Filters

I've been having a bit of a conversation in the comments for my Serendipity post with an anonymous former member of my old group in Salt Lake. It's gotten me thinking quite a bit about how we place mental filters on our memories. It also shows me the benefits of blogging in real-time as opposed to the historical blogs I have been doing.

It is impossible to ever clearly remember the past. Our perceptions will always be clouded by our experiences leading up to any event, as well as our experiences that occur as a result of the event.

For me, I look back at my time at Microsoft and see a great place where I learned a lot of hard lessons. I chose to leave to prove myself, which I feel I have done. Others see it as a division in the ass-end of space where our existance was tolerated until we became too unprofitable to keep around, and that my leaving when I did was merely my last-ditch effort to avoid having the scarlet "L" for layoff branded on my employment record for eternity.

To be honest, there may be a lot of truth in both points of view. However, my current set of filters choose to focus primarily on the positive aspects of being at Microsoft.

That pretty much sums up my personality. I try my best to remember and focus on the best parts of my past. I do that for one reason and one reason only: while I try to remember all of my successes, I do remember all of my failures.

I'll be going through my regular everyday activities, and these failures will come out of left field and slam me with the full effect of their results. My period of military service: wham. My actions as a senior in high school: wham. The friendships I destroyed because of who I was at the time: wham. My actions that caused D.W.'s choice: wham. I remember all of them, and my memories of them stay just as vibrant today as when they first occurred.

All that brings me to the benefits of blogging in real-time as opposed to a delayed blog. It's essentially the same as writing a journal. You place your feelings and experience into the ether or onto paper, and while the experience stays with you, the feelings fade. It gives you an opportunity to look at the past and see exactly what you were thinking when you ran for student body president, or when you were run over by a co-worker, or when you broke someone's heart.

In short, it gives us the opportunity to learn more from our past by letting us use our current perceptions as well as a snapshot of our perceptions in the past in an effort to come closer to finding the truth. The longer we wait to log these perceptions, the more filters that get in the way, until we get to the historical blogging quandry I find myself in today.

A massive chunk of my readership (I've got about 100 regular readers according to my stats, but only about four people who actively comment) are either friends in the industry or friends from MGS. Because you are the people who are most affected by this, I'll leave it up to you.

Do I:

a) Continue to do the historical blog entries publicly as well as current entries; or,

b) Do current entries only, and do the historical entries in my private blog (no, I'm not giving the URL)?

Vote by comment or E-mail. I'll post the results on Monday, December 20.