounds silly, but I've come to respect them for that.

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'm entering this from my new laptop, sitting in front of the TV, and using a new extension to Firefox that supposedly lets me blog without going to my site.

I guess it's okay, but I don't think I can assign a category, not that anyone I imagine who looks at Crenellated Flotsam cares very much about that.

I hope to learn to love laptops as much as the general population does, but I miss my mouse quite a bit. I guess I could plug one in and return to my youth and work the same way I did on my first laptop, which was given to me by my employer. That machine, to be at all usable for me, ended up being used with an external display and mouse and was, really, no more than a large case for the CPU and disk drive.

Oh, well. Maybe someday I'll grow to love this Synaptics pointing device.

I tell ya, there's no end to what people and computers can do, not when it comes to upsetting or angering me.

The fine folks who host my web site, as part of their latest ... enhancement? ... weren't content to merely rearrange the icons that I use to administer the site or modify the GUI to make it just as functional but different, but have now decided that backing up my site is another revenue stream for them. It will now cost me ten bucks to perform a backup, or I can opt in for some annual site upgrade of over a hundred dollars and do one whenever I want.

Or once a month, I forget which.

At a rough guess, I'd imagine there are thirty or so built in icons I can use to perform certain functions when I administer my site, and I've really only used a handful of them. Most of them have no relevancy to my life, but they're there, anyway. I normally don't do much in the way of administering beyond messing about with the files, repairing corrupted databases, and backing things up. I once used the FTP option for awhile, but no longer, and made some use of the message board for a friend, but I don't host that for him any more, either.

Statistics were once fun, but that passed a long time ago.

I can back up the database for Crenellated Flotsam using SQL tools, but it was much easier before, back when I just had to hit a button. I suspect I'll be doing that this weekend as well as copying a bunch of files manually, so I have a morning of boredom to look forward to on that count.

It's a good thing I bought a new coffee maker last month.

They've also migrated the operating system for the host computer(s) from FreeBSD to Debian, which is a flavor of linux. It's no big deal, but FreeBSD was one of the reasons I chose this host in the first place, and I liked that they were running something solid. I was running it at home, and I imagined some harmonic factor, which existed only in my mind.

I suppose if I had that personal assistant, I could add finding a new host to her or his list of chores, right behind getting me cheaper car insurance or a real good onion soup recipe.

Every time I get all excited about updating this thing and keeping it current, unexpected forces of nature stand in my way.

This latest iteration of annoyance is one I'm blaming on the host of this site. For reasons I can only imagine or guess at, some host information changed that prevented Wordpress from getting in touch with the database that holds all of these very valuable Crenellated Flotsam entries.

Worse, I've been unable to get to the admin functions for my site, which pretty much prevented me from doing anything in the way of maintenance. Now that I've learned how to fix errors in this database, the least I hope for is being able to access it.

Since I'm now using a fancy new computer, I didn't have a working address to administer my site. Oh, sure, I thought I knew what it was, but sometime following the last time I had to get in there and do things, the address changed. It's not likely that I didn't get word of this, but it's certain that I did nothing with the information, feeling it was no big deal and just more spam.

As you can see, I have things working again.

After contacting my host provider through their helpful support and contact us page, the one that goes to a faq and searchable database instead of, you know, letting you contact them or ask a question, I was faced with one of those username and password pages before I could do much of anything.

There's a very good possibility that I had that infomation somewhere, but I was in Santa Monica and didn't have it with me. What I did do was ask them to reset the password and send it to the e-mail address on record. I was pretty sure I knew what that address was, but it wasn't until I got home that I was able to get the e-mail, reset my password, and remember what username they'd assigned me.

And now, for the nonce, I have a whole new set of passwords to remember. One to access my site administration page, which isn't at all where I remembered it being, by the way, and several more to administer MySQL and the databases I've established.

I think I made notes of them all, but confidence is mediocre.

