Category: Self
Late March and April was a busy time for reviews. Read my takes on Nails’ Abandon All Life, the new one from Hey Colossus, the intense Dragged Down A Dead End Path by Call Of The Void, Greek punks Ruined Families’ incredible Blank Language, the Melvins’ so-so covers LP and Recurring Dream by Chicago drone rockers Implodes, all on Thumped. On Burning Ambulance you can read my reviews of Dying Embrace and more recently Combat Astronomy.
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Where to start? February began, as I wrote last time, with my interview with punk rock legend, and my musical hero, Mike Watt. You can read the whole thing here on Thumped if you’ve got a spare half-hour. I finally, properly met the man himself at the Il Sogno Del Marinaio gig at Whelan’s earlier this month, which was a great night only marred by the last support band and their truly horrible fans (all I’ll say on that note is: kids, don’t do drugs).
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A busy December — plus a mostly sickness-free Xmas — ploughed into a busy January, and February’s already shaping up to be equally packed. Not that I’m complaining.
This month I’m working on a feature that could well be my first print-published piece since my student days; it’s shaping up nicely and I’m looking forward to the finished article, which should appear sometime later in the spring. I should give it a code name or something, let me think about that… let’s call it Pole Star.
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I meant to do something like this for last year — to summarise my choice cuts from the previous 12 months of media consumption — but time got away from me in the end, and anyway, who wants to read about 2011 at the end of 2012?
Let’s just pretend I never intended to do that and start over right here with my picks of music, film, TV, books and whatnot, both old and new, since January of this year.
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Not much of an autumn this year; winter came hot (or rather the opposite) on summer’s heels, and now that the clocks have gone back the days have gone black. Bummer.
At least I’m getting some writing done: lots of reviews for Thumped over the past few weeks, and I’ve started doing some pieces for Burning Ambulance too. Reviewing aside, my first interview in years was recently published, and I’ve got another one in the works which should be promising. Updates will be here as ever.
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Seeing as how it was Blog Day the other day, I thought it’d be a good idea to tidy up this post I’ve had in the works for a number of weeks: a behind-the-scenes ‘productivity special’, if you will.
One big change in my work methods since March is the switch I made from using the ‘One Big Text File’ method to Notational Velocity for my electronic notebooking needs.
Notational Velocity, or NV, is weirdly enough harder to explain than it is to use. Basically it’s an open source app for plain text notes (about anything you want: blog posts, recipes, to-do lists, etc) and a way of organising those notes so everything you need is at your fingertips. You give your note a title in the top bar, you type what you want to type in the main window, and it’s saved in a designated folder. Every note constitutes its own text file in that folder, but you never need to see the folder: everything is consolidated within the app.
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You might remember the Cornerhost debacle from a few months ago. A panicked thread on a mailing list for the host’s customers (myself included) led to a tweet from me that led to a post on Gizmodo that blew the whole thing up for a couple of days.
The controversy prompted Michal Wallace, the owner, to resurface with a blog post allaying fears among Cornerhost’s site owners that the servers were going down. Then he disappeared again, but at least my website was safe, and I could FTP in, and downtime hasn’t been an issue.
Well that was a few months ago, and now Michal has finally posted again on the Cornerhost status blog, announcing his return to the company and attempting to explain things from his side.
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So I finally joined the future and upgraded my mobile to an iPhone 4S. I’ve had it for a couple of months now, which I think is enough time to build a solid impression of what it’s like to use the thing.
I’m not going to go too much into the positives, because they’re pretty obvious, and I can’t really judge them against the competition. What I will say is that the retina display is impressive, as is the camera (from what little I’ve used it, and I haven’t shot any video yet), and the battery life is fair enough considering it’s more a mini-computer with a phone than a phone with computery extras.
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The first quarter of the year’s almost done and there’s so much I haven’t written here. I’m well overdue a catch-up, I know. This one may be brief, but it’s better than nothing.
The highlights: Hitting the four stone mark in my weight loss efforts (I’ve dropped more than 57 lbs so far) / Getting stuck into Netflix for lots of TV shows (and the odd movie) I missed before / Trying to cook a proper meal for Bee once a week (I’m a bit behind on this, if I’m honest) / Getting my writing chops back / Meeting the hardcore legend Mick Foley, if only for a few seconds (he appreciated my Cornette Face shirt):
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I should probably start calling these Monthnotes, shouldn’t I? Anyway, let’s review the last few weeks.
