Poet Ponders the Digital

I have been on the Internet since the 1980s. I have located messages I posted in college via the USENET, now more than 25 years after I composed them. The various incarnations of my Web sites have also survived in various forms, for reasons I cannot explain. From my main site, though, I have removed things over the years and hope they are generally "gone" from the massive electronic memory that is the Web. I eschewed blogs for many years. I posted only a few badly written essays and ramblings on my Web site. My poetry was online, but I removed the works after someone told me there were things no one needed to read. I removed a few short stories, as well, realizing that I couldn't recall what was fictional and what was close to the realities of people I once knew. When you write a lot, thousands of words some days and literally tens of thousands some weeks, you end up capturing bits of the people around you. But what if they don't want to be exposed, ...

This is a portion of my summer (re)reading list, at least on one particular subject matter. I am reading various books on type and design. So far, I have completed Dodd and Lupton. The Bringhurst and Parker texts are re-reads, which I will tackle later in the summer. The current book on my stand is the Stanley Morison Tally of Types . I'm putting the bibliography up top, to stress the books a bit more than my own ramblings. Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style . 3rd ed ed. Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks, Publishers, 2004. Consuegra, David. American Type: Design & Designers . New York: Allworth Press, 2004. Dodd, Robin. From Gutenberg to Open Type: An Illustrated History of Type From the Earliest Letterforms to the Latest Digital Fonts . Vancouver, WA: Hartley & Marks Publishers, 2006. Lupton, Ellen. Thinking With Type : A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students . Vol. Design briefs. 1st ed ed. New York: Prince...

I am in the process of upgrading my MacBook Pro to a 500GB hard drive. (Let's not get too technical, since I know it's not "really" 500GB.) The one thing digital media do well is consume hard drive space. This is the third or fourth time I have updated a PowerBook or MacBook hard drive. As with all new laptops, you wonder, "How will I ever use so much space?" The excitement of having twice or three times whatever you last had soon fades as iTunes, GarageBand, and iMovie eat the bytes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. InDesign, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Flash are there to help, too. A colleague said, "Why not just store it all on the campus servers or on Google Docs?" Okay, this entire cloud thing is nice -- for sharing some files and for backups -- but I am not about to put my projects out in the cloud. I'd never upload confidential files, and I certainly don't want some company to have my student projects. No way. Plus, I'm no...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley June 2009 Issue May 3, 2009 Twittering or Tweeting, It’s Not for Everyone I don’t tweet. Apparently, I’m not as cool as Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey, or the dozens of media personalities begging us the follow them via Twitter. Twitter (http://twitter.com/ without the “www”) is a “microblogging” service that allows anyone to post short messages via the Internet or cell phone. The concept is deceptively simple: instead of sending a text message to one person from your phone or computer, why not send the same message instantly to a large group? When you post a message to Twitter, you “tweet.” Some people are tweeting constantly, letting their followers know their every move and thought. Other people and organizations use Twitter for major events and announcements. The recipients of messages are known as “followers” on Twitter. If I wanted people to receive my tweets, I would ask them to follow my twitter feed. There is definitely a unique Twitte...