Back then, I felt more obligated to be polite to people who wasted my time. I was also at a disadvantage because he would station himself in my cube while talking my ear off about whatever. I would be stuck with him until someone called him away.

But now I realize that people who are so oblivious to body language and verbal cues are probably also used to having people walk away from them or take other unsubtle measures to shake them off. Fortunately, they don't take offense. Unfortunately, that's because they barely notice it's happening; therefore they never wonder why it keeps happening.

Also ... there's an app for that! I forget what it's called, but I read about an iPhone app that you set to call you in x minutes. Unfortunately, in order to take advantage of it, you need to know in advance that you're going to need to get rescued.

Yeah, I noticed those things about Tumblr. In a way, they're like an upsized Twitter. But the simplicity means I can have an actual blog with very little fuss and time-wasting on my part. I can actually kind of mini-blog again and not feel like I'm polluting my old blog (which always used to be about longer posts).

My needs and free time today are part of a different reality, and I get a lot more out of the social connections in Facebook and Twitter, so I figured that Tumblr is a good medium and complement to my activities elsewhere.

I'm saying this about a lot of things nowadays: it is what it is. :)

But Tumblr has a habit of half-implementing all of their features. There are no RSS feeds for the Dashboard, for instance. And replies between Tumblr users are limited to one way comments on a post, so conversations are discouraged. (They want you to answer in your own blog post.) There are few options to manage those replies.

I sometimes miss comments, because having them would open things up to people without Tumblr accounts, but I've never been impressed with Disqus' integration into Tumblr. Tumblr should build that into the site themselves but I think comments are against their philosophy.

Then again, if comments were enabled I would probably never remember to check them because they don't appear in the Dashboard. So they would remain a separate and seldomly used alternative.