Calendar ambushes

Keeping a diary gives the calendar a special hold on one. This morning I looked at the date on this weblog and was suddenly ambushed by grief. I was transported back to June 1 last year. It was a beautiful English summer day. Sue and I took our daughter to a Guides Summer Camp in the morning, and after watching the (hilarious) process of tent construction etc. for a while, departed. Our other children were elsewhere, so — unusually — we had the day to ourselves. She was in terrific form and looked wonderful in a pearl necklace I’d bought for her birthday a few weeks earlier. In the car she observed ironically that if she hadn’t known she was dying she would have said she was fine. We went out to lunch at a good restaurant and had a lovely time, enjoying one another’s company and the incomparable lushness of England in early summer. When we got home, I asked if I could photograph her. “If you must”, she said, smiling. So I did.

This photograph is the most important one I’ve ever taken, because it turned out that June 1 was the last day when Sue felt really OK.

Definition of a Weblog

From Dave Winer:”A weblog is a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser.”

He continues: “Key point: On my weblog no one can change what I wrote. In contrast, having written for professional publications, pros have to prepare for their writing being interfered with. Sometimes you submit right at the copy-edit deadline. Or you write exactly the required number of words so nothing can be cut. But in the end, the words that appear are an amalgam of what your organization thought should be said on the subject you’re addressing.”

Weblogs are unique in that only a weblog gives you a publication where your ideas can stand alone without interference. It gives the public writer a kind of relaxation not available in other forms. That might mean that in some sense the “quality” of the writing is different, but I would not say lower, assuming the purpose of writing is to inform, not to impress. I would choose a few spelling or grammatical errors over factual errors.”

Half of all email is now Spam, according to one survey

BBC Online story: “More than half of the total number of e-mails sent in May were unsolicited messages, according to net filtering firm MessageLabs. It found that that 55% of e-mails it scanned in May were spam, up from just under 40% in April.”