Max Romantschuk's weblog – December 2004 archive
Content-polish
OK, so I haven't coded anything as of yet. (See previous entry.) What i have done is performed some much needed maintenance and content updates to the site. The archives are now up to date, so the poor people to end up here through a search engine have slightly larger chances of finding what brought them to the page in the first place.
I also removed the "music ad" from the left sidebars, and updated the Artistic achievements -page to reflect what happened to BeSonic (see December 9th). I still have to update my CV, but otherwise things are starting to look OK.
The Curse of the Todo-list
Ever since elementary school, I've always tended to have more to do than I actually have time for. I'll give you an example of my current todo-list: (Off the top of my head, in no particular order.)
- Get my home studio/workstation sorted out
- Take care of a bunch of moving-related administrative stuff
- Solder some leads for my home studio
- Organize and backup our digital images
- Print a bunch of our digital images
- Organize and make available online a scan of an old, out-of-print book
- Start biking to work again (no time beacuse of the moving mess)
- Complete the new engine for this site
- Blog more
- Clean up my Inbox
I've gotten acustomed to never ever having enough time to do all the things I'd like to. I have also managed (so far) to make sure the genuinely important stuff gets done. What I've learned above all else is that being a jack of all trades is as much a blessing as a curse. I have the capacity to pursue pretty much anything I want, but I lack the focus and the time required to do any given thing really, really well.
Above all else, I've found that the only way I can get stuff done is by sacrificing other stuff. Currently priority one on my none essential todo-list is getting the new engine for this site up to a usable state. In order to make that possible I decided that it currently makes more sense to code than to blog, as blogging serves to increase the eventual migration cost of this site onto a new and improved engine.
The Plan
Here's the plan: I will try to code as much as possible, and report on that here from time to time. I will try my utmost not to post other stuff, as the time spent blogging is best used coding. We'll see how it goes, wish me luck!
Half Life Cookie-Quickie
I bet you haven't seen Half Life 2 Gingerbreads before? I sure hadn't. Nice. Via the Inquirer.
Twists and turns and Alpha-bloggers
The closet installation planned for last weekend didn't exactly go as planned. The retailer that did the actual planning of the closets themselves got the depth of both closets wrong, and subsequently our stuff won't fit properly. I don't wish to go into great detail as long as we're trying to sort this mess out, but suffice to say we'we got our hands full.
In the mean time do take a look at this excellent MSNBC article: The Alpha Bloggers. It's a very interesting read and describes some of the forces at work in the blogosphere rather well, if you ask me. Via Blogdex.
Transitions
New place, new job.
At home: We're still working on getting everthing in place. I've installed shelves for all my gear, and we're installing the new closets over the weekend. After that we should be able to stop dodging boxes when moving around the house.
At work: I'm trying to learn all the basics in order to actually be able to work for real. (I just changed jobs.) New systems, new things to do. Among other things I'm going to be working on some digital video stuff which should be cool.
In any case it is to be expected that it'll still take some time before things normalize.
Updates necessary
My CV is out of date, and what use to be my page on BeSonic is now a notice about a hardware crash... Argh. As soon as I find the time I intend to make the necessary updates, probably right after I finish that time machine I've been working on. I'll get it done. Seriously. Sooner or later...
...you get the idea.
Blogging, about writing, about blogging.
I don't get a great deal of traffic on my blog, but looking at my logs for the past two years does show a relatively steady increase in traffic: during the first months of 2003 my site had around 300 monthly visitors, now, two years later, it's around 900. This does vary greatly depending on how much I post, though.
Compared to other Finnish blogs my blog is rather insignificant, (it's currently rated at number 460 of 956 total listed blogs on Pinseri's top-list,) and on a global level my blog is just one among millions. Despite of this I very much enjoy blogging, I guess it's partly because I do it primarily for myself.
The popularity of my blog isn't exactly increased by the fact that I have no commenting system, no RSS or ATOM feed, and an archive which needs to be (or rather should be) updated by hand... I've mentioned I have a site engine in development and I believe I will get it up and running here eventually, but coding takes time, lots of it. I know there are lots of readily available systems out there, but none of them meet my needs as far as I know.
Writing about blogging
Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell have written a very interesting (and thorough) article about blogs, blogging, the blogosphere and the interaction of blogs and mainstream media titled Web of Influence
. It's a very worthwhile read if you have the time. Also notable is the fact that Merriam-Webster has announced the word blog as the number one word of 2004.