Substitute Blogger

Don’t know about you, but a lot of the bloggers I visit are suddenly taking breaks from their computers, their writing or just turning off the Internet due to sheer boredom and disdain. Dawn announced her hiatus and shortly after seems to be experiencing technical difficulties with SQL preventing her immediate return. The Goose chimed in the following day, but left us with a “Countdown Clock” to entrance us much like the flashing “12:00AM” on our VCRs. Then Moxie followed suit by announcing she would be posting less frequently and I actually experienced the first ever “re-run” online yesterday. One of the Mad Pony girls has run off to Paris and Sarah has way too many things going on right now.

In the universe that is the blogosphere it appears I have big shoes to fill. By no means do I have the talent, vocabulary, let alone the editorial skills to pickup where these fine folks left off, but I’m willing to give it a shot. Kevin has an idea why he blogs and perhaps I know why I do, but the question is what draws YOU the reader to these various websites? (More importantly who do I have to sleep with to get more reader comments?)

Pardon me while I ponder what to write next…

Let’s start with this report that cell phones ARE NOT the leading cause of car accidents, in fact they are ranked sixth. I’ve ranted on repeatedly for a couple of years now ever since the idea of a cell phone ban in cars was put on the table. Of course, I don’t expect this bit of information to dissuade the folks that want to regulate my ability to drive.

You know what’s worse than having your credit cards stolen and used without your knowledge? Being arrested again & again because somebody stole your identity. As I am still recovering from a credit card theft that happened months ago, this particular article hit very close to home. There have been a rising number of large scale credit thefts including the 30,000 records stolen last November and most recently the 50,000 records that were recently lifted from the University of Texas. I can attest that reestablishing your credit after fraud is difficult, but from what I read fixing errors in a criminal report sounds almost impossible. Now more than ever people need to be aware of how their personal information is used and why privacy rights ARE a big deal.

Let me close this afternoon’s entry with a recent pet peeve. I’m perfectly willing to pay for online content, but not if said content is going to expire. I am slowly restoring entries from the previous version of this website (back when a blog entry was simply an individual HTML page) and I noticed many of the news story links I used are dead now. I haven’t decided whether to go back through those entries and attach updated links, but the point is I shouldn’t have to.

OK, that’s the best I could muster without an elaborate spell check. If that wasn’t quite the reader workout you expected you can go here for a survey asking why bloggers blog. (Link grabbed from the Rabbit Blog)