What I love about being online, is the connections that I make. A few days ago, I took on the job of making an avatar for SecondLife of the main character in Cory Doctorow's "Someone comes to town, someone leaves town". In the course of the making, I visited the website of the author, and realised what a very interesting man he is :-).

http://www.craphound.com/
Not only that, he's releasing this novel on the internet for free at the same time as it is published in recycled trees...and there is a creative commons agreement that people in the developing world may take and use his work for free. You can see more in the link above.

I am also very impressed by the artist who made the cover of the book, and have been visiting webpages to see other examples of his work. Dave McKean is his name.
http://www.mckean-art.co.uk/

A couple of weeks ago, I made another avatar, for one of the people attending the Supernova conference...and in looking up photographs of the man, found information about his work into "The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places (Cambridge University Press). " Also fascinating.
http://communication.stanford.edu/faculty/reeves.html

Unfortunately, I am beginning to feel that my life is going to be too short tobe able to do justice to all the connections and links I am finding to things that fascinate me. I think it is my blessing and my curse, that I am interested in almost everything and can imagine myself working in many different environments. It is a blessing, because I am rarely - strike that - never bored. I always have things I want to do, read, visit in my head, and I am usually very excited by something I have been thinking or reading about.

It's been a huge asset when home educating the children, because there are very few subjects I don't feel interested in, very, very few. It was also an asset when I was working as a writer for Lloyd's Register, because I was able to throw myself into any story I was asked to write about, and find the contents fascinating.

On the other hand, it makes settling into one direction very hard indeed. I played the piano for a party at the meeting house a few weeks ago, and people are still coming up to me to tell me how impressed they were with my music. (I had composed the music which I played). Many of them have said that I ought to investigate publishing it. But I also make jewellery, and have often had people say to me that I ought to investigate having my necklaces made commercially. And I have written professionally. And I love family history research and would love to do that for a living. And I am very interested in health and especially a fusion between conventional and alternative forms of healing. And I am interested in education, and would like to write about alternatives to the current model of state-funded huge secondary school.

When I pick up a paper, to look at the jobs, there are very few I can't imagine myself doing. I am articulate, literate, numerate, have common sense, and I work loyally and hard for any company which employs me. I am intelligent and a good manager, and I love being responsible for a department when I was working full-time, before I had the children. I find that the huge variety of choices makes it hard for me to choose to go in one direction or another... it has lead to an almost total inertia.

Not quite, though. I have been commission to write a guide to Second Life. The company I found produces guides to a large number of games, and doesn't do one for SL at the moment, and so I pitched the idea to them, provided an outline table of contents, and they bit. So that's why I am writing that at the moment and not this blog....