This is GRENAMIER.COM

The other night I couldn’t sleep so I went downstairs at 2:00 to watch some TV. Our cable company is offering a free preview of a number of multicultural channels, and one of them was covering a cricket match between New Zealand and Australia.

I’ve only watched cricket once before, during the World Cup years and years ago. I sort of gleaned some of the rules from listening to the commentators and watching the action. The whole thing looked interesting enough, but I just didn’t get it. But this happened before the days of Wikipedia.

This time, I had my iPhone and I fought through a lousy writeup to get a sense of what the players were trying to do. And I found I could enjoy watching some of the game. I have questions, such as “why don’t they seem to run very hard?” or “who thought it was a good idea to design a game this long?”, but I know who I can ask about it. We’ll probably have a good conversation about the Mumbai Indians beating the R-something Royals by 4 runs.

Sometimes I dislike how technology has taken away the natural pauses in life… those brief moments in which you could catch your breath while something physically needed to move from one place to another. Like cheques in the mail, or documents to be stored away in a cabinet or taken to someone’s desk. Tech made many of these pauses obsolete, but also quickened the pace of life in the same stroke. When we talk about life being so hectic, there it is.

And yet, I like how certain things are more efficient now. I like having information at my fingertips. I like instant gratification when I want to know something. I really couldn’t have enjoyed the two matches I’ve sampled so far without access to technology and information. As usual, I suspect the key is managing the balance.

My free preview will be over soon, and I suspect I won’t be watching anymore cricket after that. Still, I’m glad a little new tech helped me learn to appreciate a very old game.

I recently got a notification that someone has signed up a new account on the site. When that happens, I usually say “what site? Oh, yeah…that one…”

The last post on here was dated back in April, so I thought I should make a quick update on what’s going on with the site. In a word, nothing. At least, not now.

There is no commercial purpose to my blog. It’s really just another outlet for my writing, but my main outlet is a Moleskine notebook that’s become some sort of journal/scrapbook hybrid. Pics to come someday. I think you can look for more writing on the site when football season starts to come around. Not that there isn’t comment-worthy football news happening now, but I’m not one of those guys.

Since April, there has been a lot to talk about. I’ve had some opinions on things like the Tamil protests, the Iran protests, Twitter, Michael Jackson. A lot of that is old news and not very fresh anymore, so I’ll try to get my two cents in as things happen in the news.

As if anyone is waiting to hear what I think anyway…

Part of why I don’t blog much is that sharing what I think of isn’t an action that comes naturally to me. Another big reason, is that this blog has to compete with my Moleskine.

If you’ve read my little profile blurb, you know that I love classic low tech stuff. Like fountain pens scratching out lines in a paper notebook. When I have to get something out of my head and into text, my weapon of choice for the past few years has been a Moleskine notebook. Yes, they’re expensive, but something about the paper, and the bookmark, and the handy pocket in the back is like crack on the fingers. I’ve gone through a bunch of them, scribbling thoughts down whenever on a whim. Of course, a lot of whims happen at work when I have little to do.

There are some problems with recording my thoughts this way. First: the ink gets all over my hands because I’m a lefty using a fountain pen. Second: the notebooks aren’t very searchable without a multitude of Moleskine hacks to overcome the limitations of non-digital paper. Third: everything I write is hidden away under an elastic band, never to be shared or debated.

I’ve gotten over the first problem. In fact, I like the “lived in” look that the ink smudges give the paper. The second doesn’t really bother me too much either. After all, notebooks are what they are. People who spend a lot of time and effort in maintaining systems to make their paper behave like binary bits seem unsure of what year they’re living in.

The third problem, however, does bother me. Although a lot of what I write in the notebook is private and should never be shared (screw all you “radical transparency” types!), there’s a lot there that needs to get out and seen by others. Not just because I’m a narcissistic jackhole, but because a lot of these thoughts need the benefit of perspective and cross-examination. I’d like people to read what I write, give me some feedback, and hopefully I’ll learn things I didn’t know or see things I didn’t see before. Perhaps the people commenting might also come away a little different.

The blog can help me with this. I’ll keep scribbling in my Moleskine, but when I hit on something worthy of a closer look, I’ll look at it a little more closely. Shine it up and throw it on the blog for all of my 0 readers to see.

<sarcasm>I can just hear the anticipation now!</sarcasm>

You always know when “the media” has run out of things to report when it starts to report on how “the media” is covering the story. I put that in quotes because we tend to talk about the media as if they were one singular thing instead of a collection of mediums.

Anyway, I’ve hit that point pretty early in my blogging life. Not so much because I’ve run out of things to say, but mostly because I’m not sure of what I’m doing with this blog, and what I find publishable. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of noise out there. The Internet doesn’t really need any more narcissistic navel-gazers teetering on their pedestals.

This blog is intended to be about getting a lot of the half-thoughts swirling around my head onto the keyboard where I can see it and think about what I’m thinking about and why I think that way. I think about all kinds of things, so I can’t say this blog will be about anything one particular thing.

Be warned: I do think about Apple and football a lot.

This site just started about an hour ago. In essence, I was tired of the iPhone experiment that was here before so I started a blog. Whee!

Every few months I start something like a blog or I buy a Moleskine because I want to write down what I’m thinking. What I feel. But I waver on how much it’s worth sharing with the whole wide world.

We’ll see how far we get with this. Comment freely, please!