Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

This journal is four years and one day old today. I wouldn’t be proud of that – in fact, I’d be ashamed if its existence - if I hadn’t professed during that first year that I should post regularly so as not to disappoint my readers and acquaintances that I do not get to meet often (or at all) and update about what is going on in my life, as I have been by the web pages of others.

I’m thankful I don’t “clog” (from a term coined in the web comic “User Friendly” that my friend Joel pointed out to me) or ever have stale content (as one of my online students called it) due to negligence or lack of discipline.

Another thing I’m proud of is having my own voice, not just regurgitating facts that I’ve extracted at one time or another from some book or site, or just posting links to news items without attempting to put my own unique spin on it.

After all, how many other people out there have already posted that this or that singer is the best or their list of the top ten tracks from the first half of the new decade? I could read about that from any of the thousands of other sites of people expressing their similar succinct opinion when I put those keywords in a search engine. If I’m going to put something like that on my chronicle, I’d relate it to the question that my readers would probably be asking, which is why this or that thing matters to me?

Virtual diaries are about using the tools of the electronic age to be able to update my ever growing circle of acquaintances (comes with the job) with the goings on in my life or in my mind or in my heart if we don’t meet everyday.

Sometimes it’s even about telling people that I do see regularly about my perspective on a shared experience that for some reason or another remained unsaid at the time, such as – pulling out a hypothetical situation – expressing discomfort in watching a play about euthanasia when the other party may be more vocal raving about the looks of the lead actor immediately afterwards, and the writer was just too nice to burst the other’s bubble.

In other words I’m saying the cyber log responsibility is not for everybody. Those who can’t sustain it should just stick to e-mails or text messages, which are okay if they are sporadic. After all, who wants to scroll down and read: “Been too long since I last wrote here. Too many things have happened for me to talk about them, even briefly” repeated several times?

This is my web legacy, the consistent trails of ones and zeroes I’m leaving for the billions out there to find.

Session 1497 clogged and was stale. Class dismissed.