Flying "Into" the Grand Canyon

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A dialog about the idiosyncrasies of flying helicopters in certain parts of Arizona.

I just spent the last 30 minutes or so cleaning up my e-mail in box. I have the nasty habit of not filing or discarding messages as quickly as they come in, so there were over 300 messages to wade through. I’d read all of them and flagged some. I wound up deleting about 1/3 of them, filing another 1/3 of them, and leaving the rest for another day.

Among the e-mail messages I found was a dialog between me and another pilot, Robert Mark of JetWhine. He’d e-mailed me to ask a question and although I normally don’t answer questions sent to me by e-mail — I prefer using the Comments feature on this site so the exchange of information can involve and possibly benefit others — I did answer his. Although I’d like to get the exchange out of my e-mail in box, I want to share it with readers, since I think it has some interesting information.

So here’s the exchange. I’ve mixed Robert’s questions with my answers to make the exchange easier to follow.

Robert:

As a helicopter pilot out west, I wondered if you might be familiar with this Grand Canyon topic.

Do you know if it is correct that tour copters operated through the tribal reservation run to different standards than those that are based elsewhere?

The Chicago Tribune ran a story about the Canyon Sunday and claimed the tribal-operated copters can dip well below the edge of the cayone on a tour where others can not.

It sounded pretty odd to me.

Me:

Helicopters operating on tribal lands with appropriate permits can actually LAND at the bottom of the canyon. This, of course, is on tribal land belonging to the Hualapai and Havasupai tribes in the western part of the canyon — not in the main National Park area.

Please send me a link to that article if it is online. I’d like to read it.

Robert:

Just happen to have that link to the Tribune handy.

So then as a tribal copter, do their pilots train to different standards if they only fly there?

Me:

No, they’re not owned by the tribes. They’re owned/operated by other companies, like Papillon and Maverick, both of which operate in Vegas and at the Grand Canyon.

I worked for Papillon at the Grand Canyon. Training for GCW (Grand Canyon West) consists of spending a day or so with another pilot, learning the route and getting the feel for the density altitude situation. It’s hotter than hell down there in midsummer. Anyone can do it, but they don’t normally train women because of limited housing out there. That’s one reason why I never learned.

Don’t think it’s a big deal. It’s not. Each flight is about 6 minutes long and you’re doing ups and downs all day. The canyon isn’t as deep there as elsewhere in the park. And it isn’t as if you’re cruising up and down the canyon all day. You’re not. Just ups and downs on a preset route. Tedious stuff. Flying the South Rim is far more rewarding.

Thanks for the article link. I’ve flown out there in my old R22. The article describes the place pretty well. It’s unfortunate that many Vegas tourists think GCW is “The Grand Canyon.” It’s just a tiny part of it — and not even the good part.

Robert:

Sorry, but I’m kind of dumb on Native American issues.

Me:

Don’t feel bad. A lot of people are.

The reservations are self-governing bodies within the U.S. In a way, they’re like they’re own countries. They make their own rules, but do have to answer to the U.S. government for some things.

Robert:

So these are regular helicopter tour operators that ALL get a special exemption to do whatever this writer was talking about then? And that comes from FAA or is FAA essentially not involved because it is tribal land?

Me:

Yes, the helicopter operators get permits from the tribes. When I say operators, I mean the companies, not the pilots. They pay a fee to the tribes that’s based on operations (takeoffs/landings), facilities (like landing zones next to the river), and other stuff. Theoretically, my company could apply for (and get and pay for) a permit to do the same thing Papillon is doing. But since GCW is a 2-hour flight from where I’m based, I haven’t tried.

Closing Note:

Since the opening of the Skywalk at Grand Canyon West, I’ve gotten a number of calls from people interested in flying out there. It’s a two-hour flight from the Phoenix area and I’d have to charge about $2K round trip (for up to 3 people; not per person). But the alternative is a 5-1/2 hour (each way) drive. For folks with money to spend, I can turn a two-day excursion to the middle of nowhere into a pleasant day trip. Still, I don’t expect many takers. Not many people are willing to blow $2K+ on a single day of fun.

Araucana Rooster Seeks New Coop

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Kicked out for pestering the hens.

Araucana RoosterMr. Rooster (that’s the name I give all my roosters) has been kicked out of the chicken coop. One of two roosters in my flock, the girls prefer his rival, the other Mr. Rooster. They’re particularly upset by exiled Mr. Rooster chasing them out of their nests while they’re trying to lay eggs. (It’s quite obvious he isn’t “getting enough.” Wink-wink, nod-nod, say no more.)

