AKMA’s Random Thoughts

My husband and I blog, as did my father when he was alive.

How you should handle relationships when you blog, and in your blog, is an interesting question. There's a lot of interest in what happens when your boss finds out that you have a blog, and what happens if your boss disagrees with what you write there -- the SacBee controversy and the more recent Easterbrook flap are signs that that issue is still alive and kicking.

Yet for most bloggers the more salient coming of age blogging moment is What Happens when Your Family Finds Out About Your Weblog?. And how does that change both your relationship to them and how you keep your weblog? Personally, the fact that both I and family members keep weblogs has improved our relationships. Things that would have been heated arguments face to face with my Dad, for example, were quite civil and reasonable in the context of our respective blog posts on the issue, and in at least two cases allowed us to get beyond what had previously been intractable conflicts that had dogged us for years. My husband's blog is not overtly personal, but because he can be reticent about his likes and dislikes, I actually learn a great deal about him from his blog. I know him better now because of his blog, and choosing Christmas gifts is no longer a brain-wracking misery.

You should look at this one weblog: Stare At Us, which, via clever formatting, allows a husband and wife blogging team to display their blogs side by side on a single page -- a sort of blogging marital bed that always reminds me of those photos of John and Yoko reading the New York Times during their Bed-In protest of Vietnam.

Thanks for pointing out Stare At Us Lisa it is excellent. My "scary", was of course, ironic as I suspect for many bloggers their blog is a place of escape from "normal" relationships and that this is almost certainly frequently unhealthy.

Both AZ and I blog. I think my relation to this partnership is less "keeping separate" or "not disagreeing" but wonderment often in how lovely her writing is by comparison to my own disjoint scratchings. And this in the sense that she started some 3 years after I did...

I believe I have learned some more about her through her blogging, though I also think it is YA way to do so as our relationship continues on it's journey. Some things we discuss first and then blog, other things we discuss post-blog

We haven't had many coblogging moments over the last year plus she's been keeping hers, though there have been a couple refractions-on-events.

A blogging couple I think highly of is Idle Words and the companion Nobody's Doll.

And yes, Stare At Us ++

Hi, Euan: I figured your "scary" was a bit tongue in cheek. And certainly there are truly scary blogging situations out there.

It would be fun if a service like BlogTree were able to represent real, offline family relationships between bloggers as well as "took inspiration from" relationships between blogs.

Of course, both Laura and I blog. We read each other regularly and there are frequent crosslinks. I don't recall an instance where we actually posted contra each other, but we have added comments to each other's posts. Needless to say, this is my feeling. Laura may (and often does) feel differently.

Oh, drat — of course you and Laura. My apologies, Micah — and so soon after I had just visited both your sites, too. I’ll have to post a follow-up with all this good feedback.

I think LiveJournal may have a higher share of blogging partners than the general blogosphere, since part of LJ's strengths is its ability to network among friends.

I basically drove my husband to blog, because I thought certain things he was telling me in private should have a larger audience (some for theraputic reasons, others for their sheer brilliance).

We use our blogs for different things -- his is primarily a personal journal for friends, whereas mine is more public and newsbloggy.

We're both avid readers of the other's blog, and we comment in them as needed[*]. Since we have different readerships, I often make a point of linking to his journal every so often, when he says something I consider particularly profound.

In our wedding vows, we promised not to shame one another, so sometimes we will vet our posts with the other before making them public, to ensure we're being fair. Or sometimes I'll just tell him in advance that I'll be venting, so he's not taken by surprise.

Personally, I think communication is a key to a strong relationship, and blogs are a useful tool in that regard. I've had more problems with the fact that my parents read my blog than from my husband.

Let me be quite clear: I have no problems whatever with the fact that both my wife and my mom read and comment on my blog. None. I love them and appreciate them, and am glad they feel free to say what they want.

Was that right?

It's a source of great disappointment to me that my beautiful and talented wife does not use the account I've created for her on my weblog, but I'm happy on the occasions when she posts comments.

Okay, not completely true. She's usually pointing out a mistake I've made, and there I am fixing it.

On one memorable occasion, I pulled and rewrote a post which she criticized. I also pulled her comment on the post, which brought about some disorder in the house. She felt I should've left her comment and shown my corrections. I felt I should just make the post right, which would have left her comment orphaned and meaningless. In retrospect, she was nearer right than I was.

Everyone can use an editor--I'm no exception.

I'm glad to have my errors pointed out, but it'd be nice if she were also posting items. She does a fair amount of good writing herself, but it mostly ends up on closed mailing lists.

She's a good writer with intelligent things to say, and she deserves an audience.

Earlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.

Earlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.

When the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.

When Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.

Let's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.

A variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.

Note the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.