The highlights: Michael D winning the presidency, even though I voted for Norris / Seeing The Silence of the Lambs for the first time (and loving it) / The Dark Crystal at this year’s Horrorthon / Wearing sunglasses on the first day of November / James Gleick talking about The Information at the Science Gallery / CHIKARA‘s High Noon iPPV rekindling my love of wrestling / Digging Bill Orcutt‘s mindbending acoustic blues / Reginald D Hunter at Vicar Street (very different from the panel shows) / Finally dinging three stone (and dropping a trouser size).
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So August flowed into September into October, and I have little to report. Such is life.
The highlights: David O’Doherty at Vicar Street / Ruins Alone at The Twisted Pepper / Dava Sobel at the Science Gallery / Dinner at the new Nando’s in town / Packing for Mars / Losing another few pounds to hit the 2 1/2 stone mark / Hearing ‘There’s a Ghost in My House’ on the radio / Getting deep into the new Murakami / Receiving an @reply from the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Champion.
The lowlights: Being sick for a week and missing Mike Watt + The Missingmen. Sure, I saw them over the summer, but still. Sad face.
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Thanks to Twitter for helping me remember the following:
4/7 — I find a hole torn in the back of favorite plaid shirt. Annoyed. Proper, durable (non-fashiony) plaid shirts are hard to come by round these parts.
Later in the day, the beginnings of a bad week of hayfever-induced sinusitis. Ugh.
13/7 — Markham sent me an invite to Google+ a couple of days ago. First impressions? It’s like Facebook, but more Twittery in its de-emphasising of symmetrical relationships. But at the same time, it’s kind of boring without my friends there. I don’t feel the same way about Twitter, funnily enough.
16/7 — Made up a batch of my tomato, carrot and onion soup. The secret ingredient is habanero sauce. Yum.
17/7 — Watching Sunday morning wrestling. Zack Ryder has a QR code on the front of his shorts. Genius! Although I’m not sure that’s what they really meant by the Internet of Things.
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April closed out nicely with Knut and Keelhaul playing a free show at the Button Factory. This is what hardcore’s supposed to be! Knut were quite good, if slightly on the hostile side (their vocalist didn’t seem the warmest of chaps). But Keelhaul blew them off the stage with time changes, awkward rhythms and riffs galore. So happy to have finally seen them live.
More gigs in May. Rush at the O2 was what you’d expect it to be: a show. But what a show! Spaceship lights, fireworks, elaborate sets, videos – the whole package. Even if it threatened to veer into Spinal Tap territory at times (mandolin on a stand, anyone?) these Canucks are no dinosaurs; three hours of hits is a breeze to them (it was much harder on my feet).
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Some highlights (and lowlights) of the past few weeks:
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In the middle of February, Bee and I paid a visit to IMMA to catch the last day of The Moderns. It was portrayed as an exploration of “the development of modernity in Ireland through the visual arts”, but the resulting exhibition was a bit of a hodge-podge of whatever it seemed the curators could shoehorn into it, and it didn’t cohere as a whole.
Why, for instance, was work by French artists in France (who merely happened to influence a handful of Irish painters) displayed next to photographs evoking the changing character of Ireland and Irish society? There’s no context! If juxtaposition was the intention, they missed the trick by a mile.
These conceptual problems aside, there were some gems to discover, particularly in photography.
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Fed up with the Wii Balance Board‘s fluctuating readings – and the time spent getting through the menus in Wii Fit – I’ve bought a proper doctor’s weighing scales so I can keep better track of what I’m losing (or not, as the case may be). After a few days, I seem to be a kilo heavier on the scales than what the Wii tells me; I’m more apt to trust the scales.
What else this week? To town on Saturday night to see Wire at The Academy 2, which is one of the shittier venues in Dublin. It’s basically a wine cellar with a dancefloor surrounded by iron columns and a stage that’s barely six inches off the ground, so there’s no hope for me when the tall motherfuckers push up to the front. We can do better than this.
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Looking back over the last two weeks, I find two prevailing themes: reviewing the past, and predicting the future.
The past I’ve already alluded to in my first Blogfodder link dump. Some of those links are nearly eight years old, which is forever in internet time. It’s incredible that so many of them are still accessible. (Yet maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised, as there’s many a site from even further back that hasn’t yet shuffled off this digital coil.)
As for the future? Last night I watched Bob Roberts again for the first time in years, and I’ll be damned if it isn’t prophetic: its parallels to the current social and political climate in America are franky scary.