Mr. Rooster is an Araucana, an Easter Egg chicken. He’s about 16 months old. Araucanas lay colored eggs. In my flock, they’re mostly green, but one of the hens lays brown eggs. Mr. Rooster, of course, does not lay eggs. But if he’s in with your hens, you can bet those eggs will be fertilized daily.

We kicked him out of the coop so he’d stop bothering the girls. It was my hope that a coyote would have him for dinner one night, but it’s been two weeks and he’s still hanging around outside the coop. We give him food and water and he’s gotten quite friendly. But he’s not getting back in with the girls.

So I’m hoping someone who either needs a rooster to complete a flock or a chicken to have for dinner will come claim him and take him off my hands. You bring the box with the air holes in it and I’ll catch him and get him in the box. Do what you like with him, but if it involves axes or Mexicans, I don’t want to know about it.

Seriously interested? Use the Contact link. And no, I won’t ship or deliver him. You’ll have to come to Wickenburg to pick him up.

But hurry. He can only hide from the coyotes for so long.

—

June 21, 2015 Update: Because someone actually emailed me today to ask whether the rooster I wrote about eight years ago was still available, let me make it clear: it’s not.

Four Steps to Get the Most Out of Twitter

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Some tips for taking the “yuk” out.

I first heard about Twitter a few months ago on either the MacBreak Weekly or TWiT (This Week in Tech) podcast. (Both highly recommended, by the way.) I immediately checked it out. At first, I thought it was kind of cool, but then I realized that it was nothing more than a gigantic, worldwide chat room. Everyone talking, few people talking to a specific other person, some people even talking in languages other than English (imagine that!), few people saying anything of interest.

Twitter is a micro blogging tool. If you looked at 100 random blog posts from all over the blogoshere, how many of them do you think you’d like? This is the same. Look at 100 random tweets and you’re likely to find very few that are even worth the time it took to read them.

And they’re only up to 140 character long.

First Impressions

Miraz summed it up in a comment on yesterday’s “Reach Out and Meet Someone” post here:

I’m really interested by your previous post and comments here about Twitter. I’d noticed Twitter and found my first, and strong, reaction was Yuk!

The next time I looked was the other day when I thought I should include it in a book I’m writing for community groups. This time I looked and just felt old.

I see it as a monumental waste of time and a triviality, so I find your comments about feeling more connected to people particularly useful.

I felt exactly the same way. Yet people were talking about it and raving, in many cases. So I figured I was probably missing something and decided to give it a closer look.

You Need to Scrape Away the Bull

The main complaint about Twitter is: who really cares about what all these people are doing? What you had for breakfast isn’t very interesting. What you’re watching on TV isn’t interesting either. And why all the cryptic statements? Are you trying to be cool?

But if you could scrape away all the bull and concentrate on the content that may be of real interest to you, Twitter does have some value. I’ve gotten a glimpse of it. Not enough to convince me that it’s good, but enough to make me think that it might be.

Here’s what I did to reach this point. I recommend these steps to anyone who wants to give Twitter a real try.

Step 1: Create a Twitter Account

I’m not going to explain how to do this. You can go to Twitter and follow the instructions online to do it yourself.

I definitely recommend that you choose an appropriate image for your identity there. Something that gives people an idea of what you’re all about. For a while, mine was the same image I currently use for my Gravatar: my helicopter’s back end with hot air balloons in the background. Pretty but not very real. I’ve since switched it to my standard head shot, which I hope to get redone one of these days. Most Twitter users either use a photo or a cartoon for their images. My advice: don’t use established cartoon characters; one of these days, someone’s going to start suing.

While you’re in your account settings, be sure to create a one-line (they really mean about six-word) bio of yourself. It appears when someone goes to your Twitter page. Set your time zone, enter the full URL for your Web site or blog, and just provide the needed info. If you don’t want to be on the public timeline, there’s a box you can check. I wouldn’t check it unless you’re worried about stalkers or some other crazy thing. After all, there is a slight chance that you might impress someone reading the public timeline (whoever that might be) enough to make a new friend.

Step 2: Download and Install a Tweeting Tool

I cannot over emphasize the importance of this step. Sure, you can keep your Twitter home page open and refresh it once in a while to see what’s new. But there are better ways to get involved with Twitter.

