Y. Karp? Why Not!

The question "How many people keep a daily journal" on  Askville by Amazon provoked responses that range between "more people" and "less than half". Whatever the real number, people have been keeping diaries for hundreds of years. Wikipedia says that a work called To Myself by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius could possibly be one of the first diaries ever written. One might think that keeping a diary is a more feminine passtime. However, the appropriately named website, artofmanliness.com, provides a short list of famous men who kept a journal: Theodore Roosevelt Thomas Jefferson Charles Darwin Benjamin Franklin Lewis and Clark Andrew Carnegie Ralph Waldo Emerson Captain Cook Winston Churchill Sir Edmund Hilary Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton artofmanliness.com gives three main reasons to keep a journal: Your children and grandchildren will want to read it. It can bring you to your senses. Journaling grants you immortality ( Woody Allen : ...

The digital world has switched to the cloud, yet I still have my feet firmly on the ground. At home, I use a local email client on a big black desktop computer. I use software that was installed from a CD. I have a puny mobile data plan on my Symbian-based work-phone, and I haven't used a touch screen since I ran over my Palm PDA with my great big silver station-wagon sometime in 2002. My friends all have G-mail accounts, and I'm still mulling whether or not to use DropBox. There was a time when I wanted to ditch local computing and entrench myself in the Google-sphere: G-mail, Chrome, Android, Google+. The theory behind Chromebook, despite it's very shaky and unpopular start, sounds brilliant: Doesn't matter if you drop your Chromebook in the loo, simply log in from any Chromebook machine and all your settings and preferences instantly appear before you. (I would have used the word "magically", but I think it is trademarked by Apple...) But I resisted...