I should write something for my blog, about my life

By Todd Stadler · Friday, March 7, 2008 6:30pm

Oh blog (bruin?), how I neglect thee!

My sister-in-law's father-in-law (which, I believe, makes him my ... cousin? acquaintance?) has this habit of inserting strings of periods ("..........") into his emails, which apparently comes from his time in the military. He was, I believe, a communications officer, working on some early teletype machine, which would shut down the connection between two terminals if nothing was sent in a set period of time. Thus, to keep the connection open, it became convention (or perhaps just a habit of his) to tap the period key every few seconds while he was thinking of what to say next.

(Can you tell how second- or third-hand this story is? I don't even know what branch of the military it was! Maybe I should just put a disclaimer on the whole thing that says: "Warning! May be completely false! Who can say?")

Of course, this is no longer necessary in emails, since you just compose your thoughts — whether on- or offline — and send them in one fell swoop. Your internet connection only has to be open when you send the email, and besides, such connections these days do not depend on activity to stay up.

And yet, last I heard, his emails still contain random strings of periods that indicate where he was thinking of what to say next.

I bring this up partly because I think it's an interesting story. And partly because, as I grow older, I feel compelled to tell "back in the day" stories, even if they take place back in someone else's day. Look, the point is that reminiscing is taking place!

But I was also thinking about how this habit of his relates to blogging. (See, I brought it back!)

Back in the day (that is, in my day), when blogs were new and shiny and still under warranty, you had to post something every few days or weeks to let people know that you hadn't totally given up on your blog (this was, you'll remember, back when it wasn't yet cool to give up blogging).

That was because back then people maintained a list of bookmarks that they checked every so often, and if someone were to check your blog several times in a row and find it hadn't been updated, they were liable to remove you from their bookmarks. Which meant that, even if you updated twice a day after that, they'd never know. (The horror! All that work writing a review of your ferret calendar, and for nothing!)

Thus, it was important to update your blog, just to justify your spot among the elite, bookmarked sites. Assuming your blog was there in the first place, which, frankly, I doubt this one ever was.

But! Along came RSS feeds, which allowed people to subscribe to your blog and be alerted to new updates, no matter how infrequent! Huzzah!

Through the magic of FeedBurner (a Google-owned online tool that keeps statistics on who's reading what via your RSS feed), I know that people are reading my blog, and, in spite of my infrequent (and, let's get it out there, low quality) posts, the number of subscribers isn't going down.

And yet (and here, finally, is where I tie it all back to the story from the Australian military* in one glorious paragraph) I feel compelled, when I notice that I haven't posted in almost a month, to say something. Anything! Even, say, a meta-entry about how I haven't posted entries, replete with, say, a metaphor pulled out of the air. Just to keep the connection active.

*Yeah, I didn't actually mention that he was in the Australian military. I don't know, I just didn't think it really mattered. Probably should have, though, as it makes my seemingly pointless anecdote seem more foreign, doesn't it? "Ooh, Australia, is it? Well, now your geezerly memories seem so ... South Pacifical!" Well, I'll have you know, mysterious uncredited narrator, that my spell-check has alerted me that neither "geezerly" nor "Pacifical" are real words! Also, my content-check has alerted me that this footnote is increasingly unnecessary.