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I’ve been ploughing through The Creation Records Story over the past few days. By now I’m at the stage where my interest is trailing off – I can’t stand Oasis – but that’s only the last couple of hundred pages; the rest is essentially a survey of the British indie music scene of the 1980s, and Creation was right in the thick of it.
The label’s earlier days are the most interesting to me: 73 in 83, The Jesus and Mary Chain, the House of Love saga, and the infamous My Bloody Valentine – as much remembered for almost bankrupting their label as they are for breaking musical barriers.
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My intention was to keep a mini-journal of our six-day trip in New York last summer. I even bought one of those Moleskine city guides as the perfect notebook for my observations. Sadly the day-to-day busyness and exhaustion put paid to my plans. But I’ve still got that notebook for a return visit, and I’ve had the benefit of a few months to distill the experience into thoughts which are better off here than stuck in my head, unarticulated.
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Everything gets back to normal a little too quickly post-Xmas, don’t you think?
Little to report from Week 478. No big New Year’s Eve partying for us, just lunch at Nando’s and adding to our puppet collection. Seriously – The Puppet Company and Melissa & Doug come highly recommended.
Oh yeah, and we bought a telescope. Though we haven’t had much chance to use it yet, what with the cloud and the haze and all. When the worst of winter passes we should have more to see.
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The pre-Christmas rush to the shops was all the more intense this year due to an extra blanketing of snow, and the infrastructural craziness that came with it.
Lucky for us we’d done the majority of our shopping in the weeks before, and only had to pop out for a mere handful of things before holing up for the weekend. If we’d had any more to do there might well be blood on the streets.
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Monday — Train is quick into town this morning. Getting home takes longer, however; these icy pavements are frustrating me no end.
Tuesday — I finally get around to watching Aguirre, Wrath of God only to find the DVR missed the last two minutes. Gah! Everything was building up to that moment! Also, putting on Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny right after wasn’t the best of moves.
Wednesday — Adventure afternoon: I take Grimmson out questing in WoW. It’s the first full day of Cataclysm proper, but no sign of any new races. Never mind; Grimmson’s levelling pretty fast at the moment which makes me happy. Was a good idea to upgrade to Burning Crusade, methinks.
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Monday — Another day working from home, as I twist my ankle heading out the door. On the plus side, home is much warmer than the office. But my ankle’s sore, the backs of my legs hurt, that weird malaise from Sunday evening returns – and news of the deaths of both Leslie Nielsen and Irvin Kershner doesn’t help at all.
Tuesday — Production day frustrations aside, little else to report. My ankle doesn’t fare too badly on a trudge through the snow to the supermarket, and I spend the rest of the evening with Bee on an epic session of Arkham Horror.
Later, when I go to bed, I chance a look out the bedroom window to see if it’s snowed again. As I pull up the blind I surprise a fox just feet away, right in front of me. Haven’t seen one that close in a long time! I hope he found some food, he had a cold night ahead of him.
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Monday — Dublin Bus is really pissing me off. Missing buses on the 37 in the morning and afternoon, and bad traffic on the 39 in Blanchardstown means it takes me nearly two hours to get home. I thought this was the future and we should all be telecommuting by now. Sigh.
Tuesday — Day of administrivia: I need to change my address on the electoral register, lest I miss my chance to get that shower of gobshites out of power.
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Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday — First two days of this week are a write-off. Wednesday I’m up earlyish, cold still getting me down. I briefly flirt with the idea of going out to the shops. But then I remember the Tesco delivery guy is coming, which puts those silly thoughts aside.
The day ahead is reserved for Getting Better: WoW in the afternoon, followed by an Apprentice double bill in the evening, and Skyline chili for dinner. That’s what I call good medicine.
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Monday — Work at the office is blah, and cold. I skip out early to beat the rush and finish things up at home. I’m finding that work is eating into my thinking time. Can’t let that happen; don’t want to get stuck in that rut again.
Tuesday — Time to return to the world (of Warcraft) and patch my game install ahead of the Cataclysm. But what should be a straight-forward process, maybe an hour or so for a 5GB file, ends up lasting the whole day and night. In fact my download doesn’t complete until 1am, with the installation taking another 90 minutes. I’m convinced the culprit is our ISP throttling the torrent, though of course I have no evidence of this, other than my righteous indignation.
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Monday/Tuesday — I wake up feeling rotten on Monday. Time to take a sick day. (The fact that it’s officially the first day of winter is just a coincidence.) I worry for a while about catching up at the end of the week, but you know what? I’m ill and I’m entitled to look after myself once in a while.
