In Search of Clear Focus

Today is not going well.  This week, I’ve been more active on-line, posting more here on my blog and over at Flickr.  The nice thing is people have actually been reading my blog and few were nice enough to leave a comment.  You’d never know, though, because my current theme doesn’t like to show the comments.  Even more nefarious, it simply reports that there aren’t any comments.  Other themes seem to work, so I need to spend a little time debugging the problem.  I actually had a few minutes to do that earlier, but my web host was down.  So, the problem will remain until I have a free moment to address it.

At work, I booted up my machine for the day, only to hear a beautiful clicking sound and see the message “Drive read error” on the screen.  Awesome.  Given that the two backup systems we had recently died unrecoverable deaths, I have now lost a decent amount of work.

This day is getting on my nerves.

Update: At least I fixed the comment problem now.  They should correctly show the number of comments on the main page and the actual comments on the individual post pages. Whew.

It’s been quite a while since I last posted. Work has been busy, holiday shopping, etc. These are the common reasons, but there are several other which are far more interesting to me:

1. I started reading for fun again. After numerous attempts to turn my time on the bus (which I especially love after an easy commute in yesterday’s inclement weather) into more productive time (read about my plans to write blog posts and learn Spanish), I gave up and decided to use the time to read. I sometime print newspaper articles or technical reports, but mostly I read for fun. I raided my wife’s collection of mystery novels and have started plowing through the works of Ngaio Marsh. I have found them to be very enjoyable so far. I’m only on the third of her 32 novels, but early results are promising. I’m also looking forward to The Lying Tongue, which I have on reserve at my local library. It was listed as one of the year’s best in the Post’s Book World this past weekend.

2. I’ve been updating Twitter and my Google Reader Shared Items more and more. I find that it’s quite a bit easier to publish <140 characters of text at a time or share out someone else’s insightful post. Less thought and editing go into it (though you still need some of both). Look to the sidebar to see widgets for both of these things.

3. I’ve been reading and thinking more about social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and collaboration tools for project management and software development. These thoughts are occupying more of my time than blogging as I try to wrap my head around how to mesh the two intelligently.

4. I’ve played a little with the site design. There’s an alternate stylesheet that is currently pretty ugly and incomplete. I’m trying to find a new color scheme that would make the text more legible. Light background/dark text kind of thing, hopefully without being too light in the background, which can also be annoying.

Well, I removed my dilapidated photo blog yesterday and moved my old entries over to Zooomr. You can find more information on the Photo-a-Week page. I decided to try out Zooomr because they have no files size limits (I can archive full res images there!) and a lot of tagging options, including people, geo-tagging, and general labels. And it’s all free. But it’s still in beta. Oh well. No thing’s perfect.

This move has inspired my to shoot more. Here’s my image for today, from the early morning painting session in our family room:

Yesterday, I mentioned how I plan to start using my morning commute to capture my thoughts for the day and turn that into a regular posting schedule.  Enter day 1, where I have to drive to work because of a need to be home early to watch my daughter.  So, no bus and no well thought out post; you’re stuck with these random thoughts.  On the plus side, it is a morning post, as I intended.  More after the jump.

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I’ve been taking the bus to work for most of the last month. It started as a way to beat the traffic when schools started back up. There are several other benefits, including not risking falling asleep at the wheel after a long day, the built-in excuse for leaving work at the same time every day, and the cost and mileage savings on the car. However, the biggest benefit is that I can have a few quiet moments to myself twice a day (note to fellow passengers: please don’t take my quiet demeanor for an excuse to step on my feet without apologizing or use me as a pillow when you get tired). I’ve been using this time to unwind, listen to my iPod, and work on puzzles in the newspaper (Kakuro, Sudoku, and standard crosswords).

In the spirit of trying to resurrect this blog, I have a new plan for my bus time. I dug out my old, old, old Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 and brought it back to life. While the battery won’t go as long as it used to, there’s still plenty of juice for my to type out my thoughts for the day on the way into the office. A quick spell-check, adding appropriate links, and proofread should yield a post a day, Monday - Thursday (I still drive Fridays, so I can sneak out before the afternoon buses even start).

So, look for more regular posts.  And get the feed to help my ego.

I finally got around to hosting the feed for this site through Feedburner.  I know there’s some mixed opinions out there, but I like stats and Feedburner gives them to me.  I would like to see if there’s any interest in my site as I go forward and if any changes I make actually bring in readers.  It’s unlikely, as the only folks I know who read this site live with me.  Anyway, this should be a seamless transition if you already subscribed to the old feed (yeah right!).

I’ve been in a bit of a rut and haven’t posted for a while.  To jump start my own interest there are three things I’m looking at doing:

• Redesign the site, building my own design from scratch, rather than relying on a canned theme that I then tweak
• Eliminate the photo blog.  I haven’t used it much and spam comments are dominating there, anyway
• Plug in to my Facebook profile, so my friend see when I post.  Maybe that would actually get me a few visitors

We’ll see if I actually get around to any of that.  The first clue will be a new look to this page…  Wish me luck.

Trying out a more polished look for the site.  It is adapted from Chaotic Soul 1.0.  I added a second sidebar, which widened the page a bit.  I’m not thinking too many people are coming to see this page in the first place, but those that are will need to have a monitor running at 1024×768 or higher.  It’s a restriction I’m willing to live with.  Happy browsing.  Leave comments if you love/hate the new look.

Yesterday, I added a plug-in to generate stats for this blog. I am now worried that it may become addictive. For example, I now know that I had 11 page views yesterday and already 7 today. They can’t all be my wife, so other people are getting here. Sweet.

I also know that a few people came in to view my photo-a-week stuff, even though I’ve been horribly lame about keeping up with that resolution. I also know some people have stumbled here based on my links to Washington Post articles, SCO news, and even through a search engine based on my mention of the Duke lacrosse case yesterday. This can only lead me to check out the stats more often, at a cost of any shred of coolness that my wife ever saw in me.

It also makes me feel like I should continue to post items about any of the above things. The problem is that I have to get sufficiently riled up to post something, and that seems to take a little while to build up for those topics. Anyway, thanks to my visitors. Comments are appreciated.

I added a plug-in to my Wordpress (blogging software) installation which should give me stats on any visitors to this site. I’m curious to see if anyone is reading this site (other than my wife). I’m not ready to go as far as using something like FeedBurner to watch subscriptions, but it’s a possibility if there’s any readership I’m unaware of. “Why?” you ask… Because I’m curious. And I like statistics. And I want to feel special if anyone reads this.