For a while, I used a Dashboard widget to compose and send my tweets. This was convenient; press F12, fill in a form, press Return, and press F12 again to get back to work. This added my tweets to Twitter, but did not display the tweets of my friends.

TwitterificThen I discovered Twitterific. Frankly, I can’t imagine using Twitter without this little application. (Now calm down, folks. You can use the Comments link or form at the bottom of this post to tell me why your favorite Twitter tool is better.) It features a resizable window that captures and displays not only your tweets, but the tweets of all the Twitter users that you follow. There are a variety of notification options with and without sound. And, best of all, there’s a tiny form at the bottom of the window that you can use to enter your own tweets.

Twitterific has just one problem — and it doesn’t affect me at all: it requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later. Yes, it’s a Mac-only application. (I’m relying on the PC folks reading this to use the Comments link or form to tell us what they’re using. Let’s hope they don’t let us down.)

Twitter also works with instant messaging and I’m pretty sure you can use your IM client (iChat, MSN, AOL, etc.) to interact with Twitter. But since this article’s intention isn’t to explain all the different ways you can use Twitter, I’ll let you explore that option on your own.

And Twitter does work with text messaging on a cell phone. But if you enable and regularly use that feature, you really need to get a life.

Step 3: Find People to Follow

You don’t want to monitor the public timeline. Trust me: it’s a waste of time. You want to follow the tweets of a select group of people. People that you select.

There are a few ways you can find people to follow:

  • Ask your friends, family members, and work associates if they have Twitter accounts. If they don’t, use the Invite form on your Twitter account to invite them. Be sure to use the extra note field to explain what this is all about. You might want to point them to an article about Twitter (like this one?) or a favorable review. The people you invite should be people that spend a lot of time in front of a computer connected to the Internet, so tweeting will be easy and convenient for them.
  • Track down the Twitter accounts of famous people you want to follow. Believe it or not, Barack Obama has a Twitter account. (I don’t follow him.) So does Stephen Colbert. (I do follow him.) Now, obviously, these people have better things to do with their time than send tweets out into the blogosphere, so their tweets are likely composed by their staff and have some kind of marketing value. Obama’s is strictly campaign stuff. Colbert’s is a bunch of typical Colbert-style one-liners. These are just examples. I’m sure plenty of celebs have Twitter accounts, if you’re into the celeb thing.
  • Check the blogs you follow. Quite a few bloggers have Twitter accounts. If you like the blogger’s blog, then you might like his tweets. I found a number of interesting people to follow this way.

Make these people your “Friends” — that’s Twitter’s term for the people you follow. Doing that is easy; just go to their Twitter timeline and click an Add link under Actions.

If someone makes you a friend, he’ll be listed under your followers. It’s always nice to add them as friends, too. It might give you insight as to why they added you. And you can always “Leave” them if you decide you don’t like their tweets.

Which brings up the next point. Once in a while, you’ll discover that you really don’t like the tweets of one of your “friends.” (I really feel a need to put that in quotes since the people you follow might not be real friends.) Just go to your Twitter page, view your list of friends. and click a Leave link under his name/icon. I did this just the other day when I decided that one of my “friends” was getting a bit too political for my taste. (No, I don’t want to sign your online petition, thank you.) Click of a link and I don’t have to hear from him anymore.

Step 4: Post Tweets

Even if you have no followers, you should make it a habit to post tweets on a somewhat regular basis. I’m not saying you need to do it daily or hourly or weekly or every ten minutes. I’m saying you should do it at least occasionally, when you have something to say.

I tend to tweet when I sit down to start a project or finish one up. This morning, I tweeted about going down to feed my horses and about a new article posted on my site. When this article is finished and posted, I’ll tweet about it and provide a link.

Be particular about the content of your tweets. Try to limit yourself to tweets that people might actually be interested in. Okay, you had eggs for breakfast. But don’t tweet about it unless you fetched those eggs out of a henhouse and the rooster tried to kill you or you cooked them in a microwave, causing them to explode all over the inside and start a fire. Okay, so that’s an exaggeration. But you know what I mean. Something interesting.

You can make all your tweets self-promotional, but I assure you that you’ll have very few followers — unless, of course, you’re famous and people want to read about your latest book, movie, radio show, interview, podcast, etc. I admit that my tweeting about articles as they are released has an element of self-promotion to it, but I’d like to think that some people might want to check out some of what I’m writing about. After all, if you were using Twitter, wouldn’t you be slightly interested in an article about it?