The good news is ... if I stay this excited about posting things, I may get some readers who stumble on me through Google! I say such interesting things...

Over this last weekend I became a trifle upset. I was all set to add a thrilling new entry to Crenellated Flotsam when I discovered two discouraging facts.

1) My last entry had, somehow, disappeared
2) I couldn't see my site

Then, this morning, as I got set to try and fix things, the site was back. I did some quick poking around, but it wasn't until later today that I discovered my web host had sent me a friendly letter letting me know that my site had been successfully transitioned to their new software.

Which may explain why CF is working again. And, I must admit, better than it was. Last time I updated it, I lost handy little buttons for marking up the text or inserting links, but now they're back. I haven't yet found, on my new control panel, how to quickly check and repair the database, but its loss would only further strengthen my beliefs in the nature of progress.

In the meantime, I'll check around and see if I can find something to post about.

I'm wondering if this newly upgraded thing will work. I may be able to add back the missing entries.

Considering how frequently I think of something witty to say about things I’ve seen, it’s downright suspicious that there isn’t multiple posts here every day.

I mean, it’s not like I’m not opinionated or shy about speaking my mind.

Just today, although this isn’t witty in the slightest, I was driving behind a screen repair truck. This guy, I thought, should be making money faster than he could print it up himself. Nearly everyone has screens on their windows, and I’d be willing to bet a good number of those screens need some repair.

And, in spite of the fact that repairing or replacing a screen is only slightly more difficult than putting in a new shoelace, I have a hunch most people refuse to even consider doing it. Not that I’m any better than anyone else, but although I know I could do it (and have many times in the past), I’m burdened by laziness.

Anyway, in a more perfect world, all this guy would have to do is by a couple big rolls of screen mesh, maybe both metal and fiberglass, a whole bunch of that rubber tubing stuff and one or two rollers, and he should be set for life. The trouble, I guess, is that no one would know about the excellent service he provides.

In today’s business climate, you have to do more than build it. That’s the rub.

There are things going on with this blog that I don’t understand fully, if at all.

Access, even for me, the owner of the damn thing, is sporadic. Now that it’s working I have a good mind to post an entry, so I will. Just to let you all know that (1) I’m aware of it, and (2) I’m as puzzled as the next guy.

Assuming, of course, that the next guy is as baffled as I am.

I’m blaming my host, but I haven’t told them about that yet. There’s some sort of something or other going on with the site, maybe some update or other, and it’s the kind of thing that makes it difficult for me to access my site to manage it. Not only have they instituted a capcha that fails three times before working correctly, I have to continually choose between “old and new” management tools.
I believe I have the old set, but not the oldest set.

In the meantime, enjoy this post!

This site has a whole new look, but only if you're me or another person with administrative rights.

I've been ignoring the notices about the update for the past few months, but today I updated the Wordpress software I use to post these entries. I guess it works all right, but I haven't tested all my plugins or even checked to see if everything works. This isn't a commercial site, and in spite of the claimed numbers, I'm not even sure more than a handful of people even know it exists.

The update was easy, though took more time than I expected. I blame that on my host, who doesn't seem to accept uploads very quickly at all. Some times it's fine, but Saturday morning doesn't seem to be one of those.

The new software gives me bluish-teal highlights for the admin screens, a change from the gray. Also, and this is just fancier than hell, my categories are now in a drop-down menu instead of displayed.

This is progress, but does nothing for the functionality.

The only reason I changed is I was being deluged with notification from my spam catching add-on. No, I haven't looked to see if there are updates for that, but I was getting the caught spam digest about once an hour instead of once a week, and enough is enough. Maybe that's because I've been getting more spam entries.

Anyway, it looks as if it works, and both of my blogs are now up to date with version 2.0.4

Damn. I'm never going to get to that post about my second-favorite metal.

