It’s amazing how much one can accomplish if one stops weblogging for a week.
I finally finished my writing for Unix Power Tools and am now in the editing and production stages. In addition, I’ve been working quietly in the background implementing some changes to the weblog. Note that those you see now aren’t the really interesting changes – I’ll be hitting some of you up to help me beta test these the first week of July.
I’ve started the usual pre-move activities: cancelling utilities, deciding what to keep, store, throw away. My philosophy is if I haven’t read it, worn it, or used it in two years, out it goes. That ought to take care of a lot of packing.
I don’t actually move until the 20th, and will be taking a roundabout two-week drive to get to St. Louis. If I can avoid getting et by grizzlies, I’ll post my adventures when I arrive. If I can’t avoid getting et by grizzlies, at least you’ll know I gave a bear somewhere a full meal deal.
‘Scuse me, do you want fries with that human?
I’ll be pulling my DSL connection this week, as soon as I receive some files related to a new contract I’m working on; most likely Tuesday if all goes as planned. That will end my posting – finally – as well as my unseemly, shady weblog lurking and quick hit and run commenting.
I wasn’t going to post until I got to St. Louis, but found that going cold turkey and not posting for an entire month was too much for me. Since I’m an addictive personality, going without my weblogging fix that long was causing physical discomfort and aberrant behavior. For instance, joining friends for a going away dinner yesterday, I found myself nattering away about weblogging, completely disregarding glazed eyes and pitying looks.
Luckily, a group of students having dinner before going to the prom showed up – girls dressed in incredibly slinky, sophisticated cut down to here, up to there dresses – providing a useful distraction while I pulled myself together long enough to remember to hide my obsession from weblogging unbelievers.
There have been some interesting threads I’ve wanted to post on, in particular the Unified RSS thread at Ben Hammersley’s weblog, as well ongoing discussions about weblogger as warblogger as Journalist as savior of the world and defender of free press.
However, I’m following a new weblogging policy of “think first, write later” rather than indulging in my usual direct synaptic connection of brain to weblog to you. Because of this I’m holding on pursuing either thread in any depth until I reach St. Louis and can give both threads the time and attention they deserve.
I do want to say, though, that I’m pleased with Edd Dumbill’s comments in the RSS thread. As a fan of RDF as well as author of an upcoming RDF book, I’m concerned when I see folks ‘simplifying’ a specification in order to make it work with one particular implementation. As we found with HTML, this isn’t always the best course to follow.
The technology I will be adding to this weblog the first week of July is also based on RDF – something that couldn’t occur without the rich meta-language capability RDF provides, and the availability of libraries to work with same.
Personally, I think this technology is also going to blow the socks off of RSS/aggregation – but that’s only my opinion, of course.
As for the topic of weblogger as warblogger as Journalist as savior of the world and defender of free press – it can wait.