So I spend the day watching crappy movies, getting annoyed that the Kindle cover I bought off eBay is in fact the size of a bleeding iPad, and later providing a running commentary on the Irish Apprentice with Bee (if there’s one thing that show has taught me, it’s to never take a job working for Bill Cullen).
I don’t sleep well Monday night: bad indigestion and weird abdominal pains when I try to lie on my side. Another day of bad movies and timeshifted TV is required.
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Monday/Tuesday — Monday is a bank holiday, but not for me. At least I get to work from home and wind up at a reasonable hour. Early start again on Tuesday for the deadline, but there are few headaches and everything gets sent to the printer on time.
Wednesday — Administrivia takes up much of the day. That and playing F1 2010, which frustrates me greatly: even on easy mode its unforgiving about the smallest things. Maybe what I’m looking for is arcade mode, which this game doesn’t have. Guess I’m resigned to doing lots of practice laps in time trial.
Later I get caught in the rain walking home from the shops and am drenched to the bone. Fat lot of good you did, umbrella.
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Monday — A very slow day at the office. Thank goodness I have to leave early to meet the electrician, who’s coming over to look at the dodgy stovetop. Regarding said stovetop, it will indeed need to be replaced. I wish these things had been checked before we moved in…
Tuesday — Lazy day today. Was meant to be somewhere else early in the morning but plans changed at the last minute, so I had a much-needed lie-on instead.
It’s also a day to catch up on unwatched TV, and get back on the stationary bike. Every now and then I hop online to track my Kindle through the UPS network, from Nevada to Cologne. I go to bed assuming it’s on its way to Dublin.
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Monday/Tuesday — Nothing much happening. We take the train out to Raheny on Tuesday evening – timing things slightly better on the return journey this time, so it takes little more than half an hour to get home. I’m getting the hang of this.
Wednesday — Still waiting for word on the taps. There are boxes in the living room begging to be unpacked, but the day gets away from us. Could be partly due to my playing F1 2010 on the Xbox for much of the afternoon. Guilty!
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Monday — An unremarkable day, other than my dismay at the golf overrunning so I miss University Challenge. Nobody makes me miss University Challenge and gets away with it! Okay, they do get away with it, but I’m certainly not happy about it. So there.
Tuesday — A night out at The Foggy Dew with David R and the gang. Dave has a great story about meeting the guy who writes Scott Pilgrim. I have a boring story about the taps in our kitchen not working. Was I the only one not drinking? Just wasn’t in the mood for it.
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Monday — This cold is hitting me hard, feels like the walking ‘flu. Work is a drudge. A chicken and chickpea curry for dinner helps me breathe a bit easier, but it never lasts long enough.
Tuesday — A half-six start at the makeshift home office is probably not a good recipe for recovery, is it? After that stress, I don’t know what to do with myself for the rest of the day. But I feel so crap that it’s probably for the best.
Wednesday — Not the greatest of days, but I do discover that it’s only a 20-minute walk from the new place to the Blanchardstown Centre. Well, the Westend Retail Park, but close!
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Monday — A morning of admin, followed by an afternoon of work. Also looked up where the 39 bus stops, so we can have an alternate route home to the new place (integrating Google Maps is the best thing Dublin Bus has done in quite some time).
Reading Scott Pilgrim Vol 2 on my lunch break, I see the spot in Lee’s Palace where I was nearly bottled in the head by the drummer from …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead (p183; the stool on the far right).
Tuesday/Wednesday — Aside from getting another lift to relocate various appliances to the new place (many thanks again, Declan) I have little recollection of what I did over these two days. This worries me.
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Monday/Tuesday — Work work work, busy busy busy. Just enough energy left to get to the shops. Not sleeping well.
Wednesday — Still in zombieland, but I revive somewhat in the afternoon for an IKEA run. In the evening Declan drops by to help move a few things to the new place (thank you!). Surprisingly I’m able to find it in the dark without getting lost.
Thursday — Screwed over by IKEA’s delivery service. They never told us when we booked the day before that if we missed their random and arbitrary delivery slot at any moment within that timeframe, for any reason, we still had to pay in full (in other words, the ‘delivery’ charge isn’t actually a delivery charge).
I’m furious! And I get even more so when the customer services drone calls back and rather than really try to help us as customers, decides to hide behind the terms of service – which were never fully dictated to us in the first place. Customer disservice, more like.
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Monday — Wet walk to work this morning. Parnell Street stinks of wet dog. Then the sky gets darker and the rain gets harder and my enthusiasm goes out the window. Blah. At least I survive the walk home without slipping.
