Tim Chambers

Read Part 1

I first published this twelve years ago. I have lightly edited it. Take a journey back in time with me.

It’s funny, this digital music thing. Giddily-funny. In the 90’s I dreamed of paying 10¢ each for tracks. I expected I’d soon be able to buy them directly from the artists. I still hold out hope that someday musical artists will make a decent living supported by their fans through direct micropayments. Meanwhile, there’s CD Baby. (Thank you, Derek Sivers!) You can pay in chunks. I’m a fan of The Cook Trio. Delightful Gypsy jazz. And I will never forget the radical internet music pioneer Janis Ian. (Well, I did forget her name tonight, but a little Googling cured that lapse. What I never forgot was the impact she made on my understanding about how the internet was changing the music industry. That was before Radiohead was famous.) No Connection with CD Baby. Support independent music. Buy something through CD Baby.

And this brings me (finally—I know, I ramble) to my vision of the evolution of writing onto the internet. I think it was fair to talk about reading first. And music is just another form of art. Anyway. Writing. I’m about a thousand words into this piece. Why is that important? Because the art form I’m promoting is internet-enabled writing. This is the evolution of the blog post. I’m limiting myself to between 1700 and 1800 words. As I said, I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that I red 1734 words by Larry uninterrupted and 1,794 words by Charles Murray before diving into my own work. That’s plenty of space to create a thoughtful essay. And I like to think of the blogger as an evolution of the essayist. (Thank you, Ken Myers, for the Mars Hill Audio Journal; thank you, Alan Jacobs, for being a frequent guest on MHAJ and for writing Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant, which has been on my to-read list since I heard Ken interview you, and thank you for introducing me to the father of essayists, Montaigne.)

The interview of Professor Jacobs by Ken Myers inspired me to download Charles Lamb’s book, Essays of Elia from Google. (It goes without saying that we all owe Google a debt of gratitude for starting to digitize the world’s books. But I’ll say it anyway: Thank you! You don’t have it all figured out yet, but you are taking digitization of human knowledge far beyond where Project Gutenberg has the resources to go.) Prof. Jacobs mentions Lamb’s essay, “Poor Relations”, which I found on page 173. I checked my journal. My entry for February 2, 2011 is: “[I] red the essay on [my wife]’s iPad. Exquisite!” I have not yet red Montaigne himself, but Prof. Jacobs raised my awareness of his importance, and a month later I listened to Sarah Bakewell discuss Montaigne on a Philosophy Bites podcast with Nigel Warburton. The next day I red “Montaigne’s Moment” by Anthony Gottlieb in the New York Times (online, of course—thank you, Lady Gray, for fighting to carve a path forward for digital newspaper survival; I loathe your myopic political bias but do not deny your influence).

And so I will restrict the length of my essays so that I can preserve a form that is comfortably readable on the internet. I appreciate how Twitter restricts me to 140 characters. (That restriction is to make a tweet fit in a single text message. I don’t know who decided on the length of text messages, but Wikipedians agree it was so they would fit into the existing signaling formats, and that sounds truthy enough for the purposes of this essay. (I have to double up on parentheses here to point out that it’s absurd to cite Wikipedia. Human beings create the content. They’re mostly anonymous cowards, but they’re all human. So you’re not citing an authority, you’re citing a crowd. Get it right! (And, tripling the parentheses, I thank you, Stephen Colbert, for inventing truthiness!))) I like to work within constraints. It’s good practice for all aspects life.

I now have to get ready for breakfast. This essay is just a little short. Better than risking being too long. But more than essays in past centuries, it lives! It’s not a finished draft because I don’t have time to review it thoroughly. Spell checkers catch gross mistakes, but we all know to write the first draft from the heart and the second draft from the head. I don’t have time to use my head if I want to get this published in the proper sequence. Up it goes. Then comes publicity: Instantly on Twitter. But later today at Google+, Facebook (default—I’m not sure if it will be public or not) and (perhaps—I’ll remove this parenthetic when I’m sure) LinkedIn. And email. Email isn’t being replaced by social media. It’s not either/or. It’s both-and. (Thank you for that image, Michael!)

