I’ve been away for a while. Away from my blog, that is. I got a little behind on things in mid-January and kept putting off a new post, even though I’ve had a variety of ideas to share. By early February, the blog turned into the equivalent of a friend that you were supposed to keep up with but got behind on, and then you get even more behind because you felt bad about getting so far behind. It sort of feeds on itself. But finally, you crank up your resolve and decide to fix the situation.

This behavior is fairly typical of introverts, and I almost define the term! Here is a quote about it:

And when someone who an introvert has categorized as a “true friend” seems to be in danger of falling into “acquaintance” territory, the introvert can begin to have gnawing feelings of guilt, even shame, at the idea of “abandoning” the friend . . . guilt is accompanied by anxiety, the fear that the person in question has taken the extended silence of the introvert as evidence of how lightly their friendship was regarded . . . in an effort to avoid the awkwardness that a long-delayed communication can create, the introvert may choose to let the friendship die the long, slow death of silence, instead.

Yea, that is kind-of what has happened to me and my old friend, this blog. But maybe  »  continue reading …

I use wordpress.com stats for my blog, and I recently took a look at the worldwide breakdown of where my views originate (and presumably where my viewers live). Here is a partial breakdown covering the past year or so:

USA: 30.8%
United Kingdom: 13.3%
Canada: 11.2%
Australia & New Zealand: 8.0%
India: 5.5%
Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore: 5.0%

Is there any common thread here? Well, at least 72% of my traffic comes from former British Empire colonies (or in case of the Philippines, a former colony of a former colony). So, my blog is a British Empire phenomenon!!!! To the degree that a handful of hits a day could be said to reflect a “phenomenon” . . .

Nonetheless, Hail Britannia!!! Perhaps I should have a gin and tonic, that great British colonial drink, to celebrate!!!!

I haven’t been blogging much lately, as I am trying to set up a new home computer (a Dell XPS8700 tower — yes, a very old school, totally non-mobile computing situation) with Windows 8.1. Win 8/8.1 is a terrible operating system, a real clunker. I paid for it, but sooner or later Microsoft will pay, one way or the other, for putting out such a monster. Win 8/8.1 tries to cover both worlds — the desktop world and the mobile world — and winds up combining the worst of both. I hope that MS does better with Windows 9 (already in development, supposedly for release early next year), and that my Win 8.1 becomes a curious anomaly, a clunky transitional footnote between the world-changing Windows95 to Windows 7 series, and some new, highly flexible and intuitive type of personal computer operating system. I’ll be stuck with an Edsel (one of the most famous clunker cars of all time; but you could also say “Corvair” here, to avoid picking on Ford). But there will be enough others in my boat to form a support community such that we will still get some use out of our misbegotten software investments. In every life, you are going to buy something that just doesn’t live up to your expectations; you do your best to make the best of it. (No complaints, though, about the Dell box; seems to be running OK . . . knock on wood).

I’ll be back in a few days with a big essay on modern scholarship regarding consciousness, cosmology, and the deepest nature of reality. And whether God has any part in all of this. I have some big thoughts brewing up, so stay tuned, more to come!! (Hopefully this weekend).

When I began this blog over ten years ago (Nov 11, 2002), I had modest goals in mind. If I could reach 5 people a day and share with them the various things that I have learned in this “classroom of life”, it would be great. I called myself “an eternal student of life”; unlike all those eternal student sites out there written by anxious or narcissistic graduate students, my own ‘classroom of life’ truly does go on and on, despite the fact that I was through with formal schooling many decades ago. The “eternal” part reflects a spiritual longing (although not at all a ‘certainty’) that my living and growing conscious experience will not in fact be completely ended when my body dies. But hopefully, I can deal with that issue another day.

Back here in the earthly realm, it turned out that my blog at first attracted more like 5 people a week. But I carried on with it, even though it was quite certain that my thoughts were never going to go viral and become another Huffington or DailyKos or Hot Air. I still liked it, even if no one else did (except my friend Mary, shout out to her given that she stuck with it thru thick and mostly thin). After I moved over to Word Press in April 2010, things picked up a little. I actually did reach about 5 viewers (about 8 to 10 page hits) per day for most of the week. But seldom did I significantly exceed that amount.

Within the past year, I actually did have one post that “went viral”, relatively speaking. For me, any post getting over 10 total views a day is “viral”. My one big hit was published on May 17 of this year, and it was in regard to a certain Dr. Chauncey Crandall, a cardiologist who  »  continue reading …