Back on the Ecto

Well, having played with the blogger applet on dashboard (sorry, they're called Widgets aren't they... ), I've decided that it's not terribly useful. Frankly, it seems to have less capability than just posting via e-mail, so what's the point. As far as I can tell, it can't edit or even see already started posts, and it can't do any sort of formatting. Just text. Yes it's simple, but so is my e-mail client, and that will at least check the spelling.

So, it looks like it will be back to ecto, the blogging client I was using before. Assuming of course that I manage to actually continue to blog. Perhaps I'll let the trial period run out before I purchase a license and see if I use it enough.

Woah... weird little bobble there... the tool bar disappeared... It came back though... Strange.

Hmm... I use too many ellipses in my writing. That can't be good style. Probably a sign of laziness: I can't be bothered to finish my thoughts.

Is that a correct use of a colon? My grasp of grammatical sentence structure in anything but it's most basic form is just pathetic. I really must sort that out one day. Correct understanding of the proper use of semi-colons would be even better. Not that anyone seems to use them much in text. Probably because the rules are a bit squishy. Still, I think that I tend to think and speak in semi-colons a lot. I really should look into that some time.

I also need to cut down on my use of parentheses. (The above paragraph started as a parenthetical aside.) I tend to over use them. Professor Boyk at Caltech commented on this my senior year. He said he'd heard it was often associated with people who do a lot of computer programming. I can see that. It feels a bit like trying to nest the parenthetical idea like a nested code structure. (Those two sentences really wanted to join together, but I don't know the rules regarding the colon/semi-colon glue! Something to do with phrases that can stand alone or those that can't!)

I'd make a terrible newspaper journalist. My natural prose style is completely antithetical to the short choppy sentences that newspapers prefer. I seem to like my sentences long, with lots of ideas and little twisty bits hanging off. Not Joe Friday "just the Facts, Ma'am" style structures. (Jeez... should that whole phrase from "Joe" to "style" be hyphenated? I think maybe technically yes, though it would look immensely silly.)

Good grief this is a rather self-referential bit of text. (Must not overuse exclamation points!) Perhaps I should cut it off now and go home. It's a long way to Harrow and the Piccadilly Line is probably about to transition from a train into a long tube of human flesh wandering through tunnels, occasionally exchanging a few elementary people particles ("Per-sons" to borrow a joke from David Goodstein). Yikes, overly complicated with parenthetical asides and mixed metaphors! (And gratuitous punctuation!) I should quit before I dig too deep a hole.