Remember, Twitter limits you to 140 characters per tweet. Don’t feel as if you have to fill them. It automatically converts long URLs to short ones (using tinyurl), so don’t worry about URLs taking up all your characters. Just keep it short and sweet.

As for writing style, Grammar Girl wrote an excellent style guide for tweets, “Grammar Girl’s Strunk & Twite: An Unofficial Twitter Style Guide.” Read it and use it. Please.

The Twitter Virus

I first read the phrase Twitter virus yesterday. At first, I thought it was some kind of real computer virus. But apparently, it refers to a person’s active involvement in Twitter — in other words, tweeting the moments of your day all day every day.

A certain amount of Twitter virus is vital to using Twitter and attracting and keeping followers. But if you’ve got it too bad — like a certain person I follow who tweeted from his cell phone about being stuck in traffic waiting at a railroad crossing this morning — you probably want to take a step back and think hard about your involvement.

While a tool like Twitterific makes participating in Twitter extremely easy, don’t get carried away. The people who follow you don’t need (or probably want) every detail of your life.

Try It

Twitter is also a social networking tool. I participate because I find it interesting to see what other people do and think throughout their day. I leave the Twitterific window open — I have a 20″ monitor, so there’s enough real estate for it — and peek at it once in a while. And then I tweet when I have something to say. It’s pretty effortless and it certainly doesn’t take much out of my day.

Now you know what I do with Twitter and how you can make it a worthwhile experiment. Don’t be shy. Try it. It’s all free and, if you don’t catch the virus, you can quit it at any time.

Reach Out and Meet Someone

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I remember what online community is all about.

I got my start in the online world back in 1984, when I bought my first computer. It was an Apple //c and I quickly began visiting bulletin board systems (BBSes) using my 300 baud modem. You could get away with 300 bps in those days — there were no graphics, no big downloads, no Flash or PDF or QuickTime files.

Back in those days I visited BBSes to participate in online discussions on what were called message boards: the precursor to today’s forums and blog comment features. Later, in 1989, when I bought my first Mac, I was quick to start my own BBS, The Electronic Pen. I kept it up and running for years, until the Web made BBSes archaic. Then I hopped on board Web 1.0 with a Web site — back in 1995 or so? — and have been a Web publisher ever since.

It Was about Meeting People

In exchanging comments and ideas on BBSes, I met a lot of people:

  • There was Tim, who ran a BBS out of the same office where he sold tombstones. (Really!) Tim was my age and a Mac user and he’s part of what made me so enthusiastic about Macs. He introduced me to Mark, a legally blind albino guy who worked as a graphic designer. (Really!) Mark couldn’t drive, so we’d take him out to dinner once in a while. He had all this high-tech computer equipment that he’d show off to us: things like CD-ROM writers, 20″ monitors, and high-end graphic software. (Remember, this was in the early 90s.) Although I lost touch with Mark, I still exchange e-mail with Tim, who married his high school sweetheart, fathered three boys, and got a job as an IT guy for some medical information company.
  • There was May, who ran a BBS for writers. She wanted to become a writer, but she couldn’t seem to get her foot in the door with any publisher. She even quit her day job to devote all her energy to writing. She wound up broke and depressed. She went back to work. Years later, she finally got some stories published. I don’t know what she’s doing now. She once called me an “overachiever,” which is something I’ll never forget. It made me feel as if I should be ashamed of my success.
  • There was Art, a computer programmer who knew everything — or thought he did. At thirty-something, he still lived at home with his parents. When I met him in person, I was very surprised to see that he was only about 4’10” tall. He bitched a lot about his employer and I wasn’t too surprised when he got canned. When he got 18 months pay in his severance package, I encouraged him to travel around a bit before getting back to work. He visited his brother in Seattle. “There’s snow on the Rockies,” he told me after his trip. “Art,” I replied, “there’s always snow on the Rockies.” Some people really need to get out more. We lost touch just a few years ago.
  • There was Bill, a copywriter. Here was a middle-aged man who wrote for a living. And he made a good living. He offered me advice (when I asked for it) and was amazed when I told him that I thought something I’d written “sounded good.” “That’s the point,” he said, obviously excited that I’d made the comment. “Good writing should sound good when it’s read out loud.” I learned a lot from him, but ironically, we lost touch soon after my first book was published.
  • There was Martin, a computer geek like me, but with an arty streak. He did design work and computer training for a local computer store. If my memory serves me right, he helped me get my foot in the door there and I worked for them for some time. I went to his wedding and, when I moved out to Arizona, he, his wife, and their new baby spent a day with us. When he set up his own consulting firm, he sent me a full complement of his high-class giveaways. I still use the logo-embroidered throw blanket when I sit on the sofa to watch television some evenings. I haven’t seen him in years, but he’s one of my LinkedIn contacts.