In an attempt to be pithy and use one of my dad's trademarked phrases, I made a glaring error in yesterday's post. I implied, or, maybe, outright said that I would be saddened if the poor people never got to enjoy stuffed hummingbird tongues or sculpted radishes, and while that's true, I certainly don't object to anyone eating them.

There is, after all, such a thing as the good life, and one of the rewards for doing well in this world is being able to enjoy things others cannot. That may be sad, too, but something about supply and demand enters into it, I guess, and there just aren't enough truffles to go around.

There's nothing inherently wrong or unfair about being able to eat beluga caviar while others subsist on millet. What does upset and sadden me, though, is division of society or the world based on the staples of life. If there is a better grain of wheat, I think it shouldn't be reserved for those who can afford it. I'm rather unhappy with the "let them eat cake," idea.

I admit I applaud the efforts of those who, in the past couple hundred centuries, have modified crops and livestock. I'm certain that billions of lives have been saved by their work, and would never look down on those who've created the abundance that's now possible, nor those who eat it. Classes of food disturbs me in a political sense as smacking of elitism, but that's my problem.

On a completely different note, I'm experimenting tomorrow. I traditionally whip up a chicken soup when I'm feeling ill, but the organic leeks in the store looked so tender and fresh, I'm making it tomorrow, when I presume to be healthy. It can be said that I've never fully tasted my chicken soup, but between the gorgeous leeks and fresh, organic barley, I'm set to see if what I've depended on for the past thirty years to cure me tastes anything like I've thought it should.

Maybe I'll have that soup, and a side of Vidalia onions.

It's been about a month without my computer, but I finally got it fixed, and I could only be happier if it all worked.

That it works at all, of course, is a testament to my abilities.

For several months I'd been having some disk drive problems and errors, the type of things that remind one of the acknowledged three states of hard drives:

* Hard drives that have failed.
* Hard drives that will fail.
* Hard drives that were retired in the course of a computer upgrade before failure.

After a few months of intermittant problems (mostly freezes), I started getting an ominous notice of impending doom during the Power On POST Self-Test (hee). This was remarkable, if only because I hadn't realized my computer could do that, could tell me such things, but there it was in black and white even before the computer booted.

That got my attention and sent me off to do non-computer things. I'd occasionally check, and the message would appear each time I turned the computer on (Backup now! Failure is imminent!), so I was reluctant to do anything with my machine. When I'd determined that the problem wouldn't just wander away, I went online and bought another drive.

Then I was away, and that's when the drive arrived. When I got back home, the error message stopped appearing (naturally), but I didn't trust my computer one bit. I was prepared to swap out the drive that runs Windows(tm), but a careful examination of the error message told me that it was the other drive, the one with Linux and FreeBSD, that was failing, so I needed to get smart, quick, and learn how to clone that drive.

Instead of doing that, which would be simple and brainless, I installed a later version of FreeBSD on the new drive and just cloned the linux stuff. To my amazement, it worked.

Kind of.

For the time being I'm having to boot from a floppy (need to write the MBR with the booting program) and can't print, but that ain't bad all things considered. I have a ton and a half of e-mail to go through, thousands of websites to visit, and new porn to collect.

I'll be busy catching up, but the good news is I have several entries for Crenellated Flotsam to write. It's good to be back. I've missed this.

When I began Crenellated Flotsam I had a few rules, some of which I'm only now discovering.

It was my intent, originally, to post a plithy little entry every day, one that would entertain those who sought it out and that would so delight those who stumbled onto it that they'd, of course, become regular readers and cheering fans. I had this notion that if I ever skipped a day's entry that I'd receive hundreds of e-mails, inquiring about my health or wondering what's going on.

Over the years I'm proud to say that I've gotten more than one such e-mail.

The important part of that rule wasn't the rabidity of my fans but the "daily entry" idea. You see, I've been trying to stick to one entry a day, because (for some reason) I think that's the right way to do it. The thing is, I never check that on the other sites I visit, especially if I'm not a daily visitor. I just read the top entry then go down until I see something that looks familiar.