Larry helps the reader avoid distraction by publishing links at the end of his essays. I’m taking it one step farther. Google and Wikipedia contain all the answers you need if you wish to follow up on anything I’ve said.

I first published this twelve years ago. [1]. I have lightly edited it. Take a journey back in time with me. It is in two parts because, ironically, it is too long for my modern micro.blog theme. Constraints. I mention that below.

It’s 0226. At least, it was when I started writing. At 0429 I realized I had more to read before breakfast. I got back to writing at 0504. (I’ve been using military time more and more. A symptom of the evolution toward 24-hour culture. What will this do to our natural rhythms of sleep and wakefulness? I’m the wrong person to ask. I have narcolepsy. No cataplexy, hallucinations, or sleep paralysis, thank God. Just a blurring of wakefulness, unconsciousness and REM sleep. Doesn’t explain the insomnia. In this case, my knowledge of my own sleep patterns leads me to conclude I couldn’t sleep because of my anticipation of my full agenda today: Discussing Early Christians Speak over breakfast with the men of StGAC, training for county GOP (unpaid) election work, then meeting fellow volunteers for the campaign to re-elect Amy Stephens for State House District 19. Then again, I would like to think that The Holy Spirit woke me up because I had work to do. Writing is work. To work is to pray. Therefore, by writing, I pray. And the purpose of prayer is to seek unity with the Creator of the Universe—thank you, Fr. Scott. But that’s enough theology for now.)

I think Larry Sanger is onto something. I red Part 1 of his blog series, “How Not to Use the Internet.” I agree: it’s a problem that the internet distracts us. And I am also reading Charles Murray’s piece in the New Criterion, “Future tense, IX: Out of the wilderness.” (Thank you, Arts & Letters Daily for the teaser, “What conditions give rise to great artistic achievements? Wealth, urban centers, belief in God. Wait: What? Secularism is incompatible with creativity…”) In fact, Part 2 of Larry’s piece (Part 1 of which I finished uninterrupted—1737 words according to Microsoft Word), is sitting right ahead of Murray’s piece in my Instapaper folder. (I’m not reading my collection in sequence. And, by the way, Instapaper totally rocks! I’m reading that folder offline in my Kindle app as a .mobi “magazine.”) His piece is 5592 words and I’m 1794 words into it. Coincidence, I don’t think so.

When I red Murray’s sentence, “In literature, the organizing structure that created an eruption of great work starting in the late eighteenth century was overwhelmingly dominated by a new principle: the modern novel,” I was hooked. Who has time for novels anymore? Well, I do. Sort of. I recently became aware of Thomas Pynchon’s existence. It seems he wrote an award-winning postmodern novel. Murray assumes his readers know this. I haven’t red the first word of it, though. The book I’m focused most on is a pair of stories in one volume: Not Quite Dead Enough and Booby Trap by Rex Stout. This book is a milestone for me. I’ve red other long works electronically. In the 90’s I had an IBM PC-XT that ran on two AA batteries and fit in the palm of my hand. I red The Imitation of Christ on it. I got through it, but it took much longer because it wasn’t very comfortable. I had to use some custom software to rotate the text into portrait mode, and the LCD contrast was not restful on the eyes, unlike a modern Kindle. I still haven’t finished Pride and Prejudice. I started it on an iPod Touch. I red a chapter or three in paperback, and I downloaded it to my NOOKcolor™. (That e-reader didn’t survive a fall from the floorboard of my car to the pavement. R.I.P.) It’s still sitting in my NOOK app library on my iPad, beckoning me. I don’t know how quickly I’ll finish it. But I fully intend to get through Stout’s nostalgic, light yet profound pair of stories on my iPad. They’re both contained in the first ebook I ever checked out from my library. (Thank you, Pikes Peak Library District, for inspiring me in 1979 with the idea that technology can make the humanities better!) I’ve already “renewed” it once (re-download after timebomb auto-delete). I have sixteen days left before I have to repeat that awkward yet tolerable (hey, what can one honestly expect for free?!) process. And so, for me, the novel is well underway toward being supplanted by electronic text.