The evening is better. New MythBusters on TV tonight; good to see them back to busting myths and not idioms (that ‘lead balloon’ episode was just stupid).
Tuesday — A day of meetings (and a little bit of sunshine!) with lots to think about, followed by a trek with Bee to IKEA for cardboard boxes. Thankfully we dodge the rain on the way home, and avoid our boxes turning to €15 worth of brown mush. Tomorrow the packing begins in earnest.
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Monday/Tuesday — End of production cycle means little else (aside from meals and a few hours’ sleep) but work from Monday morning till Tuesday afternoon. I’m used to it, but also tired of it.
After all the files are gone to the printer, more Project Hannibal. We see a place in nearby Smithfield which is great for location and okay for space, but is a bit grotty inside (worn carpet, scrapes on kitchen counter, no power shower).
Later on we see a much nicer place out in D15; it’s modern, clean, lots of space, the kitchen is perfect. But there’s a catch: there’s no good cable TV or broadband available. That’s a deal-breaker for us, unfortunately.
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Monday — Bored in the office with little to do bar some more production prep, and steeling myself for the inevitable deluge at the end of the week.
On my lunch break I upload some photos to Flickr that I’ve been meaning to get online for a while. The process is less painful than I remember (broadband speed really makes a difference). I do have to troubleshoot a problem with portrait shots displaying as landscape, but it’s an easy settings fix after a trawl through the help forum.
University Challenge in the evening: good exercise for the mind. The album covers round is too easy, but it freaks out Bee that I know them all instantly. Well I did work in a music shop for quite a while.
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Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday — Beginning of this week is a bit of a blur. I spend some time on Project Hannibal, but mostly watch movies from the backlog on the DVR (nothing I’d go out of my way to see, though the first Harold & Kumar was stupid fun) and try to recharge my batteries.
Also: still writing up my NYC notes. Need to upload my (mostly rubbish) photos to Flickr, too. I didn’t shoot as much or as often as I expected; guess I’m just not confident/comfortable/shameless enough with the camera. But I’m also thinking: it’s great to have photos as a memory aid, but do they need to be my own photos? Surely I can get the same feelings/memories from looking at others’ snaps of the same places. Yet there’s still a part of me that says that’s cheating.
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Monday — Long day at work; got more done than I expected, but still not enough. Home around half six. Left a message for the landlord, then spoke to him later re: us moving on. He sounded disappointed, but I hope he knows we’re not simply bailing on him (besides, we need a few weeks to find the right place before the packing/cleaning/etc).
Loud music/drunk singing downstairs starts as soon as I finish the call; makes me wish we could move tomorrow, just beam all our stuff into a new place. Curse you Heisenberg and your uncertainty principle!
Up to p164 in the Eno book, plus however-many pages of the appendices. It’s a two-bookmark job, this one.
Idea for a new TV show – Sportacus: Blood and Sand. (Somebody Photoshop a poster for this, please.)
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Taking my lead from the weeknotes meme that’s spread across a number of blogs/feeds I follow, but mostly inspired by my reading of Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices, I’m making a go of keeping note of my thoughts and activities from week to week – much like I used to when blogging back in the day. It’s 457 weeks since my first blog post, so that’s where I start counting.
Long term, it might help me get closer to my vision of this site as a hub for my aggregated self (that was before I lost my enthusiasm for a while). But I’m not really thinking about that; it only invites creative paralysis! In the short term, it’s just something to keep myself engaged with things. However mundane my week has been.
But hey, enough of my yakking. Whaddaya say? Let’s boogie.
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Emmet Connolly over at Thoughtwax writes about the virtues of taking things slowly:
Without the restrictions of regular media, we pajama-wearers can do whatever we want. For the most part, something is written when it’s ready to be written, and then it’s only as long as it needs to. Some people, like me, have very few things to say, so we say them infrequently.
Indeed, there’s much to be said for “the idea of posting infrequently as a deliberate editorial approach”.
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A list, in no particular order, of Things That Must Be Done:
Fix categories: I’ve got far too many categories in both of my blogs, and now that I have tag functionality (see below) most of them are completely unnecessary. Five or six catch-all categories is all I really need, so these will be condensed forthwith.
Set up tags: Now that I’ve upgraded to MT 4, I can haz tags! I’ve already used a handy script to convert my jury-rigged entry keyword tags into tags proper; now I need to code up templates for the tag archives so I can actually use them.
