Swallowtails in my garden.

These are not very good pictures, but I figured what the hell. I haven't blogged in a long time, these pictures were sitting in "draft" mode, so here they are. From July.

 

[I played around with the settings on this blog a month ago. But I stopped suddenly, leaving a possibly off-center layout. I might fix it, or not. Not tonight for sure. I might remove the list of books next to the posts.]

 

Hello to my handful of readers!

 

Does Google control it all?

If this link works for you, you will see Internet intrusiveness at its most benign, although some might argue that it's not really that benign.

The link takes you to an automatically generated photo album, called Saturday in New York, A Story by Pam Jones. I had nothing to do with the creation of this Story, which was generated by my Google+ account using a recent post about a trip to NYC. Maybe the number of pictures in the post triggered some program that compiled the Story, as Google calls them. The photo album just popped up one day in front of me when I logged into Google. Basically the whole thing creeps me out. 


The Wall Street Journal says of the feature:
"Google will automatically sort through your pictures and turn them into stories based on when they were taken."
From here.

Always something new in the Big Wide World of The Interwebs.

Socks for George, right off the needles.

Now George is a good friend. Half of the Margaret-George team. Love them both to death. But George hates blogs and it seems to me that he mentions this dislike/hatred quite often. So I'm sure he doesn't look at this blog and that's just fine. But it does make me feel odd to post his picture (well, a picture of my socks with him in the background) knowing how much he hates blogs. Would he be offended? Would he feel that I had invaded his privacy? And then these questions raise the related question of other friends and relatives who are put off by blogs. I worry about them. Should I shut down this operation because it's too intrusive? Too revealing? Too self-centered? Should I (can I?) block access to those who are unsettled by my blog? All rhetorical questions -- obviously -- because here I am blogging. As Anne (of The Complaint Department) says: that is all.

The deer are back! Been so worried about them. I'll be cursing them soon.

I've been avoiding my blogs for a few weeks. Not sure why, other than some vague feelings of being a little too full of myself. I mean really: pictures of socks and deer and snow. Is that what my life is reduced to? Apparently. Do I care? I didn't think so. To be continued. Or not.

Blogs come and blogs go. (First tomato!)

Interesting article about blogging.
"According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled."