Travels with Paddles

a sea kayaking journal

Axel Schoevers (Photo: A. de Krook) Name:
Axel Schoevers
Location:
Rijswijk, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands

Friday, November 02, 2007

Web Life | Gone Paddling

On the Tuesday evening ferry I overheard a mobile phone conversation of a school girl to one of her friends. Her teacher had returned her school project with the remark that she should check it for typing errors. It would have been adequate if not for the large number of typing errors in it. If she made an effort to correct the errors she could re-submit it with no consequences. What she said next struck me in a way that this conversation made it onto my web log. She said that she did not know what she did wrong because she surely used the spelling checker...

At home I drop into a TV-programme about youths "addicting" to texting, MSN Messaging, on-line gaming and internet in general. YouTube enabled cameras... And parents that have given up to understand what their children are up to. Some teachers are spelling doom, while others say that nothing has changed, only the medium. Anyway, more and more people live their lives on the web and through their mobile phones. Some rarely leave their house anymore...

I am thinking about my blog and what it is different from pre-internet days (that era really existed!). Possibly only the "information overload" increased. There is just way too much out there.

I write this after two days of "web cleanup". Web storage used to come at a premium price. Over the years I used a patch-work of free hosting providers to store my pictures that my logbook pages are linking to. Now it is very cheap (or even free) to get 1024 Mb storage accounts. Unplanned, I reorganized and got rid of the patch-work. I hope I corrected more link errors than I created in that process. By now my website links to a whopping 3500 (!) pictures after 14 years of paddling. More overload?

Why I am typing this anyway? Should my blog not just state (if anything): "Gone Paddling!" ?

3 comments:

karel said...

Axel i agree,but what can you do when also people like reading about paddling and inspiring each other ,ts good to inspire others to paddling.

kaat said...

Axel! It's so easy these days to keep friends and family and the rest of the world (in that order) up to date on one's kayaking adventures. It sure beats writing all those individual letters - can you remember what life was like without a copy machine (Xerox) or a Fax?
Copy, paste, browse for a photo, hit the enter key, make a link.
Face it. You can't kayak 18 hours a day. Or can you?

Silbs said...

While I, too, am over whelmed by the constantly being in touch thing, these blogs have given me entree into the lives of others/ experiences...like yours.