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No sooner had I posted my last entry than my host’s server decided to throw a wobbly, rendering my Movable Type installation unusable.
A fresh start with a clean install of MT 4 failed to solve the problem (which I still have no explanation for) so my blog was effectively stranded. However my host’s move to brand new servers a couple of weeks ago finally did the trick.
There’s still a bit of housekeeping left to do, as Movable Type has changed significantly since the last time I upgraded. I’ll get around to that sometime soon. No promises, mind.
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AKA Trying to come up with witty titles is what got me into this mess
Last night I found myself at the Wayback Machine looking up something or other, and got suddenly curious to see how much of my own site had been archived. Quite a bit of it, it seems.
I clicked on the page with the earliest date, and immediately jumped back almost six years to meet my 22-year-old self. There I was, graduating from college, already wistful about my undergraduate days, and unsure about how to get where I wanted to go. But boy, did I ever have a lot to say.
I must have been blogging daily back then, maybe more. I was so un-self-conscious about it, too. I just blogged what I was thinking, I didn’t give much consideration to what went before or what was to come after, and it was all the better for it. So the question immediately came to mind: Why don’t I write like that anymore?
I could give a whole list of excuses to answer that question, but the truth is that I really don’t know. Somewhere along the way I must have got the notion that I couldn’t just blog about random stuff, that everything had to have a point. But that put the pressure on, and pressure does not equal fun. And when something’s no longer fun, why do it?
So the gaps between entries grew wider and wider, while the self-imposed pressure to turn out finely-crafted pieces led to inevitable procrastination. Soon enough, the windows of opportunity flew past. And there’s no point in writing about something that happened months ago, even when I did occasionally have the motivation to try, so why bother? I was full of good intentions, but they’re worthless without acting on them; I’ve got a text file full of abandoned drafts and half-formed thoughts to prove it.
I said two years ago that blogging is ‘just what I do’. But I haven’t been doing it. Quite the opposite: I’ve had blogger’s block.
However, looking back at my younger blogging self has made me realise what I’ve been wasting. No, I tell a lie: I’ve known what I’ve been wasting for a long time now. I’ve just been too embarrassed to admit it.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is, to hell with all the pretensions that hindered me from doing what I used to do so easily. This place was at its best when I wasn’t trying to be perfect. I’m glad I’ve admitted that now.
Updated 5 Dec 2009: In hindsight, I feel a bit silly about what I wrote here before. Not so much the part about not striving for perfection, but the idea that going back to the ‘old days’ of near daily blogging was the answer.
After all, that was then and this is now. Times change. And besides, as Emmet wrote a couple of years ago on his own excellent blog, there’s much to be said for “the idea of posting infrequently as a deliberate editorial approach”.
That’s an idea that’s resonating with me more and more. But of course, adopting such a policy won’t solve my procrastination problem. ‘Slow’ and ‘stagnant’ are very different things — some effort on my part will be required.
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Nine years ago on this very date, I took my first steps into the world of personal publishing by starting my own website, a horrible mess of black and orange (well it was 1999) which eventually morphed into what you see before you today. Nine years! Jesus. That’s a long time. And what do I have to show for it?
Well not a lot, going by the lack of activity here (unless you count my Twitter updates). But I’ll have you know that my real life has been far more eventful.
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I started blogging six years ago today. One could argue that I stopped over a year ago, seeing as I’ve only posted to the Macrolog four times since I marked last year’s anniversary.
However, though I’m not as prolific as I once was, to say the least, I haven’t given it up (even if my Twitter stream does get more attention) and I don’t foresee doing so any time soon. As I said last year, it’s just what I do.
Now, if only I had the time or motivation to do it more often…
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Thanks to the magic of Yahoo! Pipes, I’ve cobbled together a single RSS feed combining my Macrolog and Microlog with a whole bunch of other goodies, from MetaFilter comments to Vox blog posts and regular Twitter updates.
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It dawns on me that this humble little weblog recently passed the fifth anniversary of its inception. Two weeks ago, to be exact. I’ve been taken up completely with other things since my return from South Africa (the new job, mostly, which I will get into another time) and had barely enough time to eat a proper dinner, let alone tend to my RSS feeds and bookmarks and draft posts and what have you, so I’m sure you can forgive me for not marking the occasion.
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Not much time for blogging lately. Cogs once rusted have been cleaned and oiled for turning again — and turning they are.
Right now? Plans are being made, bags are being packed and loose ends tied up before my long-awaited return to South Africa. T minus 12 days and counting. You better believe I’m counting.
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