I realize certain words are difficult to spell for a lot of people. “A lot,” for example is too commonly written as “alot.” The simple trick to remember that is, you’d never write “alittle,” and so you’d not “alot.” I love those little tricks because they work so well to provide context for what would otherwise be an exercise in rote memorization (a technique that clearly didn’t work in the first place). Sometimes a trick does not exist for a word I often misspell, so I have to make up my own. Here are a few of them.

• I struggled with “significant” for a long time until I noticed that you can make a little sentence out of parts of the word. “Sign if I can’t” is, minus the apostrophe, the correct spelling.
• The word “their,” aside from being part of the they’re/there/their trifecta of grammatical butchery, stymied me for some time because I was always trying to spell it “thier.” Once I noticed that no matter what form of the word you’re using it always contains the three-letter sequence “the,” it was no problem.
• Definitely is “in it.” That’s how I remember that it’s not “definately” or “defanitely” or “defineitely” or whatever other mess of vowels people toss into that word. After the “def” and before the “ely” it’s just “in it.”

If you have your own little spelling tricks, I’d love to hear them.

I’m not sure if you noticed, but I spend a lot of time online. It’s partially my job, but I’m a pretty ‘net-connected type guy in just a general fashion. And this is nothing new. Part of my net presence has, for the last six years or so, been this site here, ironSoap.org. I cultivate it, I design it, I’ve made it my own over various iterations and levels of attention. To a certain extent, ironSoap.org is me, when I’m online. If people want to know who ‘ironsoap’ is on an IRC channel or a forum, I put my web address in nearly every public-facing “profile” I can find.

It’s not like I’m trying to drive traffic to my site so they can click on ads and make me a bunch of money. I don’t run ads on ironSoap. I pay for the hosting and the domains from my own pocket and I create all the content here. The key reason why ill-fated efforts like Hyperbolic Avatars existed was because I didn’t care to have other people—even people I love and respect—putting themselves onto my site.

There is even a conscious effort to make the site intuitive: Wherever I use the name ironsoap (which is pretty much everywhere), I figure people could put that “word” into a search engine and come up with this site. What else is called “ironsoap” after all? Or, they could just try “ironsoap.com” and they’ll come here. If they want to talk to me, ironsoap@ironsoap.org works as you’d expect. So does paul@ironsoap.com. I don’t advertise these addresses; they aren’t my official email address. But my official email address is listed and I like to it all the time without de-spamminating it: paul@ironsoap.org. Yeah, I get a lot of junk mail and I have to do aggressive filtering on my inbox.

But I don’t mind. This is me. Me online. I have a presence, by design.

So help me out here. A lot of people I know are on Facebook. Or MySpace. Or whatever other social networking site. Orkut or whatever. I don’t know. For the longest time I’ve avoided them. I’ve done so on purpose, because to me they simply seemed like a new-wave version of Geocities. They appeared, from my observational vantage point high on my horse, to be nothing more than a simple way to create an online presence. And, of course, tie it into someone else’s system so they can serve you ads and adjust the Terms of Service as they see fit. So they can limit you to their design sensibilities and the limitations of their web engineering departments.

My stance on all these things has always been, “No thanks. I already have a web presence. I’ve had it since 2001.” Is it smug? You betcha. But is it also true? Absolutely.

I’ve heard people complaining to me that I’m not “hooked in” with their little circle of Facebookies or MySpacers and they grumble that it wouldn’t kill me to have a profile set up. And they’re right, I suppose it wouldn’t. But why should I? Why would I want to keep a separate account for all these sites that offer me no value whatsoever? I don’t create profiles on Motley Fool just in case some armchair investor wants to contact me. My thought process is this: I’m not hard to find, but if you can’t narrow a Google search enough to track me down, you probably don’t know me well enough for me to want to talk to you anyway.

I didn’t say I wasn’t an elitist jerk.

But it’s getting out of control. I have Facebook invites coming in from business contacts now. What gives? Has the whole world gone mad? Am I overlooking something pivotal about these sites? Tell me, dear readers, why should I bother?

Is there anything I could do on a social networking site that I can’t do on ironSoap? Anything that makes me the jerk for not joining up when I’ve been trying to drag people online since 1998 only to find that when they got here they started telling me how it’s “done”? Have I gotten old and set in my ways already, destined to be the cranky old coot on the Internet’s porch screaming at the dang kids to get off my LAN?

What, exactly, is in it for me?

Eventually my brain is bound to expire. It’s like milk that way, only in my case the date was not set far in the future the way most folks prefer, very different from the serendipity they will dig through cartons toward the mysterious world beyond the dairy case to obtain. Mine is like the lone quart left in a gas station snack shop, ink stamp smudged almost beyond legibility: Did that say ’09’ or ’06’? If you’re desperate, you’ll buy it anyway and hope for the best.

Whatever you do, you don’t leave it on the front seat of your car in August, practically begging for some sort of souring process to accelerate, perhaps leading to solidification. Likewise, I have little enough facilities to draw upon as it is and here I am lighting them afire with reckless abandon: Write for this site here! Contribute to that forum there! Maintain a similarly themed site of your own! Avoid neglecting your long-standing outlet! Then I arrive at my actual job and I’m expected to maintain a rapport with various co-workers via—guess what—written communications and then I recall that I have solicited people to contact me via email and IM so I must meet or exceed their expectations lest my future solicitations go unheeded. Further I am chastised by my like-minded acquaintances for not being hip to the game when I fail to maintain my Twitter profile and resort to archaic communication methods like phone calls rather than text messaging…

It is as though my phalanges and have begun to crust into crude claws and my vocal cords have withered like grapes on a vine or are mutating outward from my throat into hideous mandibles. Meanwhile, as mentioned, my mind has slipped into a state that is undoubtedly dangerous where the surface wrinkles contract and smooth over. The result will be either the development of telepathic powers or, more probably, the reduction of higher function leaving me in a state of reactionary instinct.

