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Monday, 2 June 2003 |
OK. I'm not going away. I shan't stop blogging.
I did think of it because... well, because for me what I want out of blogging is to have a bit of a conversation. I don't need to do it just to work my thoughts out or for any other reason. But right now, my brain is mush. I have bugger all to say, and would struggle to articulate it if I did. The thing with blogging is that it creates in your mind a pressure to deliver. I feel that were I to stop for a few weeks or more, I'd lose what few readers I have. I don't care about recognition, but I do care about the conversation and contact. So, I figured that if I stop for a few weeks, might as well just throw it in completely.
Silly me.
Anyway, I may or may not go quiet for some time, until I get back some of what motivated me to start in the first place. I may even trash this blog and start again. Or not. But I think whatever I do, I'll do it openly as myself. I've tried before to wear another persona, but it doesn't sit so well. I need to be me. That kinda puts some constraints on what I write, being mindful of immediate and extended family. But it can't be any other way.
And I really appreciate the comments. Thanks people.
Later.
andrew
9:49:29 PM 
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Thursday, 22 May 2003 |
What I want, what I really, really want, is a WYSIWYG (X)HTML editor for my Powerbook. It has to run under OS X natively, be simple, lightweight and gorgeous. Or, better still, it could be browser based. But it'd hafta work in Safari. It also has to generate clean, preferably XHTML-compliant, unadulterated markup. I'm kinda sick of having to either type tags, or manually insert them from drop-down lists and menus, and neither can I quite bring myself to accept the markup that MS Word produces. Any ideas?
6:27:54 PM
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Monday, 12 May 2003 |
Heh! This blog was supposed to be the next stop on my way to creating a new, web-based business, *not* an extended, asymmetric counselling session.
Must do better; there's a world to change.
10:05:48 PM
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Tuesday, 18 March 2003 |
Pay it forward: by way of a recommendation from Stavros the Wonder Chicken, I dropped in to read Skot's blog, the fetchingly entitled Izzle Pfaff!
Skot is funny. So funny that I think I should give up trying to be funny, as should many others. And it's accessible too, meaning that I can read the thing in one pass and not have to squint and frown and screw up my forehead.
A sample, hopefully representative:
Well, the wedding is less than two months away, so I'd better give fair warning that the entries here might get a little more sparse. I mean, we've got everything more or less under control, but of course there are more and more little shitheaps to trip over along the way. Holy shit, we've got to get a marriage license! Also, a banquet license so our friends can drink! Definitely a banquet license so we can drink! (Thoughtful pause.) JESUS CHRIST! Do you realize how much people are going to drink?!
...
Tomorrow we go to meet with the nice 'n' clenched mansion people to talk about meal options (my votes for corn dogs and fries have been loudly shouted down)
...
I have never written a check this big. I've never bought a house; my car cost $450; and my student loans are paid whenever the jar of pennies fills up. So it's a big deal for me, especially since I'm handing it over to people who, while again, are very nice, seem on occasion to be made of extruded plastic.
And you know, for extruded plastic animated entities, they sure have a lot of snitty fucking rules (not that I am conversant with other lilac-scented, money-snatching plastigolems, but I'm just saying).
"Plastigolems!" Why didn't I think of that one?
11:29:30 PM
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Monday, 17 March 2003 |
Rageboy notes that:
...I am getting very fucking little email from you people. Perhaps it's because I've been sending so little. Is that the way this Internet thing works? Shit, how come nobody told me? OK then, listen: Be that way. I hate you all.
Link
Well, yeah, perhaps: you don't send it, you don't receive it. But even if you did, we're not replying because now we want to blog it instead, with a nifty hyperlink back to your good self. Then, having leveraged Rageboy's massive fame and mind share to lend some illusion of authority and dignity to our own, spotty, little blog, we can count our Technorati links and trackbacks (tracksback?) and watch the site meter ticking over.
Anyway, no point hating us; we'll just be nice.
9:31:04 PM
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Sunday, 16 March 2003 |
but this is
3:16:06 PM
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Friday, 14 March 2003 |
Something odd is at work here. I like to write, I really do. You see, I have the tortured soul of an artist, the need to express and create -- as do most of us I suspect -- but I also have all the artistic ability of a gnat's left bollock. This causes me unbelievable amounts of misery and frustration. If only I could paint or photograph.
The only arenas in which I ever manage to successfully express a little art are programming, and writing. Just, just, oh-so occasionally, I manage a paragraph or two that I feel proud of.
And those times that I do manage it, I did it without trying; the words simply flowed onto the screen, almost without conscious thought. By contrast, the harder I try to write, the more contrived, turgid, dysrhythmic it is. Bleagh!
Which is all perfectly in order and in accordance with our human nature. I remember an article in New Scientist some time back on the superior reflexes and decision making of the unconscious self. I think that when we achieve that state known as flow, we must lose the conscious self to a large degree.
So, for a few nights' running now, I've sat up late and read blog after blog. And as midnight approached, and I was so fuzzy of eye and brain that I could neither read nor comprehend very much anymore, I started to write. And the words flowed, even if I had to squint out of first one eye, then the other, to read them. I even flew without a spell checker.
OK, it ain't art. BUT I WROTE. And one or two people have even been moved to praise.
And here's the great hope: if I do enough of this, relentlessly day after day, and go back and read it later which, strangely, I quite enjoy, perhaps it'll become easy. Perhaps, just as I can now rattle off in minutes the kind of Oracle SQL that one sees in advanced sections in texts and has support dudes quietly reaching for the manual, perhaps I'll be able to do the mechanics of writing quite without conscious thought. And then perhaps I'll be able to express the ideas flashing through my chaotic mind as they come to me, not spend an entire day trying and failing. Like happened today with my idea for a killer disruptive technology.
Stay tuned.
10:01:10 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Andrew Barnett.
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