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Heck, I don't know! *8) The log is a place where I post stuff, so I can hear my voice, play with ideas, record paths travelled through conceptual space, maybe get comments from others in the great Out There, maybe become rich and famous when a hermetic philanthropist whose middle name is Hank reads something that I've written and is so struck by the perfect beauty and wisdom of it that he endows a revolving fund for the support of me and my heirs and assignees in perpetuity, so I can be free to write my nose off. Something like that!

The log won't often be a chronicle of daily events. Daily events aren't always that interesting, and they often involve people who may not want the world reading about them. It is likely to be a bit of a Weblog, as I spend quite a bit of personal and professional time on the Web, and posting some of what I see and find noteworthy there seems proper.

Think of it, for instance, as a mirror. A mirror that I'm looking into at myself, because I'm incurably vain, and that you're free to look into over my shoulder. Of course, you're looking from a slightly different angle, and what you see is likely to be a bit of both of us, sort of crammed together. If there's anything you'd like to say about the composite experience, I'd love to hear it; drop me a note at log@davidchess.com.

How do I write links to the log?

Good question! "http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.html" is the right link for the log in general, but what if you want to link from a page of yours to a specific log entry of mine?

Starting near the end of March, 2000, there's a little square image at the right end of the date-header on every entry; it points to the permanent linkable URL for that entry. In Navigator, just right-click on it and do "copy link location" to get the permanent URL onto the clipboard. Something similar probably works in IE also. For older entries, read on!

The entry for any given day will always be on a page called "log.yyyymmdd.html", where yyyymmdd is the year, month, and date of the Friday that starts the week that the day is in (yeah, log weeks start on Friday: historical reasons). So for instance the entry for 26 December 1999 is in log.19991224.html, since that's the relevant Friday. Even the days that are currently in plain old log.html are also on the site as log.yyyymmdd.html, where yyyymmdd is the most recent Friday.

Starting in 2000 (and for some random dates in 1999), there's also a named anchor for every individual day, in the form yyyymmdd. So, for instance, the permanent URL for the entry for 3 January 2000 would be

  http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.19991231.html#20000103
Lovely, eh?   *8)

What's the name of the log?

Well, that's a good question. Most other logs and journals and stuff have fancier names, like "My Heart on Fire", or "Fred's Technology Watch". I started calling my page "Log" before I thought anyone else might ever want to refer to it. You can call it "log", or "David Chess's Log", or "davidchess", or "a weblog", or just decide it's too much trouble to decide and not refer to it at all. I'll forgive you!

I'd sort of like to call it "The Curvature of the Earth is Overwhelmed by Local Noise", but that's kind of long. You can allude to that name, though, and show that you're one of the select few who have read this paragraph.

Can I subscribe to your log?

I don't have a notification list myself, but I do produce various geeky XML "feeds", and there are various tools and sites that can read those and let you know when I've posted a new entry or whatever, in various ways. There are links to the feeds on the main Log page, but for quick reference they are: RSS feed with just the title of each entry, RSS feed with the complete text of each entry, Atom feed with the complete text of each entry.

These feeds are all produced by hacks of various degrees of groddiness; lemme know if you find any of them broken someday.

Please summarize your philosophy of weblogs and journals.

To quote myself, way back when all I had was a NEWS page:

I think everyone in the world should be forced to write a paragraph a day of thoughts, events, rants, or whatever, and to put it up on the Web for everyone to read. Of course that would imply universal literacy and computer access, but that's OK! Anyone who refused to post their daily paragraph could like have their livers eaten by eagles or something.

That about sums it up, but see also a longer rant from the other month, about some things that don't suck.






decorative pile of books
What other logs and journals are there?

Qua-zillions! I hope and intend to straighten up this section, and maybe even give it its own page, sometime this aeon.

Other journals and diaries and stuff, many many many many many many many many many many many many others, can be found at diarist.net (in case you're curious), and of course there are Weblogs and semi-personal newsletters and so on all over the place.

Things I read something like daily:

Or at least that I have in my syndication reader / page minder, and therefore intend to read pretty often. Heh heh.

Geegaw: Bright, funny, quirky, mordant, good to read.

The Medley Weblog; another bright person, politically aware and outspoken. The site also has a portal page, with big lists of other weblogs, journals, references, u.s.w.

Ftrain: FTrain (another frighteningly intelligent and articulate person).

Cow orkers: Ian and Steve.

The Jenn / amptoons / Kip Manley ontogroup.

Thoughts, Arguments and Rants by professional philosopher Brian Weatherson; very nostalgic for me, as I did analytical philosophy as an udergrad at Princeton in my vanished youth.

abuddhas memes, links and commentary about all sortsa cool subjects in the general area of consciousness, culture, freedom, and so on.

Pursed Lips; one of the first sex-related weblogs; kinky and friendly.

Daze Reader; also about sex, especially sex in the news and current events.

The Hotsy Totsy Club (or whatever it's called this year) -- more smart words.

Mootmom -- one of my heros.

More people (all of whom deserve more description than this):
Caterina (Caterina),
Abada Abada (Jessamyn),
rebecca's pocket (Rebecca),
Synthetic Zero (Mitsu),
calamondin (Judith),
Sylloge (Stewart),
gorjuss (Giles),
luvly (Giles also).

Bruce Sterling! On a Tripod site! With really annoying ads! And URLs sitting there as plain text rather than links! (SF writers can be so amusingly low-tech in real life; but at least he tries!)

Sharp Blue, by a physicist / extropian / SF reader and general sharp person who should post more often.

Stavros the Wonder Chicken; weblogging celebrity. Or something. Somewhere in Korea; I think.

Antipixel, photos and thoughts and stuff from Tokyo, Japan.

