Tea Leaves

A few years ago, I heard the term "blog" for the first time. It took a few more weeks before I had the term explained to me, b y, of all people, a colleague who had pretty much retired, and was teaching. I realize there are techonophiles in their 50s, and I'm not so young either, but I didn't expect him to know what a blog was. So, for those who don't know, blog is short for "weblog". They're online diaries.

Except they're not. A diary differs from a blog in one extremely important way: secrecy. In principle, you write a diary expecting no one else but you will read it. This secrecy allows you to put thoughts that might be seen as offensive or hurtful. But it affords a degree of honesty. Most bloggers would avoid talking about their health, their dissatisfaction with marriage, their affairs, or other highly embarassing situations.

Amazingly, if you could ever prevent your friends, family, and coworkers from reading your blog, and restrict the readings to complete strangers, you'd be set. You'd get the fame (or notoriety) you might crave from publishing a blog, but without the consequences of having everyone you know harass you, get upset, and so forth.

There are people who are reasonably open with their lives, who enjoy the publicity as much as Big Brother participants. Those blogs can be fun to read because they offer the kind of voyeurism that make people read blogs. Since I'm curious about people, I want to know what they're thinking, and what they're thinking is often not what you think they're thinking when you talk to them. So few are willing to be open.

And I have to be in that camp too. The people who are best suited to writing blogs are college students who don't live at home. They are just far enough from their (hopefully) technically-unsavvy parents to avoid dealing with these issues in person. They're old enough to write stuff that's interesting, but young enough to not worry about it affecting their job, their marriage, etc.

Personally, I don't feel I have that luxury. A few months ago, a blogger working for Google got fired weeks after joining Google. He criticized their operations, complaining that Google's in house meals were an underhanded way to make employees work more hours. The amount of protection bloggers have from their employers is not that great. Not that I have that much to complain about my place of work or that I want to reveal anything of a sensitive nature, but that still places boundaries on what I can and can't (or won't) say.

Which finally gets me to the point of this entry. Why blog? Why the name "Tea Leaves"?

To answer the blogging question, I have to say, up front, that I've been using the Internet a long time. I was reading Usenet in the late 80s and using email then too. I used Mosaic, then Netscape, then occasionally IE, Safari, and Firefox. From the years of 1990-1997, I wrote a lot of articles on Usenet. At first, I was scared to write on Usenet. After all, who wanted to hear my opinions?

What? You don't know what Usenet is? In the late 80s spanning even until today, people could write articles to newsgroups. A newsgroup is not really news. It's a bulletin board. You can either write an article, or you can write a response to someone else's articles. The set of an original article, plus all the follow-up responses is called a thread. For example, suppose I want to write about the series Enterprise (which I've hardly seen) coming to an end, and the meaning of not having any new Star Trek on television for the first time since like 1988.

I'd give my article a title, very much like the blog entry I'm writing now, and then people could follow up. But where would I put this article? Usenet provided a googol-monguos newsgroups. I might post it in, rec.arts.startrek.enterprise, where fans of the Enterprise show could write (called "post") their opinions. There were newsgroups covering the gamut of topics from geek subjects such as AI, operating systems, to coffee drinkers, to Indians, Scandanavians, to those wanting to talk about sex.

Two things really killed Usenet. First, in 1995, or so, AOL members were allowed to write to Usenet groups using their AOL accounts. This lead to the newbie ways that lasted a year. Cries of "newbie AOL posters" abounded, as if homeless people were suddenly admitted to a posh Princeton club for blue blood alumnis. Newbies (effectively, stupid newcomers) had no idea how Usenet worked, but had no fear of demonstating their lack of knowledge. My thinking, at the time, was that it was an annoyance, more than anything. I couldn't work myself to the lather that experienced denizens of Usenet would.

AOL newbies were tolerable. They'd eventually learn how to write a post, how to manuever their way around before browsers changed our lives forever. What really killed Usenet is what's killing email. Spam. Once spam was introduced to newsgroups, there was no turning back. A group like alt.sex already had few enough articles that were intriguing to read (such groups were said to have low "signal to noise" ratio, borrowing a term from DSP communications, meaning few good articles to many bad ones) were made unreadable. Links to porn sites abounded, and posters stopped posting. Spammers are perhaps the greatest evil in the Internet, making what was an intriguing forum, unusable.