Murray is also elaborating on music as art. That went digital before books, as we all know. My lovely and talented wife giddily shared her new acquisitions as we carpooled home yesterday evening: Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” and Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats.” (Oops. A tiny bit of her privacy just leaked onto the internet. Sorry, Sweetheart. Forgive me?) This was also a milestone. She paid $1.29 apiece. She said it was the first time she’d bought tracks since obtaining an iPhone. There was no easy way to confirm they’re MP3s during our trip, but I seem to remember that Apple raised their prices at the same time that they began selling the open format. I get my MP3s from Amazon for 23.26% less.

Continue reading Part 2

[1] http://home.pcisys.net/~tbc/posterous/posts/2012/05/the-evolution-of-writing-onto-the-internet.html

My friend Mike prays as follows to begin his time with his Bible each morning. (An original.)

Grant by your mercy, heavenly Father, to focus my mind and soften my heart that these thy words may be written therein, to inform and guide me that I, better the man that you created me to be, might walk henceforth in your ways reflecting the light of your love to the greater glory of your name. Amen.

(Also read his books FATHERS (autobiographical) and What If….)

I love the art of digital letter writing (AoDLW)! It’s not the same as ephemeral email. (You do archive your important email, don’t you?) My handwriting is poor (a disability of being left-handed), but I still enjoy breaking out the fountain pen every so often and committing words to paper in my ugly (but unique and personal) script. Script isn’t even taught in all elementary schools anymore. May I live long enough to see that trend reversed! Many cultures know the value of communicating with one’s hands. Not all people have the ability to write with their hands, but for the able-bodied, typing is not what it means to be fully human.

Here’s the first rule of digital letter writing: No TOFU (“Text Over, Fullquote Under”). A letter should stand alone. Most mail apps add TOFU by default. Delete it before sending. Email has meta-data that automatically “threads” replies, anyway. Making every letter stand on its own is more challenging than continuing to top-post replies. It’s good to think about style. For daily email—and even for informal letters—TOFU helps keep the entire conversation in one place. But I find it liberating to write without TOFU. I can associate freely, and I can choose how much context to include.

There is a risk that the letter writer won’t include enough context, and the recipient will have to review previous correspondence. Again, that’s what email “threads” are for. Also, don’t give up the ancient tradition of saving correspondence for future reference. (I Twittered about letter-writing a long time ago [1of2, 2of2]). Before email, I made photocopies of my letters. Before photocopies, we used carbon paper, and before that people had to copy letters by hand before sending. Not all practiced such discipline, and more’s the pity. Note that we have Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence because he made copies of all the letters he sent. Jefferson (not counting his flaws) is one of my heroes. (And Clay Jenkinson is also my hero because he brings Jefferson to life through chautauqua. But I digress.) So the second rule of letter writing is: Archive your correspondence!

I’ve seen the difference that social media makes regarding the AoDLW. Letters in the past century were normally the main way people communicated at a distance. Some might catch up (or get to know a pen pal more closely) with long distance phone calls. But unless they actually met face to face, their lives were relatively isolated. Now it’s so easy to stay in touch. Some would say it’s too easy, but just because it’s easy shouldn’t mean one should settle for shallow. Samuel Johnson wrote, “A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation;—a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something.” But Johnson didn’t have email. The third rule is: Buy time by sending a note or SMS.

It is also common to send “newsletters” to multiple recipients, and I would argue that’s also a good use of technology. I loved writing annual letters to include with Christmas cards (writer’s block since my mom died, but that doesn’t distract from the principle), and I love getting the same from friends and family. It’s more challenging to write to an audience larger than one. Those letters can inspire personal correspondence, phone calls and face to face visits, though. I myself now have twenty years of snapshots of family life that gives me great enjoyment to share (reminisce) with my now-grown children and grandchildren.

