tangentalizingly delicious

Monday December 22, 2008

Recently I stumbled across a formerly very good friend’s web log. Formerly in the “drifted apart” sense, not the “falling out” sense. By reading the archives I was able to get a reasonably light but interesting overview on what he’s been up to for the past couple of years.

My goals for writing here primarily fall into two categories: external and internal. Externally, I like having a presence. Whenever I Google a coworker or former friend and I’m not able to find them (or increasingly, find a locked Facebook profile) I get kind of sad because I want to catch up one their lives but I frequently don’t feel comfortable in adding them as a Facebook friend or just can’t find them.

Internally, writing on a regular basis is just good practice and I love going through my own archives to see what was happening at a particular time. Perhaps it is vanity, I’m more inclined to attribute it to poor memory.

The last time I had a regular posting schedule (which, holy shit, ended in May of 2007) I was able to maintain it for quite a while based largely on having specific topics that I would talk about each day. I don’t recall what I abandoned first, the per-day topics or the regular posting (probably the topics), but in an effort to get things moving again I’m going to try identifying some things I want to continue talking about.

Deciding to attempt a regular posting schedule a couple of days before a fairly holiday-heavy period is probably foolish, but I’ve really never been otherwise. And one of the things that I’m learning most about myself is that the fear of not doing things exactly the way I want them to be done is often a convenient excuse to not do them at all.

I don’t yet know what topics are going to hook me enough to talk about, so for now I’m just going to spout out some things that I know I want to talk about and we’ll see how that goes.

• Myself. The best topic of all of course, and theoretically the reason for doing this is to keep track of my life and what is happening to me. Of course, everything here is intrinsically about me, be it actual details of goings-on or just my opinion, so a little more detail is probably of use.
• Weight. One of the things that helped me was talking about my progress in cycling. I still cycle, but these days instead of in my basement it’s at a gym where I also engage in other physical activity. I’ve lost some weight since I started paying attention to this stuff but so far haven’t really been recording any of the details of the things I’m doing.
• Education. I miss school. Not the structure or the people-judging-my-work or grades or any of that but I miss the regimented learning. Lately I’ve been poking around various media several Universities have been sharing with the world (eg, MIT’s Open Courseware) and that is pretty interesting stuff. Right now I’m tracking an Algorithms course at MIT, and Psychology 101 offered by Berkley.
• Technology. A term that is too wide to use in practice, but there’s a lot going on in the world again and I’m poking around with some of it and have (largely ignorant) opinions about the rest.
• Personal growth. This is a hand-wavey sort of one, which in its own way contains well, pretty much everything else but I have a few concepts about how I think I’m improving myself that aren’t directly related to one of the more specific topics. Things like tackling my procrastination (er, probably not exactly served by blogging but at least I’m generating output instead of consuming other peoples’ blather) my sense of entitlement (which kind of disgusts me at times) and other things I consider to be major deficiencies.
• Projects. Over a year ago I decided to take some time off from development projects done on my own time. That was a good rest, but the desire to work on an assortment of things has slowly been creeping in and I’ve started to work on a new over-arching project to contain smaller sub projects. For now I’m calling it Zombie Universe. Much like I talked about CHORE.tl (which is now very defunct) as the foundation for talking about business and project development, Zombie Universe is my new primary focus. I have several ideas for things to do to support and chip away at the big project and will talk about them.

That’s actually 5 things, and as my TweetStats will prove, I mostly deal with the internet on weekdays anyway. I didn’t think I’d have 5, but the topics I came up with were much wider in scope than I’d anticipated (when isn’t that the case?) so I guess I might as well go with them. I (of course) reserve the right to change my mind at will and miss any day I’m not abusing my lunch break.

edit Wow, guess who sucks? It’s me! Anyway, that’s 6 things as you’ve no doubt already noticed. I’ll probably bundle personal development stuff into talking about myself.