That happened in about 1996. Until then, I had cut my teeth in writing articles on Usenet, primarly on tennis newsgroups where I found fans of tennis that were more rabid than me. I think the group still exists. Once I stopped getting cable, it became increasingly difficult to follow tennis. Furthermore, tennis is personality driven. You don't root for a team, you root for a person. And it's not like golf, where players can have careers spanning 30 or more years. A tennis player's career lasts maybe 15 years, and that's for a good player, like Agassi. Sampras's health is so shot, that he had to retire.

Since the heyday of Usenet, I haven't written much in a public forum. I've written a lot of tutorials, but in hindsight, I think I should have written them in a different way. At heart,I'm still a teacher, and even though I don't teach these days, I think about it. Time away from teaching is helping me see teaching from a better vantage point.

Let me stop a few moments. If you've read this far, you've seen me jumping from topic to topic to topic. This is how my mind works. I think of something, that reminds me of something else, that reminds me of something else. I don't feel the need to write a focused blog, and I'm sure that's not the point of many blogs anyway, or at least, not it's effect. I then become self-aware that I've become totally schizophrenic, and point it out, so you know that I know that I write this way.

For the last year or so, I've been wanting to write a blog, but just figuring out what I wanted to use for a blogging service had me quagmired. Should I use Blogger, Typepad, MSN Spaces, Squarespace. Should I pay for the service? Should I hose my own blog?

A month ago, after having convinced myself to use MSN Spaces, then convinced myself not to use it, I picked Blogger. I then did what I normally do, which is get a book on the topic. Buying books--that's a whole entry unto itself, which I will delve into much later on. The book, by the way, is Visual QuickProject, Publishing a Blog with Blogger. I know what people think. Blogger is so easy an idiot could use it. Let me state this emphatically. Technology sucks! Books like this sell because the people who deliver technology can't make their technology easy to use. As easy as Blogger is to use, I would tell you how to make it better (and all software for that matter) were I divinely given powers of Software Czar.

And it took me weeks after I decided on Blogger (my decision finally coming down to "just pick a damn blogging software, and move on") before I made myself write the first entry last night.

I'm still pissed the editing bar doesn't appear in this window. My book is obsolete within months of publishing, or else Safari doesn't know how to render a toolbar. And, did I mention, I hate toolbars?

The first roadblock I had to this blog was coming up with the name. Goodness, my blog needs a name? I love the one that a "friend" (what do you call a person you keep in contact with that hasn't quite reached the level of friend---eh, I'll just say friend), who named his blog "Blarg", like some horrid transmorgrification of "blog" as spoken by a Long John Silver shill. I picked Tea Leaves because "tea" was a name I used in chatting way back in the day.

Ironically, I drink coffee far more than I drink tea. I'm sure I should be a tea drinker and imbibe oolong or white tea or antioxidant rich green tea. I should, I should, I should. But I'm a creature of habit, and so a cup of Joe is my choice of caffeine.

The thing is....someone has already picked tealeaves.blogspot.com. That's just my luck. Names being taken from the namespace of the Blogger-verse. Maybe that reason alone should have made me go to some other service. Instead, I spend minutes, MINUTES! trying to figure out another name. Finally, I settled on "chaileaves" because chai is the Indian word for tea.

This is where I get to say that I had chai before chai was hip. I had my first chai in maybe 1991. Chai is black tea, milk, and some Indian spices. It became much more popular years later.

Chai also happens to be the last name of my freshman (er, first year) roommate. He was Ed Chai, Malaysian born, ethnic Chinese, citizen of Canada, married. Also, knew an Ed Choi from Philly, also married. (They may have gotten divorced since then but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt). I didn't name this blog after my roommate.

This is not a blog about predicting the future, despite its name. I just like its double or triple meanings of tea leaves being literally tea leaves, and that it is based on an old chatting name, and that it refers to augurs of the future.

That is all.