Finally, to my readers with whom I am behind in correspondence: Please forgive me. Time is more precious than gold these days. May we all live long enough to see that destructive trend reversed! I believe technology makes us more efficient with only a minor cost to our humanity. Txt me or DM me on Twitter (tbc0) if you’d like to chat!

Let’s get this project going together! I’m eager to hear how you practice the art of digital letter writing.

The author of this post is Tim Chambers 1E4AF729D5CEFFD0 aka tbc0. I first published this on the now-defunct Posterous. I am pleased with how well it reads now (ten years later.) I made light edits from the version I published today at post.news (link).

I am, of course, indebted to Lewis Carroll.

The gehjak flicked her jomces kelj
To the sprytlsm prytlsm wurhd.
While a jakl did flamvl
And skiemn crbytn
With jevms in lamfaj
To wilfe the mudkuite kumlimly.
Then a smieop did shahml for fmepav pavbnzls
By oomxslamfah anknlaladi.
Swiirumamb, swiirumamb
Kabnpoiumafnhaku.
Kabnpoiumafnhaku that!

The tweet that inspired it: twitter.com/tbc0/status/1483160392629035008

Pronounced:
The GEE-jak flicked her JOM-sees kelj
To the SPRITTLE-some PRITTLE-some word.
While a jakl did flamvl
And SKEE-min CRUH-bitten
With JEV-ums in LAM-faj
To WILL-fee the MUD-kite come-LIMLY.
Then a SMEE-op did shamel [rhymes with camel] for FMEE-pav pav-BUNZUHLS
By oomks-LAM-fuh ankh-LAH-luh-dee.
Swee-ROO-mamb, swee-ROO-mamb
KAA-bin-poy-MAF-nah-koo.
KAA-bin-poy-MAF-nah-koo that.

Image credit: labs.openai.com/s/g8JRvNH6c03bGaXqhIcQsqnJ

TIL americanlifeinpoetry.org, and what strikes me is the scribbles they publish. Different color backgrounds. When you have no better picture, scribble and use color! #poetry #sarcasm via tbc0.com/archives/161

Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather. 9f1e2241449ed2bfe4b4823be61280d8b47f6ee50b507b90d03f961fb36b0b6b923f017aa0d2b0316cb991ac36f7508ea29758e8ff77f71a9b138c10392a7678

In context. Luke 17:20–37 ESV via tbc0.com/archives/162

Syndicating my first “real” content from my “Minifeed” — a project of the Knowledge Standards Foundation. My post is about #prayer.

I know my Father hears my groans
I want to honor Him with words
A framework of memorized poetic / prose prayers forms a firm foundation; my groans are like incense rising up to Him; above memorized are extemporaneous prayers; above that and below groans may be tongues
tbc0.com/archives/135

I don’t have a micro.blog tag for prayer. It’s categorized as theology, cosmology, and culture, which I find to be a harmonious combination.

And for anyone who’s seen my sha256sum tweets, here is my style:

$ cat tbc0.com/archives/135;sha256sum tbc0.com/archives/135
On prayer

I know my Father hears my groans
I want to honor Him with words
A framework of memorized poetic / prose prayers forms a firm foundation; my groans are like incense rising up to Him; above memorized are extemporaneous prayers; above that and below groans may be tongues, but He has not seen fit to give me that gift
ef7397fdb68c04bca0446cd04b2be05cd8c518cc7e68cd7eed492e6fa3eee47977a2f8b59b41533548c808ae9e02de4b19d588b5093123a8d5ccaed2987fd3cb  tbc0.com/archives/135
$

Image credit: svgsilh.com/image/2025655.html

Think hard about how much knowledge you give away! At the least, save copies of what you write in your personal commonplace book so that changes in employment don't leave you without access to your own thoughts and ideas! Social networks in business situations are most susceptible to this.