These are just some of the people who entered my world through the world of online communication. (And no, these aren’t their real names.) They were friends, despite our mutual shortcomings, and we socialized both online and off. In fact, I was better friends with these people than my college classmates.

What Changed

Somewhere along the line, things changed. I think it had something to do with switching from the two-way communication of BBSes to the one-sided Web sites of Web 1.0. Although I remained friends with this handful of people for some time, I didn’t meet anyone new.

And I didn’t miss meeting people.

After all, I was busy with work — writing books and articles, teaching computer courses for two different companies, writing course material. And then we moved to Arizona and I was busy with my new home, learning to fly, and exploring my surroundings. As my old BBS friendships faded away, new ones didn’t replace them. But I didn’t even notice the gap in my life.

Social Networking

Until yesterday, I never realized the value of social networking sites like LinkedIn, MyBlogLog, and Twitter. You see, I wasn’t in the market for new friends. I didn’t need any. I have friends around here, I have friends elsewhere.

The trouble is, our friends around here are either 20 to 30 years older than we are (remember, Wickenburg is a retirement community) or, if they’re younger, they’re transient, passing through Wickenburg on their way to someplace where they’re not always the youngest person in a restaurant or supermarket. (Okay, so that’s an exaggeration. There are usually a few people younger than me in the supermarket, and some of them are even customers.) We lost two friends our age just last month when he got a better job in Michigan and they just packed up and left. Other friends have been bailing out regularly: one couple to Colorado, one to San Diego, one to New Mexico.

Mike and I aren’t movers. We like to stay in one place a good, long time. But with the way things in Wickenburg are going, I’m ready to bail out. We’ve been here 10 years — that’s longer than most of our friends (in any age group).

So I’m starting to think about new friends who live someplace other than Wickenburg.

Yesterday, I read “How to Use MyBlogLog to Succesfully Build Massive Blog or Website Traffic.” I’d signed up for MyBlogLog back in January, but never did anything with my membership. I had some time, so I went through the instructions in the article. And I started finding blogs for people who write about the same kinds of things I write about. People with similar thoughts and ideas and concerns. And I began to realize that I could make friends online again. Perhaps even good friends.

Now if you’re reading this and actively participate in social networking sites, you’re probably thinking that I must be some kind of moron. Of course that’s what social networking sites are for.

Hoof PickWell, have you ever seen a hoof pick? There’s a picture of one right here. You use it to scrape horse poop and mud and rocks from the bottom of a horse’s foot. It’s standard equipment for everyone who rides a horse — a responsible rider wouldn’t even consider getting into the saddle unless the horse’s feet had been checked and scraped. But if I didn’t tell you this and you’d never needed one and someone handed one to you, would you know what it was for?

That was me with social networking Web sites. I couldn’t understand the purpose.

Now I do.

(Duh.)

Build Community Through Participation

Yesterday, I also realized that what’s holding back my blog from reaching the next level (whatever that is) is the sporadic participation of visitors.

Sometimes I’ll write a post, hundreds of people will read it, and a bunch of people will post comments with other viewpoints about what I’ve said. This adds substance to the blog and makes it more valuable not only to visitors, but to me. I learn by starting a conversation and reading what others add to it. (I love to learn.)

Most times, however, I’ll write a post and even though many people will read it, no one will post comments to it. Which makes me wonder whether I “got it right” or if anyone cared about what I said. Are these posts a waste of time? Are they useless bandwidth suckers? Why did Post A get a lot of response while Post B, with a similar topic, generate “dead air”?

I may never know.

But the one thing I do know is that I want more participation here. And since I want it here, I’m sure other bloggers want it on their sites. So I’m actively trying to add something to a comment string — sometimes even starting a comment string — when I have something to add. Even if what I have to say is just a quick note to thank the blogger or give him/her my support on that issue. (Whatever that’s worth.)

