Some Knowledge

The Magic Story is a short book that was written in 1900.  It is really a short story about a man who grows up and has some hard times.  In the course of his life, this man learns that there are two aspects to a person’s personality.  There is the positive self and the negative self.  He learns that by embracing the positive self, he can succeed.

The story is written in an almost archaic language.  It is not very hard to figure out what the author is saying.  It is supposed that anyone who reads The Magic Story will be changed and will become successful.  It took me about twenty minutes to read the story.  It is interesting enough, and it is available for free from the above link.

I don’t know if The Magic Story is really as magical as it claims.  It fits in with a lot of other power of positive thinking books that were written in the early twentieth century.  If I suddenly become rich and famous after reading this story, I might change my opinion.  We will wait and see.

I took the afternoon off and went to Barnes and Noble.  It was a quiet drive into Northville.  The weather was hot and a bit humid, but not uncomfortable.  I parked the truck and walked inside.

I spent a few minutes looking over the bargain books.  Seems like the price of the cutouts is going up.  It used to be you could find things for two and three dollars.  Now, the lowest price was five bucks.  I really did not see anything I was interested in reading on the remainder shelves.  I looked at magazines and almost leafed through a couple on computers, but magazines are little more than books of advertising.  I’m not about to pay money for a bunch of advertisements.

I went over to the business section and looked for interesting books on Internet businesses.  There were half a dozen books supposedly telling me how to make millions online with Ebay or other programs.  I looked through a couple of these books, but there was suprisingly little information in these $25 items.  I looked at a couple books on business and money, but again, nothing caught my eye.

I went back to the gardening section and looked at books on growing organic vegetables.  Then I looked for farming books and found one that is supposed to be about running a small farm business.  I looked through this book and it looked interesting, so I picked it up.  The farming book had more information on running a business than the book on making money with a blog.  Maybe this book will be useful.

I have a lot of books.  I’ve got two rooms full of them at home here.  I think I am going to take some time off from writing all the time and just read for a while.  I looked around for something interesting to write about today, but I ended up playing simplistic games instead of blogging.  There seem to be a lot of people reading this blog.  At least there are a lot of people finding my article on the Candy Tracks game.  So far, more people have seen those three paragraphs than anything else I have written.  Maybe I should just review computer games and popular websites.

In any case, that’s about all for today.  Maybe tomorrow I will find something more interesting to write about.  Then again, maybe I will just go outside and start working on my garden.

Books and the written word are some of the most important things in life.  Knowledge, experience, and information are all written down and stored on either paper or in electronic format for anyone to access.  The ability to read is one of the skills we learn in school that helps us with many things throughout life.

If you want to learn something you can probably find the information you need written up in a book.  If you want a pleasant diversion from life and entertainment, there are books of fiction that can give hours of pleasure.  Reading is important, and not just for utilitarian reasons.  The ability to read gives us freedom.

In the days before writing was invented, the only way people had of passing on information was with spoken language.  Written language was developed in ancient Babylon to keep track of debts.  The original use of writing was for business.  Later, epic poems like the Epic of Gilgamesh were transcribed in cuneiform text on clay tablets.  Impressing language on some form of medium not only served to transmit the information to many people, it also preserved the information for long periods of time.

We live in an age of massive amounts of information.  This may be as mundane as some random person’s opinion or as earth-shattering as a new peace treaty.  Reading not only improves our lives, it improves society.  Reading exercises the imagination and expands the senses.  Through the written word we are able to keep records of our deeds and knowledge, and communicate our thoughts and feelings to the entire world.

We live in an age of change.  The written word is no longer held hostage by the publishing business.  Anyone with access to the Internet and a computer can type up their thoughts and transmit their words to anyone in the world who cares to read.  No longer do the masses of people have to listen to the programming of the mass media.  We are free to form our own opinions and to communicate to the people of the world.  The written word is not only knowledge, it is power.  How you use this power will define you as a person in the coming age of information.

I spent the last couple hours starting to read “The Everything Blogging Book” by Aliza Sherman Risdahl.  This is a fairly interesting book.  The authour begins with a history of blogging and the internet, but does not belabor the details.  I like the conversational tone of the writing.  There is not so much information that the book gets boring.  There is a lot of useful observation on what you might find in any given blog.  One chapter was about what kinds of blogs are popular.

