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.

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Short Wait Packing Booker Photography

Short On Features

Nope, no feature today. Just… can’t bring myself round to doing it, and school’s starting, so I have a feeling it’ll be stagnant for quite a while. Sorry about that.

Wait, Wait

I think I got something. That is, for the new project. I think I got that leash I was talking about. I’m still figuring my way around it, but it’s funny how sometimes you keep going and going and thinking that you’re evolving, then one day you wake up and you realise that the first ideas were best, you know?

Packing Bags

I have apparently been cheated of a week of holidays and school begins next week. I started to pack my stuff up, draw timetables and the like yesterday. It’s looking to be a bit of a rough semester, but I’m sure it’ll figure itself out somehow.

Booker Longlist

Here’s the Man Booker longlist. [via The Man Booker Prizes] I haven’t read any of them, though I did want to try the A.S. Byatt book, The Children’s Book. Never got to it. I also heard that Toibin’s Brooklyn is quite excellent.

Photography

New cameras (the D3000 and the D300s) and two new lenses including a newer version of my jack-of-all-trades 18-200mm from Nikon. [via bythom]

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