A blog by any other name

I was having a short conversation today with someone after one of my graduate classes on the benefit of communication skills in the field of computer science. The consensus? Yes, it is nice to be able to communicate to both people and computers and often the human-human interface is more difficult than the human-computer interface.

I was remembering that, at one point in my life, computers were simply a means to a literary end. For a very large portion of my life I just wanted to be a writer. The summer after 8th grade I sat down and wrote a 300 page book, which is comfortably sitting in a drawer someplace in my mother's house. Prized prose? Hardly, but in this instance I think it really is the thought that counts. 8)

So in this conversation on writing code or writing prose it was brought up "well, you have your blog". Which struck me, as I have always thought of this space as personal reflection, event chronicalling, and mental exhibitionism. But never as a way to practice and express my desire to write.

Let's face it, literary boot camp this ain't... Or is it? I've been proven wrong before.

But it brings up a good point and one that I have personally struggled with for some time: what are and are not appropriate outlets? Rarely does a single endeavor give us the spectrum of experience we need to feel whole. In just the past few years my outlets have been martial arts, digital video editing, furniture building and general woodworking, PVR building, ballroom dancing, murder mystery acting, and, more recently, graduate schooling and blogging.

But, as previously blogged on here, there is a difference between intelligence and wisdom. Quite similarly, there is a rather large gap between the accumulation of knowledge and the catharsis we seek from our outlets. Does this blog give me the emotional purge I occaisionally need? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. So the jury will have to remain out on the question of whether blogs satisfy the need to write.

_Ed