Yes, I know … I haven’t been blogging much recently.
Yes, I know … I shouldn’t be posting if I’ve got nothing to say.
But I wanted to today! Am in the mood.
So how are my (very few) readers? Anything interesting happening?
No, nor me, except:
Blah.
Leon Lim – an old Deaf friend of mine from Malaysia – is becoming widely known as a predominant Deaf artist.
Leon and I became penpals when we were both in school, me at Llantarnam Comprehensive School and Leon at the Federal School for the Deaf, Penang; introduced to each other through a “letter exchange” between the Deaf pupils at each school, back in circa 1992. We wrote to each other for donkey’s years, exchanging not just letters but also artwork (from Leon) and stamps and various mementos and goodies. One such goodie was a framed RM$2 banknote which I received for my 19th birthday, which I still use as a bookmark.
In 2003, Leon visited the UK for the first time as part of a whistlestop tour of Europe, and he came to Wales to meet me, my family and my friends, and stayed with me for the duration. We got along like a house on fire and communicated with each other in a mixture of BSL and ASL. It was surreal to meet a penpal face to face, and pretty cool at the same time.
Leon then moved to the USA to study art at the Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, and he now resides in New York City as a working artist, and has become a well known artist in his native Malaysia, and even has >his own Wikipedia page!
In recent years, as we’ve both matured into adults and forged our own careers, Leon in art and me in law, we’ve stopped sending each other letters. However, thanks to the advent of the Internet, we have remained in touch, albeit infrequently.
I found out yesterday, via Deaf News Today’s Twitter feed, that Leon has been recognised for his work on TIME magazine’s year-end cover picture of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange using the text of a leaked cable. You can read all about it here.
I think Leon’s story is an astonishing one, and I am proud to call him a friend. Leon, we’ll come and visit you in NYC in the near future, promise!!
It’s commonly thought that the advent of technology has or will signal the demise of the centuries old past-time of reading books.
I beg to differ.
Since Corey was born, I’ve struggled to find the time and inclination to read a book. Indeed, I’ve started reading a book by Janny Wurts lent to me by SBW, but I’ve yet to finish it, despite having started reading it well before Corey was born, and he was 11 months old this week.
Up to now. I have just finished Sue Townsend’s latest Adrian Mole instalment: “Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years”, on my iPhone.
Yes, you read that right. ON my iPhone!
I’ve lusted after an iPad for a while since JBW told me he’d loved reading a book on his. I’m not prepared to fork out for one though as I have a relatively new personal laptop, which does pretty much the same things as an iPad (although perhaps quite as fancily).
I then contemplated buying an Amazon Kindle; considerably cheaper than an iPad.
Imagine my delight then when I discovered that there’s an Amazon Kindle app for the iPhone, and free to boot!
I downloaded it and downloaded a few free classic books, but it wasn’t really doing anything for me.
I was out and about one day and a little bored, so I looked through the Amazon Kindle book catalogue on my iPhone and came across “Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years” for just over £3. I’ve read all the Adrian Mole books released so far and I knew a new one had not long been released and I wanted to read it.
So. I purchased it and downloaded it onto the iPhone. And started reading it. And finished it in less than two weeks! Not bad going for someone who has taken over a year to read an actual book!
Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed reading “Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years” on my iPhone. It didn’t take long to get used to it, and the font and size is very similar to a printed book, albeit each “page” is much shorter.
The best thing of all is that it’s so easy to “get out your book” and read as I almost always have my iPhone with me. So if I’m twiddling my thumbs or standing on a tube train, out comes the iPhone and off I go into another world.
Still think that technology is the harbinger of doom for the trusty old book? I certainly don’t.
Time to start reading Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol”, on my iPhone!
You will probably notice that I’ve had a bit of a “blogging frenzy” this last week. I posted rather intermittently in 2009, and hardly at all this year – only 8 posts up to last week – and now find myself enjoying posting one again, and following my Stress post, realised how therapeutic it could be.
I was then quite happy to read this article, and it made me realise something.
The reason I’ve hardly posted during the last two years is probably because of my growing utilisation of Twitter and Facebook, where it is far more convenient and less bothersome to say something: short rather than long. But now I see the difference. Cory Doctorow says:
Now that we have Twitter, social media platforms and all the other tools that continue to emerge, many of us are finding that the material we used to save for our blogs has a better home somewhere else.
That’s interesting. I never really thought of it like that; that I’d abandoned blogging because the bulk of what I would previously post about was actually more suitable for Twitter, and as I’ve said, it’s much quicker to do it on Twitter, as you’re only limited to 140 characters each time.
But then I started to feel that I wasn’t quite able to get things off my chest as much as I’d like. After all, on Twitter you can go “ARGH! HATE [PICK A THING OR SOMEONE]” on Twitter, but you don’t really get the opportunity to elaborate and really say what you want to say.
With blogging, you can. And so here I am!
And no, I don’t think blogging is dying. Perhaps the blogs I used to read regularly have stopped posting – Grumpy Old Deafies and Saltbar are good examples – but there’s probably two reasons for that: (1) they can’t be bothered any more; or (2) they’re tweeting instead. But who’s to say that they won’t start up again? In fact, I URGE them to!
Morning campers!
There’s something about early mornings. Most people aren’t early birds (myself included), but I have to say that when I manage to get my arse in gear and get out of bed before 6am, I feel a rather perverse satisfaction.
Why?
Because the world is lovely and quiet at this time of the morning. There’s a minimal number of people trying to get out and about; very little traffic on the roads; trains tend to be on time (as it’s too early for things to start going wrong); and it still dark (at this time of year anyway).
I sometimes wish I had the energy and inclination to wake up at this time every morning and enjoy a full morning.
But then again, I think I’d rather stay in bed!