I’ve maintained this blog and have regularly written in for over 4 years now.
In the process, I somehow lost the art of writing a dairy (log) and got more interested in maintaining a mostly-updated commentary on what I see and use.
However much I’d like to call them the same, they aren’t. My blog never discussed how I feel or felt about personal things. It never allows me to write how it felt after every sale I closed and every deal I lost. It cannot let me archive my emotions and thoughts about my friends or family. I cannot fully write how sorry I am to have not been there for Atul many times over the last 8 years. And he still became the friend I always wanted my brother to be!
My blog has become a self-edited newspaper … for your consumption, not for mine. Thats not a bad thing … but I need another medium, more private, more closed, more diary-like. For a while I thought twitter.com/vinit might be it. But it’s more like a collection of quotes I thought up.
Look at your blog … do you feel your blog covers your need for a personal, mental and emotional archive? Should I just create another blog somewhere and keep all the entries private?
12 Jul 2007 at 1:13 am
Don’t leave private stuff on the internet. Period. In fact, don’t leave it digital form. I know it is hard for someone so geeky, but trust me, online private content is a bad idea.
12 Jul 2007 at 8:46 am
I agree with you. Thats the reason I have kept away from writing more private stuff.
But whats a person for a need to write to do?
I can’t carry a paper diary everywhere (airplanes/etc). The fear of losing/misplacing it too high.
1) Should I get some sort of simple app that uses decently high security (PGP) and is maintained on my local computer.
2) Write out the stuff on the computer, and whenever I get a change, print it out and add it to a physical folder in my desk (again = the moment it’s printed out == 0% security)
I like option 1 … or atleast option 1 with a secure website.
13 Jul 2007 at 12:18 pm
How about I say write (not type) for the sake of writing? One reason for suggesting that is because writing is fun. I can imagine our kids growing up to say “Vinit is so cool, he knows how to write”.
Jokes apart, writing makes it obvoius what you were thinking initially(sctraching out) or what you thought later (a little ^ in subscript with the addenum as superscript) etc etc. Reminiscing with those edit might be all the more fun. If I had to bullshit, I’d hazard to say that what is written is untamperable (relatively speaking), and so prevents you from editing the past ;-)
Just yesterday I happen to look back at what I had to say on my (public) blog a couple of years ago, and it was interesting to see what I was thinking at that point; I can’t imagine what it would be to have those edits also available.
13 Jul 2007 at 12:26 pm
Writing’s always been better for me than typing when it comes to laying out my thoughts. Thats how i went through college … all those papers I had to print out double-spaced, 10 pt. font … were all first written and then typed. The only way to get those thoughts pouring!
I love to physically write.
Why else do you think I got a tablet PC in the first place?!!!
Still, the problem is … maintaining it for long term.
Maybe put the thoughts into a tablet pc program, save it as images in a pdf and encrypt them for good measure.
My problem with all of this is that eventually the technology used to archive gets outdated and at some time in the future, what if I can’t properly get back my 10 year old archives?
Looks like a diary and a strong safe are my only options.
14 Jul 2007 at 8:28 am
I used an application called digital diary or something similar about 5 years back. It was pretty good except that I forgot its password and eneded up losing all the entries as they were encrypted.
I would personally hate to write anything. As Vinit as quite nicely pointed out, I get bored by writing so end up making squiggly lines after the first two letters of the each word.
18 Jul 2007 at 11:03 am
Hi there,
This was the same dilemna I grappled with, while updating my blog. I had so many blogger friends ask me where I’d dissappeared…its diff. to walk the fine line between writing enough yet not too much..between honesty and privacy…