I found it interesting that some of the first web pages that were called blogs were really just long lists of links to web pages the author found interesting.  Maybe in future I will record some of my web surfing and post a list of URLs I visit.  There are many sites I have seen that are nothing more than long lists of website links, but I never thought of them as being blogs.  A blog is where you write out your warped opinions and rant about how unfair your personal life is.  Well, maybe not, but still, you have to have something interesting.

I’m glad I bought this book today.  Reading it has been an interesting diversion.  One thing that started to bug me about “The Everything Blogging Book” was the chapter on different popular blogs.  The author listed about a hundred URLs in this chapter, and finally I got so sick of reading computer gibberish I ended up skipping everything in italics, which made the reading a lot easier.  There was only one chapter like this though, so it wasn’t too annoying.

I don’t know if this book is going to help me write more interesting posts to my blog.  I don’t know if I will get many ideas to create an empire of knowledge.  I may never make a single penny off of advertising.  I will enjoy myself reading this information.  That’s why I buy books, I enjoy reading.  If I get some practical information that helps me improve my blog and find more viewers for the pages I create, then it’s worth the cost.  Besides, I could always sell the book for a profit when I’m done reading it, if I ever bother to start selling my things.

I got bored with sitting around the house this afternoon trying to think of something to write about.  I got my hat and coat on and took the truck out to Barnes and Nobles.  The store was not very crowded today, and I spent some time looking through the remainder racks before I headed back to the business and Internet section.

I was looking for a good book on blogging.  I have seen books on this subject before.  These books seemed kind of basic and useless compared to the information anyone can get online for free.  Still, I looked around.  Blogging books were squirreled away in several places.  I found one on the e-business rack, two more hidden in with small business, another couple in with web applications, and one or two in with personal computing.  I looked over all these books.  Apparently they were written for people who were completely clueless and did not know what a blog was.  I mean, I might not have a good idea what to write about in my blogs to attract attention, but I have been keeping a blog, or rather several of them, for years.

One of these books was $40 and included a lot of programming code for making your own blog application.  Why would I bother doing that if there are suitable apps available for free?  I’m not about to write a program to blog anything.  Another book was all about how to get different design elements into your blog.  Why bother?  I like my minimalist design.  I had to point and click twice to set that up.  One very slim book was about how to run a blog as a business.  Well, that was interesting, except three fourths of the book was explaining what a blog is, not how to use one to generate money.  There was one chapter that said basically sell advertising and affiliate products, when you make money incorporate.  I stood there and read all the info in that book in under a minute just flipping pages.

“The Everything Blogging Book” was very basic but it covered a lot of ground.  I liked the broad range of information.  The book is filled with words, not a lot of pictures and diagrams.  It cost $15.  I stood there reading the chapter headings in this book and then set it back on the shelf and went to look at writing books for a while.  There was also a book on how to use WordPress, but I thought to myself, “Isn’t all this in a help file somewhere?”

I wasted some time looking through books on how to write and about the writing business.  I almost yawned.  I’ve read so much about writing over the years that the whole concept bores me.  Writing is nothing more than typing up words that mean something.  Selling your writing involves finding a buyer.  I looked over all the books, then went back to the business section to see if I had missed anything.  I ended up buying the everything book.  It’s fairly basic, but there was a lot of different material in this book and the writing was interesting and to the point.

I think I will probably spend the rest of the afternoon reading.  I’m a bit worn out from writing too much in this blog.  I have 51 posts now or something ridiculous like that and have only been writing in this blog for a week and a half.  Maybe tomorrow I will find something interesting to say.  For now, I’m taking the afternoon off to do some research.  If I learn anything useful I may write about it.

If you are looking for something to read or just want to browse through a vast selection of public domain literature, check out The Online Books Page at The University of Pennsylvania.  There are over 30,000 titles in this collection, and it is searchable by author, title and subject.  If you are looking for any book that has been around so long that the copyright has expired, this is the place to start.

The Online Books Page lists websites where books are published as HTML, has links to different Project Gutenberg text files, and links to page image files at different libraries around the world.  There is a lot of effort being put into digitizing old books by the different libraries around the world.  If you are looking for literature that has been out of print for a while or just like reading old books, check out this page.