Jared’s Blog

Today at work I was helping this woman with her email and we were doing something that was taking some time. So I started making conversation casually. We started talking about hurricane Katrina. I said something about New Orleans and this lady responds with “New Orleans is a state, right?” I just about died. How can someone working at such a large corporation as Target be so dumb? Now as if that wasn’t bad enough, I started explaining to her New Orleans was a city in Louisiana and she was kind of saying it as I was and she stops when I got to saying which state it was in. I can’t believe someone today doesn’t know Louisiana is a state. I don’t care if you don’t know how to spell it or where in the US it is located, but to not know it exists boggles my mind. What makes it especially bad was that it’s been all over the news since the hurricane hit. If you watched 5 mins of CNN in the last 3 days, I’m pretty sure you could figure it out.

The really sad thing is this woman probably makes twice as much as I do. Tell me why I spent $100,000 on college when I could be that stupid and being doing just as well.

Where do I start? Today being my day off, I had quite a bit of free time. Most of that time has been spent plopped in front of the TV watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The images being beamed into my home are disturbing enough on their own. What makes it so hard to watch is knowing my own grandmother lives in Ocean Springs. You probably haven’t heard of the town or seen it in the news reports that have come out. It’s about 10 miles east of Biloxi. That places grandma’s home directly in the worst hit area. Now she doesn’t live right on the coast, so I’m sure the damage wasn’t catastrophic. However, I am sure there is damage. Luckily she was able to evacuate to Birmingham and stay with my aunt and uncle. I can only hope the damage isn’t severe. I am glad she was able to leave and that she will be ok.

Having a close family member be affected by this is only making the images I’ve seen even more heart wrenching. I’ve been to Biloxi and Moblie. I’ve been on those coastal highways which are now destroyed. It’s one thing to see things from afar, but having personal memories of those places makes it impact me even more. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose everything like that. It boggles my mind to think that somehow things will return to normal. New Orleans will never be the same as will most of the other coastal cities.

As most know, I am not a religious person. Therefore, I will not pray for anyone. My monitary resources are limited, so I can not make any contributions. What I do offer is my sincere hope and wishes to everyone affected by this disaster. I hope that your loved ones are safe and well. My thoughts are with everyone in this dire time.

I should be on this whenever I’m on IM now. So if any of your gmailers/googlers want to add me, I’m jrmehle.

talk.google.com is up and working! Sweet!

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It’s a topic I’ve been dealing with ever since I first started writing a blog. For me, I tend to write much better than I speak. Both quality and quantity increase when I write about a topic rather than speak about it aloud. This is most often the case with others as well. While this is great for writing a book, article, review, or publication, it can get one into trouble when blogging.

I started this blog as more of a personal journal than anything. I figured I could use it as kind of an online timeline for myself. It’d be fun to go back and browse my site, see what I’d been up to or what was floating around my brain that particular day. In that respect this site has been a huge success. Over the years, I’ve also discovered it can be a great way to keep up with people. While I may not be ambitious enough to crank out a bunch of email to friends or even to IM them regularly, I can usually muster enough to post a blog entry. Strangely enough, Rick and I were essentially friends through blogs for awhile after he finished college and I didn’t see him as much.

This brings me to the true reason for this post. Privacy. I often post here with a concious thought to who will be reading my words. I censor what I say and tailor it to all of my audience (which isn’t very big) and sometimes it bothers me. As I’ve already said, first and foremost this site was meant to be a personal thing more for myself than anyone else. But the nature of the Internet and blogs is public. It’s strange how I ignored this fact when it came to creating my site. I assume the paradox is true for others as well. How many times have you wanted to go blog about some killer party that went on last weekend, but instead you opted for a brief “party was awesome, had a good time” message leaving out all the juicy details? I’d say almost every post about my personal life gets some kind of editing just because I know who could read it.

I am wondering how others deal with this. I’ve seen plugins for Wordpress (the software this site is built on) that alter content based on who is viewing it. I didn’t opt into them because it was based on IP sniffing which somewhat works, but often times you don’t know where a person is viewing you from. I wonder, too, how this affects someone more in the public eye. Should they limit their opinons and thoughts more because they have a wider reader base?

This is more about my internal struggle than anything else. Ideally, I’d like to be open and free about everything I do. I don’t have a problem laying my thoughts out on the table (especially when it comes to blogging), but I know for my sanity it is often times better to just leave some things unsaid.

These are hilarious!

These are screen shots from a dvd that was translated into Chinese and then subtitled back into English. Makes for some very, very funny engrish sentences.

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This guy brings up some pretty interesting points on music distribution. Why should consumers have to wait for an arbitrary release date (retail release date that is) when music could be made available online as soon as production is finished? I doubt we’ll ever hear any kind of statement from the RIAA on this.

“While the RIAA is becoming smart enough to offer the music for sale digitally (through iTunes and Napster), and don’t get me wrong, this is a big, necessary step for them, there remains one major problem with the current business model: distribution time.”

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