Universal Church of Cosmic Uncertainty; sensible fellow tragically infected with some Republican memes. But we hold onto hope.

Across, Beyond, Through, by a Unitarian Universalist minister (who also should post more often).

Fafblog and Hitherby Dragons, both indescribable and utterly wonderful in wildly different ways.

I have MeFi on my feedlist, but there's so much stuff there that I'm usually afraid to actually look at any of it, for fear I won't surface again for hours, or days.

Doh, The Humanity, not exactly a weblog, but the place where NTK keeps their gallery of silly mistakes on Web pages. Yes, silly, I know.

Things specially about books: del.icio.us/tag/books (I still haven't grokked what this is, but sometimes it lists good stuff about books), Blog of a Bookslut (which I'd have to read just for the title, even if it wasn't voluminous and interesting), and Amazon's top-selling SF books RSS feed (just for fun).

A pile o' geeky webby stuff: Mena's Corner (official weblog of Six Apart, a mildly interesting enterprise), FlickrBlog (similarly, for flickr), Google Blog (similarly, for Google), Google Weblog (unofficial Google weblog: about, rather than by), the Old New Thing (deep Microsoft geekery; high schadenfreude value), the XML Cover Pages (sleep-inducing, but occasionally actually important), Crypto-gram (much more interesting; about crypto and security and stuff), All Things Distributed (some smart computer dude), Grady Booch (some other smart computer dude).

And a pile o' political or otherwise topical stuff: The Religious Policeman (a Saudi Arabian guy on what it's really like), Kicking Ass (the lesser of two evils?), Groklaw (SCO against the world, etc), Lawrence Lessig (inneresting guy innerested in intellectual property and stuff), Freedom to Tinker (similarly), USS Clueless (another Republican infection in an otherwise-capable brain), SpinSanity (an honest and often successful attempt at nonpartisan analysis of political lies), Electoral Vote Predictor (if you're reading this after November 2004, it means I've forgotten to update the page), Dynamist Blog (Virginia Postrel is a smart and interesting libertarian, with only a mild Republican infection), Back to the Kitchen (Media, Culture, Politics and Women in a New American Century).

Whew!

Things I used to follow that are no longer updated:

Linkwatcher: Tracked weblogs and stuff back before it was Cool; on the main weblog page for a long time just for sentimental reasons.

Mouth Organ; commentary on sex and the news.

Parents Strongly Cautioned: tiny fictional vignettes, often erotic, sometimes quite explicit; hasn't been updating recently (boo!).

Jane Duvall's journal

None of the Above (Beth).

Alamut: reflections with links, impressively bright and interesting; a literate artist and thinker in Europe.

William Gibson, (the William Gibson) kept a weblog for awhile.

Come to My Senses: a daily perception. No longer updated, but archives still online.

TBTF's Weblog: I liked Keith Dawson's Tasty Bits from the Technology Front, back when it was actually updating (I'm even a Benefactor).

Bovine Inversus: the name says it all. (But what has become of it?)

Inexplicably Fancy Trash from intelligent and witty writer of naughty stories Nicholas Urfé now dormant.

Flux Redux/Naked Eye/Living Art/Catherine.

Things I follow more sporadically, or have just recently stumbled on, or just whimsically felt like listing:

LarkFarm: Mike Gunderloy; high-quality links, no chatter (see also Mike's Journal).

The Bleat, weblog of the amazing Lileks site.

Apathy: yep.

Ethel the Blog: interesting rambling, and leftist anger, not quite daily.

Rob Rosenberger, often correct and usually amusing thoughts, about the anti-virus industry and other stuff.

scherzi & sospiri, by Columbine (related to Mouth Organ). One of the first online journals I read and liked; somehow I lost it for a few months, but here it is on the list at last.

Michael Norrish; what he's reading and listening to.

metababy: um collaborative uhhhh... stuff.

Cryptome: updated just about daily, a wonderfully-filtered collection of primary source materials about cryptography and the politics thereof.

lorem ipsum: It's from the UK, it has a clever name: what more could one ask?

Robot Wisdom: a tasty firehose; links mostly to current pieces on mostly-mainstream sites.

glog, my own toy group Weblog (just links and descriptions, no chatter); and you can add items yourself! (The password is "swordfish".)

SexReporter.com: a bloggish page about sex, with sleazy ads and all.

Flutterby: good content, clean design.

Perfect: a pure weblog, links without commentary. Sites linked are generally high-concept, always cutting-edge, sometimes wildly overdesigned, sometimes crash the browser.

ScreenShot; good design, smart person, what more could you want?

Bad Hair Days; a personal Weblog that I haven't really been following long enough to say more than "has interesting links". Also a journal maintained in parallel (rather than all mooshed together like mine are).

PeterMe: notes and links from a Webjockey.

/var/log: cool page design; a hacker Bildungsroman.

I put a spell on you: I really like this person, for some reason. Do I want my daughter to grow up like her? Friendly and frank; lots of life details here, and no Industry News.

Justin Fletcher's Diary: one of the first Web diaries I ever noticed. Programming and life.

Tracing: Just another friendly voice.

http://www.xplane.com/xblog/, about graphic design and stuff.

eatonweb, another blog; also a renormous blog list.

Bird on a wire and Brainlog, both (once!) at the U of Washington.

memepool, classic group blog.

Other lists of Weblogs and things (much, much bigger than this one!):

Other lists of lists of Weblogs and things:

Larkfarm's (scroll to "List")
rebeccablood's portal page has a list of portals.
Cardhouse has one on their links page.
metacubed thinks he's so very meta...

Other lists of lists of lists of Weblogs and things:

[Oh, come on!]


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May 20, 2005
 

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