Why Crenellated Flotsam should be subject to rules I neither notice, nor particularly care about, on other sites just goes to show you how forgiving I am of others and how hard I am on myself.

Anyway, beginning today, I'm not promising daily entries, but I am willing to try something new: I'm entertaining the possibility of multiple daily entries. Yes, that's right, even though it looks as if I can't even be bothered to add an entry every day, I will now permit myself to make more than one entry on any given day.

This should help.

One of the challenges of daily entries was waiting until I came up with the burning issue of the day. I'd have a perfectly fine rant at eleven in the morning, but I'd have to hold off on posting it until later that night, when I'd either forget it or come up with some more wrenching topic. Frequently I'd try to work a whole day's worth of rants into one entry, and the results are not pleasant.

So, if I can create one entry that deals with my thoughts on the avian flu pandemic, then I won't have to worry about segueing carefully into that from an entry that's ostensibly about my dental program.

In fact, I'm going to try this out in just a minute, with a second entry that's short and that stays on topic!

Each day I think of many things to blog about and, following my plan, wait until late in the day to create the entry. Then, when it's finally time for me to blog, I'm involved with something else or otherwise prevented.

Today's no exception, but there's a little difference. I'm filled to my back teeth with things I wish to say, but they're all things I've been told not to blog about. Not that they're necessarily wrong, just that they're not very interesting, not even to me. The good blogs, the ones I enjoy, never have entries like the ones I envision.

I hope you all enjoyed your weekend.

Years ago when Saturday Night Live was funny they had a skit about a guy with a computer. It was an early one, maybe before the IBM PC, and the character was quite the nerd. In the skit he'd been laboring away on his computer, creating a wonderful program. When it was done it displayed a cheesy line drawing of a bowler and announced, in big letters, "You have six hats."

Then, below the picture, it listed his six hats.

That cracked me up as it showed just exactly how useless computers can be and may have been the genesis of my belief that just because you can do something, that doesn't make it a good idea.

Computers, as we've come to know them are very good at record keeping. By that I mean filing. They're also quick at arithmetic, and can add very quickly. Oh, and less we forget, subtract, too, but that's about it.

I'm reminded of how quickly computers can make errors today when I glanced at my stats and saw that today, for the first time ever, I received over 1,000 hits on this blog.

I counter-predict.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, also years ago the LA Times had a columnist Jack Smith, who was funny, witty, poignant, and popular. Each year he'd list some of the more famous (but no more accurate) psychics and relay their predictions for the coming year. It was the typical crap, who would be getting married, giant meteors hitting the earth, floods, deaths, and for nearly every one Jack would proclaim "I counter-predict."

He created that phrase as a shorthand of predicting the opposite, and it's stuck with me for years. Whenever Jack totalled up the tally at the end of the year, it should be no surprise that he was far more successful in his counter-predictions than any psychic was with their predictions, and I now use the term to reflect my disbelief.

The only way Crenellated Flotsam could draw 1,000 visitors is if I were giving away $20 bills. I suspect a new horde of robots have been unleashed, but I may add a PayPal (tm) link and see if I can con everyone into sending me a buck.

Years ago when Saturday Night Live was funny they had a skit about a guy with a computer. It was an early one, maybe before the IBM PC, and the character was quite the nerd. In the skit he'd been laboring away on his computer, creating a wonderful program. When it was done it displayed a cheesy line drawing of a bowler and announced, in big letters, "You have six hats."

Then, below the picture, it listed his six hats.

That cracked me up as it showed just exactly how useless computers can be and may have been the genesis of my belief that just because you can do something, that doesn't make it a good idea.

Computers, as we've come to know them are very good at record keeping. By that I mean filing. They're also quick at arithmetic, and can add very quickly. Oh, and less we forget, subtract, too, but that's about it.

I'm reminded of how quickly computers can make errors today when I glanced at my stats and saw that today, for the first time ever, I received over 1,000 hits on this blog.

