T-9 Hours...

Well. This is it. Tomorrow morning I'm going over to the College and St. George Alicos to pick up my poster for the ZOO 498 poster session. Damage? $189 and change, tax included. I've heard rumours that you can actually print posters over at Physics for free (which is apparently what Marc did for Alice's BIO 299 poster) but I know Marc's busy with his own papers, and, well, it felt really nice to have done all of that all by myself without having to rely on anyone to help me out. Not that I had a choice, anyway: Dan was in Mexico for a GBIF meeting. I cringed when I heard the price quote over the phone, but I still maintain that it was a good price; they're giving me a high-res printout on photo-quality paper, and given my experience with Alicos and special print/copy jobs compared to other places, I'm fairly sure that they had the lowest price overall. I didn't have the time or energy to go to every single print shop I know of to check prices, anyway.

God, actually laying out the poster was an exercise in absolute frustration. I've never had a more frustrating and infuriatingly irritating project: it should have taken a morning to do, but what it ended up doing was suck up the whole day. I had to rely on GraphicConverter to do all of the grunt work for me; now GC is a great file format converter for graphics files, but it's clear that it's absolutely terrible for anything else. The text tools are substandard and not directly editable; if you make a typo, you need to completely delete your whole block of text and start all over again. Sure, GC isn't supposed to be Photoshop, but not having editable text is silly (I am using an older version though, so maybe this has been improved).

And then there was the file itself. I'd never layed out anything close to 1 x 1.1 m before but I knew it was going to be massive, and indeed it was: even just scrolling through the file was excruciating. That was what took so much time: the process of actually moving from place to place on the file. And for some reason, even typing text was glacially slow.

As luck or irony would have it, I actually got Gimp.app running on my G4 via X11, which didn't happen before...and I realize just what a breeze this would have made of the layout. Well, not that it does me any good now. Sigh.

Anyway...if you're going to be around campus tomorrow, the poster session will be from approx. 1:30-3:30 pm on Thursday (tomorrow) in the Ramsay Wright Student Lounge, in the basement, and I guess this goes out to Alex and Katherine, since you're the only ones in my day-to-day life who actually go to the trouble of coming here and reading my posts...oh well. Wish me luck, guys!

"What is it with you, anyway?"

That's probably one of the one-liners from Star Trek that will remain with me for the rest of my life -- a wry remark by McCoy to Kirk on Rura Penthe in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, when he sees that once again, Kirk is up to his skirt-chasing ways, as always.

I wish I could say that same thing to all of the people I've met or seen who put their journals on "Friends-Only". I'm not talking about most of the people I've seen here on Blogger...I'm talking about the people I've seen and met on the infamous Journal-Site-That-Is-Not-To-Be-Named.

On their front page, LiveJournal bills itself as "...a simple-to-use (but extremely powerful and customizable) personal publishing ("blogging") tool". And in many respects, the purpose of a blog is to arguably provide a public insight on your thoughts, be they on science or current affairs, life in general, or just what happens to you in your-day-to-day life. The very concept of a blog is, arguably, to provide a public outlet for your own feelings and thoughts. Think about it. "blog" is a slang contraction for "Weblog". Web + Log. "Log" of course, being obvious, but "Web" clearly refers to the fact that you're publishing this "Log" of yours to the Internet. And by its very definition, the Internet is a communal place where privacy is deemphasized in favour of openness and group discussion. So, extending that logic, a "blog" is by its definition a record of your thoughts which is purely open -- or at least, as open as you wish it to be, within reason.

So I then make the case that people who put their blogs, be it here or on LiveJournal, on "Friends-Only" are doing something which is antithetical to the very idea of a blog. If they're all "Friends-Only" then what are they doing publishing to an Internet site in the first place? Better to keep a pen-and-paper journal that you show to your friends, or tell them all about your thoughts and feelings via email. At the risk of sounding snobby, it in a way smacks of pretentiousness.

~

Now, I understand that it's their right to do whatever they want with their journal and it's their business how they want to express themselves...not yours. But it seems so cold, and even arrogant in a way. I've met people through LiveJournal and Renee's message board who I'd love to get to know better, but seeing that "I am putting my journal on Friends-Only from now on" post is like a big red Stop sign to me. It says to me that no, I don't want nor need your friendship, thankyouverymuch. I don't care about you, I only care about me and my own little inner circle of friends -- and no, you can't be a part of OUR group.

Which brings me back to the communal nature of the Internet today. If the Internet were a neighbourhood, we'd all be freely exchanging all of our ideas, thoughts and feelings...our doors would be unlocked, and your next door neighbour could drop by anytime, whether it was to borrow a few cubes of sugar or just sit down for a chat and some tea. But the Climate of LiveJournal is different. It's colder, more impersonal, more inhumane. It's a neighbourhood where all of the doors on the houses aren't just locked, but bricked up and sealed off with razor wire and chain-linked fences, and houses are linked only by deep and dark subterranean tunnels. Newcomers are treated with suspicion and even malice.

It's the difference between Toronto (well, Michael Moore's Toronto anyway) and a suburb in L.A.

But anyway. I'm keeping my LiveJournal and keeping it asystolic, yet still open and left at the entry about dad...if only as a sign of protest against LiveJournal's collective xenophobia. In the meantime, why don't you drop by my place here at Blogger? My door's always unlocked, and if you need to borrow a cube or a cup of sugar, I'll always be happy to oblige.