Stuff and Nonsense

Blogging that is. Surely vanity. The desire of otherwise modestly, if at all, talented people to see their name “in lights”. For sure there is a lot of good out there. Good, talented people donating software, knowledge, hints, tips, advice and ultimately, their time: that most precious of commodities. But most blogs seem to be like this blog. Like my blog; A dumping ground for random thoughts and questions of no relevance to world affairs and quite likely of no interest to any other inhabitant of said world. Yet still we do it. Rewarded in the short term anyway only by the marginal ego boost received by seeing ‘published’ what would be published no other way.

My writing here will have no more beneficial effect on the world at large than your reading of it. No poor will be lifted from poverty, no oppressed peoples freed. By the same token, and perhaps most importantly of all no one will be harmed by it either so what the hell. Read if you like. I’ll write if I like.

The most pressing question in my mind as I write this is the proper construct of a paragraph. Part of me just wants to have a bit of white space after a few lines because it’s prettier that way (my use of this particular adjective should in no way be taken to imply any real appreciation of aesthetic whatsoever. Let’s just say I find it nicer to read.) Somewhere in the depths of my brain I seem to recall something about the changing of a subject or the grouping of related ideas. Grammar didn’t feature largely in my education as far as I can recall.

Isn’t every thought in this post related? Isn’t the whole post a train of thought? I know, I know, I should  Google it. Google knows everything. It certainly seems to. Musing on the notion of a paragraph though is somehow more appealing than looking for it in the almost certain knowledge that were I to Google “How to use Paragraphs” I would have my answer.

This leads me to another thought. I think Google, without which of course the web may still be virtually unnavigable may have stolen most of the mystery from the web. There was some fun to be had in the quest for knowledge, the cross referencing between different “catalogues” as yahoo et al started out as. Locating knowledge has almost now become too easy. The seeking is now short lived, with Google and others providing almost instant guidance to what one seeks. The challenge has become finding enough time and focus enough to take in the information or to identify its provenance. Perhaps one day there will be a market for a search engine that doesn’t. A search engine that attempts to obfuscate results just enough to make the research challenging. Perhaps not.