...that there are so few active writers on estrip left.

There are so many factors. But to me the obvious 5 seem:
0. Blogging is dying. It requires more effort than the 140 characters of a tweet, text message, or status update to both write and consume. There is nothing stopping people from posting short blogs, but it seems hardly worth it to come up with a title when you are only posting a sentence.

1. The biggest factor - Facebook. Facebook overtook the internet by rekindling people's relationships with their friends, families, and even the person they hung out with for a week at a 3rd grade camping field trip. With a social network of the people you are already comfortable with, and the promise of all of your friend's friends, there isn't much need to try and start fresh with new people or go anywhere else. Because of the very same scenario, an "author" on facebook receives so much more positive feedback from the people that already care about them. To me it seems like the difference between going to a party at your best friends house and meeting a few new people and going to a bar alone where you know nobody.

2. A lot of my good local friends moved away.

3. I have no free time. Between work load, house work and some other issues, I "withdrew from being social" in general. I think I can count the people I actually talk to one one hand. Promoting the site was a big part of getting new writers. Well, that and back then there were few outlets for posting information publicly to the web.

4. I refuse to make an iphone app. In fact, I totally gave up on apple right as they became most popular. Hopefully, the switch to android - which I much prefer - will pay off someday. At least I can now be hired as an android programmer if I need a job ever. But seriously, I refuse to pay $100 to become an iphone dev, when I cannot program it on linux and I have no way of knowing if apple will even accept my app. As you can see from my date cloud in the left column, I have been publishing much more since I got the nexus one than I did 2007, 2008, 2009 with the iphone. Having a native app is easier, especially since stupid fucking apple did not include file upload in their shitty browser to force people to buy into their store.

Just check of my august's for comparison:



Sometimes I wish I had focused on estrip more instead of going the corporate job route, but ultimately I could have totally failed - especially considering the economy - and instead now at least I have a great job.

Its still sad to watch it die out. I guess thats really how everything goes. On the other hand I met so many interesting people, had so many fun experiences and learned so much from it.

All that being said, I personally don't plan on stopping to document my life here or anything, and estrip is going nowhere - so if you are in for the long haul, estrip will be here for you.

And who knows, maybe it will bounce back. Then again not even my own brother (e:mike) writes on it anymore. I guess he doesn't really have his own computer. Maybe I should just re-purpose the software for something else and make a new site in something I am interested in like a tortoise owner journaling site or a linux user journaling site.

I wonder if this is how the WELL people felt after people started going other places online. They were my original inspiration for this although, instead of bringing people together from all over the world, I wanted to bring strangers together from the same place.

Total entries per year for the site. 04 was really the best year of all.

I bet it you can't actually still reserve seats for the '99 season.

This lack of being able to buy beer at some music venues and all stores really annoys me and I barely drink.

Last night at the chez-a-rena they sort of got around it with this scam. For $30 they has an all you can eat VIP pizza buffet, and in the VIP lounge they also gave away "free beer" but you had to pay $30 to get on. To me, and especially because we had just eaten, that seemed like a total rip off. Even (e:terry) didn't want to spend the money. Plus the VIP space was as far from the band as possible.

I don't know how alcoholics survive here if not by stockpiling. However, in my own personal experience I've noticed alcoholics are not good stockpilers.

says sleep comfort

At like 2am, we walked to ETS to get nachos for (e:Terry)'s birthday last night.

Now we are on the highway on the way to the show.

You are now the big 30+. Hope you have fun at the Circa Survive concert tonight.

Sometimes, I can't even figure it out myself afterwards.

This is why I sided with google instead of apple. I just logged into my gmail on linux and was able to dial all the numbers I have in my address book on my phone and talk to them online free on my computer. It also has the entire history of all the calls from my phone. Plus I think this is the first time I have seen really good video chat on linux to mac. I guess skype also works but I don't have skype and they ripped me off on credits twice while this is just built into my gmail and fully integrates with my phone.

Here I am talking with myself between mac and linux.

Luckily we have about 1000 of them.

(e:mike), (e:terry) and I went to La Dolce Vita for lunch. It was amazing and quite reasonably priced. I got the half pannini and soup special for $7.