Blogging is good for you

Well, obviously.  It’s a form of expression and it’s always good to express ones feelings – to get them out there instead of simmering inside, and blogging anonymously is even better as it harms no-one (if, for example you want to moan about a colleague but without mentioning names…).  I’m referring to this article in Scientific American which says that blogging has therapeutic value.  We bloggers know this already.  Writing is cathartic.  But it is good to know that when you’re sick, blogging will do you good.

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Another discovery (I’m slow)

I’m teaching a group of people at work about RSS in a week or so.  It’s surprising the number of people I work with and are friends with that do very little online, have not heard of blogs or RSS or Web 2.0.  Their lives are much the same as pre-Internet.  Once I discovered the online world and had a computer of my own I was hooked – back in 1996 I think it was and my first computer with dial-up in 1999. 

Anyway, my recent discovery is docs.google.com.  I did know about Google’s online word processing but I never saw a need for it until today.  I mean every computer comes with a word processing program so why would one bother?  I now see distinct advantages.  My laptop has Microsoft Word but this computer has OpenOffice. 

I was writing up a teaching plan, if you like, and was about to use OpenOffice and then convert it to Microsoft Word to print out at work.  But then a brainwave hit me – use Google docs!  Brilliant!  Now I don’t have to save and send, then convert and print.  Just access Google and print.  Wonderful.  Such small realisations make me smile with glee at the ease of it all.  Thanks Google.

Talking of RSS, the reader of my choice is Bloglines – it seems a lot easier than anything else.  For a while there I’d forgotten my log-in and password, so manually visited my bookmarked faves.  Very time consuming I must say.  I still have some feeds to add.  I hope the people I tell about RSS will find it useful.  It’s especially brilliant for databases if you’re doing research.  That’s something I hadn’t realised until recently (slow…).

On a different note, I’ve given up on the idea of a second blog – too much work.  I find it difficult enough to update one blog let alone two.  The second blog would mean keeping up to date with local news and who has the time for that?  There seems no point in deleting the blog though.  WordPress has the annoying restriction of not allowing blog names, IDs or even email addresses to be re-used for another blog.  Useless.

The sun is shining but there’s not much warmth.  Once that sun goes down it’ll be freezing. 

Weekends are so short….

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Nothing doing

Life is pretty quiet at the moment.  The weather has got colder and I’m just about ready to hibernate (if only).

I lost enthusiasm for everything for a while there.  I haven’t been to bellydancing classes for about a month or more now.  I feel guilty but haven’t practised and would feel put on the spot having to dance in front of others without having practised anything at all.  So I keep telling myself – next week, after I’ve practised.  Yeah right.  I’ve just received a new CD of bellydancing music which makes me want to get up and dance so that will help.  A previous CD I’d bought was quite uninspiring.

I couldn’t help myself at a local store’s sale of DVDs recently.  All up I probably bought 6 DVDs of movies I like or haven’t seen yet.  I mentioned my purchases to colleagues at work and they looked at me rather strangely and one said “you certainly have eclectic tastes”.  The movies I bought, when I think about it, are all rather violent.  “Kingdom of Heaven” (I’m a history buff and this movie was surprisingly accurate), “Dead Fish” (I like Gary Oldman and Robert Carlyle and was intrigued by Karel Roden), “Dracula” (again – Gary Oldman), “History of Violence” (I’m a big fan of Viggo Mortensen), “Fearless” (a martial art movie), and “Night Watch”, a Russian fantasy movie featuring vampires.  Not your usual female fare, I admit.  But then I’m not your stereotypical female.  I dislike (sometimes intensely) female things such as the colour pink, lacey or floral things, cooking, sewing, shopping for clothes/shoes/makeup, romance novels (with the exception of history or fantasy-based with action as well as a smidgeon of romance) and chick flicks.

Anyway, the upshot is that these female colleagues won’t be borrowing my new DVDs anytime soon – which is fine by me!

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