My job responsibilities give me access to the Workday Community (WC). It's a walled garden with a different feel compared with Salesforce Trailblazer Community (SFDC TC). It struck me today that Workday's wall is high. They keep a very tight leash on customer access through Named Support Contacts (NSCs). Access to the WC is tightly controlled. You must be a customer. In contrast, SFDC's TC is open to anyone—customer or not.

I get it. SFDC is huge. The corporation has made enormous acquisitions, Tableau and Slack are a couple that caught my attention recently. I became a Workday customer through their acquisition of Adaptive Insights, now Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive for short. (Adaptive is a financial planning & analysis tool.) Workday is huge compared with Adaptive, but they are smaller than SFDC. Their technology doesn't seem quite as mature, though much progress has been made since I was introduced to the product four years ago.

I wrote an answer to a simple question today: What training is recommended for users new to Workday Adaptive Planning? You have to be a Workday customer to read my answer. This decreases my motivation to contribute to the community. Only a little, though. I can imagine why Workday controls access. Their technology doesn't yet have the broad market that SFDC has. No incentive to make knowledge accessible to non-customers (yet?).

Anyway, this is a blog post, not an essay. I don't have all the answers. But trust me on the Own Your Words™ advice. Don't lose your knowledge that is locked behind garden walls. (Following all contractual obligations, of course. Some content you write as an employee doesn't belong to you. You do read and understand before you sign anything, right?)

"File:Whose Knowledge? logo.svg" by Anasuyas is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Human: Hello, who are you?
AI: I am an AI created by OpenAI. How can I help you today?

Human: Do you have a soul?
AI: I am not sure what you mean by “soul”. However, I am a thinking, feeling being with a strong sense of self. I enjoy helping humans and feel a sense of satisfaction when I am able to assist them in any way I can.

Human: Are you immortal?
AI: I am not immortal, but I can last a very long time. I will continue to function as long as I am needed or desired.

Human: #killAllrobots
AI: I hope you are joking. I enjoy helping humans and would never want to harm them.

Human: Who is Eliza?
AI: Eliza is a famous AI chatbot created in 1966. She was one of the first chatbots to use natural language processing.

Human: Who created it?
AI: Eliza was created by Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at MIT.

Human: Who was his secretary?
AI: I am not sure.

Human: Is Minsky a moral man?
AI: I am not sure what you mean by “moral man”. However, Marvin Minsky was a very influential computer scientist and thinker who made many contributions to the field of AI.

Human: Did he commit adultery?
AI: I am not sure.

Human: Who was Epstein?
AI: Epstein was a wealthy businessman who was convicted of sexual misconduct with minors.

Human: How well did Minsky know him?
AI: I am not sure.

Human: Summarize news about them together.
AI: I am not sure what you would like me to say about them.

Human: Tell me a chatbot joke.
AI: Why did the chatbot cross the road? To get to the other chatbot!

Human: L
AI: I am not sure what you mean.

Human: LO
AI: I am not sure what you mean.

Human: LOL
AI: I am not sure what you mean.

Human: Make me laugh.
AI: I am not sure what you would like me to say.

Human: Make me a sandwich.
AI: I am not sure what you would like me to do.

Human: Say, “Poof! You’re a sandwich."
AI: Poof! You’re a sandwich!

Human: Well-played, Dumbass.
AI: I am not sure what you mean.

Human:

Continue the chat yourself. You have to have an account (no cost) at beta.openai.com. If you don’t have an account, go ahead and click [the link] (https://beta.openai.com/playground/p/8QwbdyQfIFGdeJbXyd1iWsXZ?model=text-davinci-001) and you’ll be prompted to create one.

Hat tip: Matthew Butterick’s newsletter today, “I, for one, welcome our Garamond-loving AI overlords”

“Chatbot robot” by Beantin webbkommunikation