Twitter Really Is More than Just a Waste of Time

Yesterday was also the day that I realized that Twitter is a lot more interesting if you’re monitoring the tweets of people you know and/or care about. I realized this as I started adding “friends” to my Twitter account — the same people whose blogs I was beginning to monitor. When you follow the tweets of a select group of people, you learn more about them and the things they do. Like me, some of these people publish tweets about the major work-related things they do throughout the day. Or about ideas that have just gone through their heads. Or about life’s frustrations.

And I think that Twitter can be a great way to help decide whether I want to take another step toward a real friendship with someone. A person’s tweets reveal not only what he/she is doing or thinking, but his/her personality. I could never pursue a friendship with someone who composed tweets like AOL chat room IMs. Or a person who took him/herself too seriously. Or someone who used Twitter solely to market a product or service.

So I’m going to be more active in the blogging world, both in my blog and on other people’s it will be interesting to see what new friends I can make.

Keeping Up with the Blogosphere

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I’m not the only one struggling.

I use a feed reader (endo) to follow about 30 feeds in a wide range of topics. At least I try to. The trouble is, if I skip a day reading the feeds, no one tells the authors to stop writing. They just keep churning out new material. The result: as I type this, there are 1188 unread blog entries waiting for me in endo.

Sheesh!

Why Don’t I Just Do It?

Why don’t I read them regularly? Well, one of the reasons I subscribe to all these feeds is because they give me food for thought. I’ll read an article and think about it and, in some cases, it’ll get the creative juices flowing so I can write a blog entry based on what I’ve read.

Perfect example is the article I wrote yesterday about notebooks and scratchpads. It wasn’t a good article — I’ll be the first to admit that — primarily because I threw it together without giving it enough thought. (My husband was rushing me. He wanted to go out to dinner. Can you imagine putting food before blogging?) But the seed that became the article came from a blog entry (which I now can’t find) recommending that bloggers keep a notebook beside their computers. I think that’s incredible advice — and it goes against what all the geeks out there recommend — and I realize that I follow it. I wanted to explain why it’s good advice by explaining how I follow it. My post didn’t communicate the story the way I wanted it to, but that’s where the idea came from.

Thinking takes time, which brings up…

…the Other Reason

I simply don’t have the time to read (and think) about them all.

Now you might tell me that I can make the time. And I’d tell you that I really do need to sleep at night and get some paying work done during the day.

I stumbled upon a blog post today, written by Lincoln Adams, who evidently really likes to punish himself with this stuff. From “Can I get back to blogging now??” on Habitation of Justice:

Honestly, I don’t know how some people do it. It took me literally all day just to check out places like Digg, Reddit, MyBlogLog, and so on. Just to read the latest feeds from my newsreader sucked up so much time that before I knew it, it was 3AM and my brain was fried from fatigue and an overload of information. How do people find time not only to sift through the all the crap out there, but also blog 20 posts a day AND work a full time job on top of that? My goodness.

My goodness, too!

Apparently, Lincoln and I have the same problem, only he’s taking it more seriously than I am by actually trying to keep up. I don’t think he writes 20 blog posts a day and I know I don’t. But even two or three can be tough when you’re doing so much other stuff.

Read Less Feeds?

Of course, you might tell me that I should subscribe to fewer feeds. And I’d tell you that I think you’ve got something there.

But which ones to remove? Lately, I’ve been adding more feeds than I’ve been removing.

But I’m starting to think that the ones without full-text feeds will be the ones to go first. Like Slate.com’s feeds. I don’t subscribe to the entire magazine — I did for a while and quickly put an end to that. I subscribe to about 10 different columns. And the problem I have is that all that appears in my feed reader is a tease to get me to the site. While it only takes a few moments to click a link and see if the article is worth reading in full, it would be quicker and easier if I just scanned it in endo. And it would certainly prevent me from being distracted by links to other articles on Slate’s site.

I’m Too Interesting…I Mean Interested

I think my main problem is interests. I have too many of them.

I’m interested in blogging and productivity. I’m interested in writing and traveling. I’m interested in photography and flying. I’m interested in politics and religion — as an observer (rather than a participant) in both. I’m just interested in too much stuff.

And the blogosphere is a great place to find information and viewpoints about all kinds of stuff. So how could I turn up the chance to suck in some fresh new content?

So I subscribe to a bunch of blogs and I wade through all that content when I have time.

I mean find time.

No, I mean make time.

I think I’d better make some time right now. If you’ll excuse me…