I counter-predict.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, also years ago the LA Times had a columnist Jack Smith, who was funny, witty, poignant, and popular. Each year he'd list some of the more famous (but no more accurate) psychics and relay their predictions for the coming year. It was the typical crap, who would be getting married, giant meteors hitting the earth, floods, deaths, and for nearly every one Jack would proclaim "I counter-predict."

He created that phrase as a shorthand of predicting the opposite, and it's stuck with me for years. Whenever Jack totalled up the tally at the end of the year, it should be no surprise that he was far more successful in his counter-predictions than any psychic was with their predictions, and I now use the term to reflect my disbelief.

The only way Crenellated Flotsam could draw 1,000 visitors is if I were giving away $20 bills. I suspect a new horde of robots have been unleashed, but I may add a PayPal (tm) link and see if I can con everyone into sending me a buck.

Sometimes I like to check my stats and things so that I can feel very inferior to other bloggers.

No matter their numbers and popularity, I'm certain to win in percent of visitors running Linux. Over one-fifth are using that platform, a statistic I challenge anyone to beat. It would be higher, but some days I only gaze fondly at my site five times a day.

A lot of people (for me, anyway) dropped by today, but that's an anomaly.

I'm not happy about it, but I know that I'm in the minority in my tastes, interests, and amusements. If the world were a true democracy, I'd be voted out. I accept that the majority believe all kinds of things I don't, have tastes I don't share. I don't get mad any more when I'm faced with admitting I'm in the minority, but it saddens me.

As much as I'd be tickled pink by it, Crenellated Flotsam will never draw hundreds of daily visitors. There's no reason it can't (except the lack of interesting content), but I'm not offering anything most people are interested in. It's less nerve-wracking not having to please all those visitors, anyway.

Still, like I've noted before, nothing gets me hits quite like talking about foosas.

Sometimes I like to check my stats and things so that I can feel very inferior to other bloggers.

No matter their numbers and popularity, I'm certain to win in percent of visitors running Linux. Over one-fifth are using that platform, a statistic I challenge anyone to beat. It would be higher, but some days I only gaze fondly at my site five times a day.

A lot of people (for me, anyway) dropped by today, but that's an anomaly.

I'm not happy about it, but I know that I'm in the minority in my tastes, interests, and amusements. If the world were a true democracy, I'd be voted out. I accept that the majority believe all kinds of things I don't, have tastes I don't share. I don't get mad any more when I'm faced with admitting I'm in the minority, but it saddens me.

As much as I'd be tickled pink by it, Crenellated Flotsam will never draw hundreds of daily visitors. There's no reason it can't (except the lack of interesting content), but I'm not offering anything most people are interested in. It's less nerve-wracking not having to please all those visitors, anyway.

Still, like I've noted before, nothing gets me hits quite like talking about foosas.

It comes as no surprise to my readers, but my list of talents is pretty damn long. Exhaustive, some would say. Still, there are things I don't do well, and you're looking at one of them.

This blogging thing has me stumped. Either that, or it demonstrates my lack of precision and focus, even with the categories. Yesterday's entry, which I've never read, is an example of my suffering.

I get carried away. On occasion I think of lots of things to write in my blog during the hours when I should be doing something else. This, I think, is normal, but not how I then handle it. I sit down, start writing my new entry, and before I know it I've written half a page and have yet to even get near my point.

Then, I panic. Blogging is a 21st century activity even though it started way back in the 1990s. I think I have one foot, maybe two, still firmly planted back in the century of my birth and am not adopting as well as I might like. Blogs should be short, something one can read while holding one's breath, and I just ramble on and on, endlessly, hypnotized by the words showing up on my screen.

Then, instead of a sharp, succinct entry that people can read with pleasure, I end up with a scrawling page of gibberish that scrolls way past the editorial features.

This is not good. On the other hand, it's me.