Since I no longer have a tablet, I’m no longer an ink blogger.  I’m a regular blogger, which has a gravitas, resonance and cringe-factor I didn’t expect.  Odds are I’ll still only post incoherent, infrequent, ignominious things on a very sporadic schedule.  And eventually my blog will atrophy and come to rest in digital twilight with the billions of other abandoned blogs, forming a whispering accretion disc around the black hole of the Internet.  …But, in the meantime, let the sad, solipsistic show continue*!

I still have my tabby, but it’s days of use are numbered. I bought a slick matte black MacBook.  I looked at new tabbys, but just couldn’t find the same feature fluidity and pricing I wanted.  At at the heart of it, I need something better than 512MB RAM and 1024×800 that won’t get in my way with a bunch of Vista.  While I will love my tabby’s mouse equivalents to my dying day, the trackpads on Macs isn’t as awful as I feared.  In fact, I’m actually becoming mildly efficient at it.  As for my poor tabby, I think I might use it to try out some Linux experiments, or turn it into a glorified GPS navigation system, since it perfectly matches the paint of my darlin’ S4.  …Maybe a hacky touchscreen remote control for our growing entertainment system, or a remote cat monitoring system so I can persecute our WRECs (WRetched Excuse for Cats) from work.  I just don’t know yet.

To sum up, I’m making a new resolution to give up my delusions of being an ink blogger, and be a better blogger in general.  I give it…2 weeks before I manage to rationalize my way out of it.

* I’m stuck in an alliterative loop right now, due to the fact Jake asked me to read Tom Robbins‘ “Wild Ducks Flying Backward”.  Robbins, to my mind, is florid.  He’s amusing, but as a conceit rather than in substance.  My general impression is that I’m wading through a gassy swamp of alliteration and assonance, with infrequent will-o-the-wisp moments of brilliance which were anticlimacticized (to coin a word) by friends before I even got to them.   But primarily it is lots of mossy, decaying cleverness and word games, with a whiff of sulfur.  Good book, Jake—don’t take my meaning the wrong way.  But he reminds me of Dickens.  Certainly no Twain or Gogol.

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When I mentioned that I would post again “later”, I meant in weeks. And regarding Steve Krug (who rocks a Toshiba tabby) and his crush on GolfLink.com, I meant right now during his “Don’t Make Me Think: The Workshop” today, in Seattle. I feel bad for the other participants [because it has been a lot of that damned grass UI]. But he has, obliquely, answered my [underlying] question about a heavy [search engine optimization focus for a ] website: is the populist vibe in Googlebot a good usability platform, if you’re investing heavily in SEO? It seems the answer is yes. Usability is at the heart of Googlebot’s methods—that is known. But to Venn [diagram] it up: usability and SEO are not opposing forces. In fact, a solid focus on SEO can provide a respectable baseline for usability. They overlap to a significant degree. Enough that it is an excellent place to start integrating usability into SEO discussions. [Pointless ink joke in the ink version.]

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