Essentially, I am becoming an insect.

Fortunately, even insects can fashion bullet points, of a sort.

• I managed to screw up rather badly at work. My job can be boiled down to its hot molten core as such: Detect problems before they manifest to our customers. Suffice to say that when a customer then contacts me to inform that there is a serious problem on our platform, I’ve basically failed in some key fashion. There were, as you might expect, certain extenuating circumstances. But those are probably merely enough to save my job, but certainly not my face.
• My commute is actually lengthening with each passing day. I leave a little bit earlier each morning and yet I arrive at work a little later. At this point I believe I’m up to two and a half hours in the morning. My nighttime commute is a steady hour and fifteen minutes, but I keep hoping there will come a point when there are literally no more humans left to stand between me and my destination. I did not anticipate that humanity is apparently reproducing at a rate that exceeds my car’s maximum speed.
• Nik is currently between jobs and being understandably choosy about what she decides to take on next. This has given her ample time to serve as a sort of post modern housewife for the last few weeks. At first she was timid, and approached her role as “fabricator of the evening meal” with trepidation. Steadily, though, her confidence has grown and last night she cooked a pork tenderloin whose equal I had not previously encountered. This is significant because while Nik has always been competent in the kitchen she has rarely ventured into a territory I found literally delectable and—this is most significant—experimental. Not only was the dinner last night scrumptious but it was unfamiliar to the extent that it almost felt illicit.
• An interesting bit of trivia: If you take a job that requires you to sit for ten solid hours and you interpret this missive literally, then marry that activity with an increased appetite for Kettle brand potato chips and Keebler Fudge Stripe cookies, you will gain weight. I discovered this through several clinical trials and now must reset in order to begin the control testing. My method for this is the same as it ever was: Regular exercise and a greater attention to what I eat. Part of my exercise routine involves comical-looking machines that I consider to be my arch nemeses; the other part involves playing an innocent looking sport called racquetball. There is not so much innocence there as you would assume. It doesn’t help if you’re a 5′ 7″ water buffalo on the court, however. I managed to run directly into a concrete wall playing this game last week and I got, for my efforts, a goose egg on my knee which turned into the most colorful bruise you’re likely to see. I suspect it’s all in the nearly perfect eggshell white of the canvas. I don’t go out much.
• Nik bought the DVD set of The Office, Season Three. I caught a few episodes here and there last year but wasn’t that impressed. My expectation was low because of this as I entered, but I came out the other side with my faith in the show’s writers renewed. You know how most shows have a central relationship that is in turmoil or question and you are supposed to root for the characters involved to work it out? Often to prolong the drama the writers will introduce a third party, another character, to stand in the way. Nearly every time this third character is abhorrent and so obviously written as a foil to the relationship that the whole exercise feels false. In the Office they did something similar but in a stroke of brilliance the foil is not demonstrably more or less likable than the central figures which generates something that feels authentic. Recall, for a moment, that I’m referring to a sitcom.

So I was a little bummed yesterday because a game I’ve been looking forward to came out (BioShock) and I had decided I shouldn’t spend the money on it until I get paid on Friday. It was only going to be a few days but still kind of a bummer. But I was happy because I got a copy of Silent Hill 2 in the mail from Goozex which I could play (this will be my third attempt at the game: I’m determined to like it because every other SH game has been excellent but I have yet to find a way to get into this and many, many people claim it is the best of the whole series).

But then, because my wife rocks, she surprised me with a copy of BioShock when I got home.

Yet somewhere late in my work day I had started feeling a little under the weather. Then I started feeling a lot under the weather on the drive home and by the time I got in the house and ate dinner I was feeling pretty rough. It was so bad in fact that after dinner I watched a couple of episodes of Lingo with Nik, as is our custom, and then decided to completely ignore both new games in favor of going to bed early.

It’s pretty telling, I think.

I still didn’t feel that hot this morning but since I’m about to take some time off and they just changed the schedule around to accommodate my preferences, I felt it would be pretty rude to call in sick. So I decided to try and tough it out. Fortunately I’m feeling a little better than I was this morning but I still have that nagging “I’m on the verge of a flu” sensation which I think is mostly being held back by the seven or eight Motrin I popped on my way out the door.

I tease, of course. I took half of one and fell asleep almost instantly in the entryway of our home.

Totally Unrelated

This has nothing to do with anything, but I thought it was really cool.

My niece, Hannah is really cute. I realize this picture doesn’t exactly capture the whole truth of that statement, but I love it so much none of the other “classic” baby pictures would suffice once I saw it. I can’t wait to meet her, although I hear she’s got a weirder schedule than I do. I think that means her and I should hang out.

In this picture, I imagine she’s thinking, “What, are you some special kind of stupid? Did you actually go to a stupid university to get that dumb? It’s like you’re a doctor of idiots.”

Just that expression alone makes me feel like her and I, we’re going to get along just fine.