Category: housekeeping

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Scapepost

After putting out a big post that took an extended period of time to write, I’ve found myself in a bit of a writer’s bind.

I’d get on the train, hang the helmet on the bike, stow the bike in some immobilizing position, remove my gloves, keep them in the bag, pull out the laptop, and start hammering away on the keyboard.

I only get as far as 3 sentences before the critic in me kicks in – the subject matter is boring, no one’s going to like this, are you sure you know what you are writing about, and the clincher – it’s not as good as that last one.

Stopped short, never to go again.

So here is a scapegoat post to reset the bar, crucify the critic and afford a fighting chance for all the posts that have yet been conceived.

Boredom lays in the mind of the consumer. I’m never going to get it absolutely right, and I’ve yet to produce my best work.

So there. Let’s get on with writing.

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My new address

It’s been more than a month in the making, but I’ve finally realized a long-time childhood dream.

Take a peek at your address bar, if everything is working as expected, you’ll find that the URL now begins with isaac.su rather than ye’olde isaacsu.com.

Just a bit of background: the .su country code top-level domain was actually set aside for the former Soviet Union. Back in my younger nerd days, I was thrilled to find that such a TLD existed. I used to dream of acquiring the whole TLD, and have an email address that read isaac@su. Alas, back in the day, I’d moving from monikers like [email protected], to [email protected] to finally settling in at [email protected].

Lots of things have changed since then. The Internet as we know it has become far less stringent with the emergence of vanity domain names and url shorteners like bit.ly, is.gd, goo.gl and the ever ubiquitous t.co. So just a couple of months ago, I thought I’d take a punt at acquiring isaac.su.

There it was, up for grabs at some no-name domain registrar for a very reasonable yearly fee. I did need to provide some personal identification documents, but it all went smoothly and soon thereafter, I was a proud owner of said domain name.

I’m still in the process of working out the best way forward with regards to email. [email protected] has a nice clarity to it, but there may be some spam concerns for such an uncommon domain. On top of that, email addresses have become something of an immutable identity for websites that require sign-on which makes swapping identities cumbersome and generally frowned upon.

For now, I’m contactable at either [email protected] or [email protected]

So thanks for dropping by. Consider this your attendance to my virtual house-warming party. If you’ve been snooping around for a while now, the very least you can do is leave a comment as part of this auspicious event so I can get to know you.

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The In’s and Outs of posting daily

It’s the cyberspace equivalent writers block when one has to succumb to blogging about blogging, but I charge you to bear with me, there is insight to be found in this.

This has gone on for a month now – my little attempt to post something at least once a day. I didn’t really think either of these would happen, that I my daily blogging efforts would last this long, and that I would run out of things to write about.

I direct your attention back to a post that I made two weeks ago on Reflection where I detailed the idea of an input and an output of a person. I’ve come to conclude that in order to produce meaningful output, one needs input, and above that, one needs to engage the painstaking process of curation at that end.

Needless to say, I haven’t been quite so diligent with my input. One could say that I’ve been writing out of my reserves – latent thoughts that have gone stale, and perhaps a little unpalatable.

Consider this a lesson learned.

So here’s to a second experiment in writing – where mindful input hopefully leads to meaning writing.

Thank you for keeping with me.

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Where the writing happens

image

It’s become something of a daily routine. Ride to the station, look for the yellow lines on the platform (they tell you where the major carriage breaks are), and board one of the edge cars.

Park the bicycle, wake up laptop, fix up tethering. Refrain from hitting up the slippery slope that is Hacker News, pull up the my text editor, and start writing for my life. Funny how writing doesn’t require an active Internet connection, but I can’t settle in until I know that I’m connected.

Still a struggle some days, like today. It took a picture to get things going.

Thank you for keeping on with me.

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Rekindling the joys of self-publishing

It started with watching my friends share their thoughts on the one popular blogdrive platform, which progressed on to me running a home-spun php blog with 4 asp scripts and an mdb file, which evolved into me setting up a multiuser site based upon MovableType and our “social network” formed from a blogroll widget running down the side of the blog.

From then on it was a bit of a blur. Multiply came and went, Facebook came and swallowed up a vast majority of the bulky blogs and comment boards set up where all people wanted to do was share photos and do whatever “friends” do. Twitter came from the other end and gave our 140 characters a home and a shot at RT infamy. As for Posterous, Tumblr, friendfeed, etc. I’d watch from afar and the hype has seemingly died down before I’d mustered up the courage to entrust my thoughts and relationships to yet another “free” platform.

My thoughts on what a website would be for me has been seriously muddied, particularly over the past year. I’d watch as publishing platforms evolved. Companies find new ways to provide services, own your data, define your relationships, gather clout and monetize, monetize, monetize. On the other hand, the pressure to write slickly-edited valuable, interesting, technical pieces (with pictures!) to present myself as a knowledgeable professional has produced exactly 2 try-hard articles and another 7 or so drafts that I either terrified to Publish or to even finish. I even attempted a “what I learned today” type blog as an SEO experiment and give adsense a shot. The result? Just over 500 hits a month and around $18 ad dollars after two years.

So this is my resolution. I’m giving up on trying to make anything happen, and will instead amaze myself again and again with the thought that a click of a button would send these words into the vast interwebs of unfathomable possibilities. I will I will write firstly for myself, and secondly for anyone else who is interested. There may be only two of you out there, but that’s two more than I could ever hope for.