robjsoftware.info

Very sorry for the hiatus, everyone (all twenty-some of you, according to Feedburner — it was forty-plus until Oct 1, then Feedburner’s stats rolled over and HALF OF YOU DISAPPEARED!!!). I know I just blew my “every two weeks” rule. And my hoary old excuse — “I’ve been sick” — has only one redeeming quality: boy, is it ever true. Our two-year-old brought home a cold that went straight to my throat and destroyed my vocal cords on the way to my lungs, where it transformed into a baker of the worst cookies ever. EVER. Combine that with some epic work-related stress immediately prior, and you have the perfect off-the-air recipe.

I’m not 100% yet, but I’ve gotten well enough to be able to think about things other than child care and how sick I am. So, my apologies. I’m about to go into high gear to make up for it — I’ve actually got about a dozen posts saved up and they’re going to start hitting every few days for a couple of weeks. Stay tuned, there’s a veritable manifesto on the way!

Ultimately I’m shooting for more of a weekly rhythm (if not more often), since biweekly is just too seldom.

Anyway, thanks for your patience, and I’ll try to stay healthy for a good long while. (Though with a baby AND a toddler in the house, and winter coming, good health is a guaranteed impermanent condition….)

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.

[Crossposted to my other blog.]

Blogging’s still new to me. The only thing I really know about it so far is that while there’s an infinity of posts to make, there’s only finite time to make them. And that time is in high demand, mainly from family, but also from all the other great projects that aren’t blog-writing.

So I have to set some kind of deadline for myself. And that is: two weeks. I must, and will, post in both my blogs at least every two weeks.

I’m setting that deadline because I notice my reaction when going to other blogs: if I see the latest post is a month or more old, it’s a sign that the person’s really way too busy to blog, and that the blog’s an afterthought to them. It’s also a sign that who knows when the next post might be?

But if the last post was a week or so ago, that’s still timely. Two weeks is pushing it, but based on my experience so far, it’s the most I can commit myself to.

So, that’s my promise to you: I’ll update both my blogs every two weeks at most. Feel free to flame me if I don’t!

…Except for the next month, because we’re expecting my wife to go into labor sometime in the next three weeks, which means all bets are off 🙂

Sorry for the hiatus of the last few days. My parents are in town and there’s been lots of grandparental fun, and I’ve also been kind of blocked on posting here.

I’ve been in a quandary about this blog, which is that I have too many topics I want to blog about, and not all of them are actually software-related. Should a blog titled robjsoftware.org have posts about religion, or family, or whatever else I might want to say that isn’t really code-related?

After getting a lot of advice from various people (thanks Bill Harris, Francis Potter, Bob Lee, and my father Norman), I decided that no, it shouldn’t. Part of blogging is developing an audience, and I’m not (quite) egocentric enough to think that everyone who’s interested in my programming posts will share all my other interests. I’d rather have opt-in than opt-out, in other words.

So I’ve started another blog — blog.robjthoughts.org. That’s where all the non-software topics will go. I’ll occasionally crosspost, but it’ll be very much the exception. I’ve also cleaned up the labels on this blog to avoid the weirdness of a “non-software” label on a blog named “robjsoftware” 🙂

Thanks for your patience. Now that my definitional issues are sorted, content will resume flowing shortly. (And I promise I’m done making new blogs now!)

• Many small posts or few large ones?
• Why does Blogger do such a terrible job of scaling your profile picture?
• Should I tell everyone on God’s green earth about my blog right away, or should I post a lot and then start spamming about it once I actually have some content?
• How many people actually read through your back posts anyhow?
• Given that there’s only so much spare time, how much of it should I spend programming, how much should I spend blogging, how much should I spend reading blogs, and how much should I play one of the dozens of computer games that stare at me longingly from the shelf, wondering where my love went?
• Is this template just too ugly for people to stand for even one minute?
• Why is Blogger’s edit window so d**n small?
• Can I say d**n without the asterisks in this blog?
• Is editing posts after they’re published bad form, even if you think of lots of things you forgot to say?
• Am I interested in — and liable to blog about — too wide a variety of topics to attract any readership whatsoever?
• Who is this blog for anyway, myself or everyone else? Is blogging like art — something that exists only in relationship to an audience?