Archive for September, 2009
A Year In The Life
A year ago today, the first post went up on this site. In it, I explained how I wasn’t exactly new to this business, having had two different sites for some two-and-a-half years. (I remember my first post was on a livejournal account in February of 2006, though I really can’t recall what I wrote about. I seem to think that among my earliest posts in those days was one about the Aerospace. Then there was one about the PC Show or IT Show or IT Fair, whichever it was, and back then I was still in the Army.) It wasn’t a completely new experience to me, to be fair, this migration thing. It was like moving house, though admittedly, I’ve only moved once and I was too young to remember what that was like, so I’m just guessing.
The story behind this is quite simple. Just a bit before my birthday, the (Almighty) Web Walrus put this all together as a sort of birthday present. It was I suppose the most special present I received last year, in a sense. I mean, to see my name in my URL made me childishly happy. In the weeks before, the two of us (being quite busy people) tried desperately to find the time to stitch things together. It probably shouldn’t have been very difficult, but we were still deciding on some things. It was all up and running by a few days before, as I remember, though we did some minor configuration changes before I began to put stuff up.
I tried to approach this differently from the older sites in that I made it more like a journal and less like a blog. It would be a record of the boring things in my boring life, I thought, in some sense less tailored to what audience I imagined I had. I think in parts it got quite boring (okay, huge parts), but I stuck to my guns and kept it going. I’m sure I’ve learnt just that little bit more about doing this.
What happens in a year? Well, plenty. I put up 317 posts (not including this one) in a year, many quite useless, but I suppose there’s never enough internet trash to go around. Meanwhile, my tags climbed to 324 tags. It appears that my post count has still failed to catch up with the tag count in a year, but it’s almost there. Of note, I started a series that I actually quite enjoyed. I named it after the old Dylan song, My Back Pages.
On the other hand, things have of course proceeded in some fairly usual fashion along this one year, with a new draft of a new project and submissions kind of underway. (This reminds me that I should be checking on it soon.) School moves along as usual, although perhaps ambitions and aspirations are vaguer than they’ve ever been. It’s not been an easy year, though I can safely say that it’s been one that I enjoyed.
So, a year behind us and I think we did kind of okay. There are a few somewhat high points, but I know too that for the most part it’s probably been pretty colourless. Quite an accurate reflection of my life, really.
In the forthcoming year, I think I’ll try to do far less cursory posting and probably talk at more depth about the stuff that I do, the interests that I spend my time pursuing. And I’ll try to go more into my work. And if I get any more bright ideas, I suppose another featured series like My Back Pages (which is still ongoing, mind you) would be nice.
But in any case, that’s a year gone by so very quickly, and I suppose I should look forward to another one, and maybe more. In the meantime, happy birthday, little corner of the internet.
d
It’s a link rojak day.
Words Live
Radiohead play These Are My Twisted Words live for the first time.
Croquettes
How to make your own Domo croquettes. [via AnnaTheRed's bento factory]
Tetris
It appears that Tetris is good for your brain. [via PhysOrg] It makes parts of your brain grow anyway.
New Leicas
New Leicas are coming, with an announcement on 09.09.09.
Probably the M9? (09.09.09?)
Being exceptionally poverty-stricken, I imagine that it’ll be nothing I can afford. However, it’s fair to say that we all need to dream a little now and then.
Test
Off to grab dinner, then to do a little revision for my test. Brr. It appears that I will be some folks with some Physics on Thursday; I’d better go prepared in case I embarrass myself. Hopefully everything will sort itself out along the weekend because there’s really a lot of stuff to be worrying about this week.
d
