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Coasting

I don’t know whether it is the sudden hot weather, or the fact that I’ve been having problems sleeping, but today I’ve been feeling somewhat lethargic and very tired. I expect that it shows in my writing, much less the delay in getting the second release out of Wordform. I wish I could be inspired to finish one of the half-dozen writings I’ve started; but after checking with each one today, they all let me know that they weren’t in the mood to be done, so there you go.

Seeing no hope for productivity in writing or code, I cleaned house this afternoon and made potato salad and fried chicken; I also cleaned up my TiBook by burning close to 10G of photo CDs and removing most of the pictures from my hard drive.

Now all I want to do is sit in my chair and watch old, old movies and sleep. But I’ll be good and try to get out for at least a little walk, and do a little code and post a few more photos out at flickr. Maybe by that time one of my drafts will be ready to ‘come over’ to the light and stop resisting my efforts to finish.

So easy to start, but so hard to finish at times. I’m talking abour writing, of course. All it takes to start a post is to get (enraged, inspired) and write a sentence or two or five; then the intial enthusiasm begins to stall and all of a sudden you wonder if the writing is really any good, or the topic of interest, and why are you writing this, anyway? So you click the ‘Draft’ button and add it to the other pile of good intentions that sit there in your weblogging tool. They don’t even have the decency to be hidden or out of the way with WordPress and Wordform. No they’re all there, at the top of all admin edit pages–like dead fish hanging off a fishing line. Dead fish eyes looking at you every time you start a new post rather than finish one of them.

I think I’ll change Wordform to only allow two drafts at most, and if you try to add a third it brings up a message saying, “Why don’t you finish one of your drafts, first, before starting another work?” Or, “Are you sure you want to start another writing? You don’t have the best record of finishing, you know.” Or even, “Too many unfinished weblog posts is the leading cause of deviant behavior in men and women over 40.”

After all, we’re talking about Web 2.0 here; what better start than to build in a nag mode? Think about the possibilities of a nag mode. If you don’t post at least once every few days, it automatically sends you an email crying out, “Feed me!” Connect it with a telephony backend and it could be programmed to call you, too.

“Hi dear, this is your weblog. I’ve missed you! How come you never write to me any more?”

You know, if I didn’t warn people about this, it could be worth a giggle. In fact, you know what else would be funny? If I were to add….

No, no, no. Never mind.

Hey, how about that. I just finished a post. Miss Energy USA, that’s me.