Last night I went to a retirement party for a guy to has worked for General Electric for the past 40 years. I’ve known him for the past 15 or so as a ballroom dancer, having met him at a dance that was held despite a major northeast snowstorm. We were among the handful of dance fanatics who refused to let a mere snowstorm keep us off the floor.
Last night, I found out that he has been instrumental in both creating codes for the programs that power nuclear submarines and crucial in the processes for de-bugging codes written by others. He’s a physicist by training and a brillinant programmer by talent and choice. I never knew that. I only knew that he loves to dance.
I went to the party with a long-time on-and-off dance partner, Nat Friedman, who retired last year from teaching mathematics at the State University and who is internationally known as a sculptor and an innovator in teaching how to integrate math and art. Many of our dance friends have no sense of his life off the dance floor.

I know lots of bloggers as bloggers. I know a little more about some of them from Frank Paynter’s lively and probing interviews with them. One of the things I enjoy about blogging is witnessing the continued unfolding of the details that make up the personalities who populate the Blogosphere — especially the ones who are not already well-known as net entities.
All that we are is so much more than we have time to share through our blogvoices.

While it’s not that we bloggers are trying to hide, but let’s face it — most of us look at our blogs as pesonal space, like our own private house made out of glass, where anyone can look in, but we reserve the right to decide on whom to invite in beyond our front door. So this information from b!X disturbs me. I don’t want my personal blog to make me the target of marketers. Of course, I know that it’s started already, with stupid spam irrelevant-to-me emails about making money on the net. That’s annyoying enough.
I like the idea of personal blogs avoiding and ignoring the mainstream activity of the Net, of constantly reinventing themselves, playfully experimenting in some uncluttered corner of the web. I don’t like publicists invading my space. But maybe I have no choice. Bummer.