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Dave Winer had a good post a while back about Stop Energy. He defines it as the drive to naysay, to oppose. He doesn’t use the opposite term Go Energy, but I will: Go Energy is what it takes to move forward, to make something happen.

Dave was characterising Stop Energy (and its converse) in terms of community dynamics, saying that some people in a community (software community especially) are driven by Go Energy, and others are driven by Stop Energy. Seems to me that’s a stretch; in any community there are differences of opinion about which direction to go, and one person’s Go Energy can be another person’s Stop Energy. But actually this post isn’t about communities at all.

I find that my own personal time is very driven by my own personal supply of Go Energy (“Go” for short). I’ve got a built-in pool of Go. When it’s fully charged up, I can hack like crazy on my own time — I had a whole lot of Go this spring when I did my GWT/Seam hacking.

More recently, my Go has had another focus altogether — my wife had a baby four weeks ago. Leading up to that, the subliminal anxiety of late pregnancy was definitely draining my pool. The odd part is that it wasn’t completely emptied — there was one particular work task that I really wanted to get done, and so even while taking three weeks of paternity leave, I had enough pre-existing, pre-baby Go to carry me through completing that work.

Now, though, my leave is over, I’m back at work, and my personal Go has got up and gone 🙂 It’s going to be a while before I build up enough Go to start doing some personal hacking. Blogging I can do on my hour-long train commute, and it also requires less Go than hacking, so I’ll be continuing that, but open source work is going to be on hold. Sorry, Jason E., Dan M., and others who were looking forward to having me back! The rest of 2007 is likely going to be fairly low-key.

Thanks for your patience, and I hope the blog tides you all over until the Hack is Back! I’ll try to stick to posting here every two weeks, now that the baby’s sleeping a bit better.