To blog or not to blog, that is the question

And a good one, too (usually when someone says it’s a “good question”, that’s because they don’t know the answer). I have a folder called BlogThis each of my e-mail clients (Outlook and Web), I use the same word to tag items in the virtual and physical world, I have a travel folder with the same name that I use to collect clippings and scribbled notes in, and a folder to collect messages and notes on my SmartPhone. Items are piling up and collecting dust (even if it is virtual) in each of these locations, waiting for me to one day free them from the bonds of the BlogThis tag.

I know I must get to it one day, because knowledge stored away in e-mails is, to steal a quote, technically persistent but instantly forgotten. Knowledge must be made search-able and instantly retrievable (not to mention fit for backup). And although social networking sites provide for posting of links and subsequent one-liner discussions on them, they are just too amorphous to be useful for this purpose.

At the same time, there simply isn’t enough time to write down everything. Would you rather do something new today or write about something you did yesterday? Both are useful in their own way, and a line must carefully be drawn. We spend a lot of our time doing mundane “maintenance” tasks, and some of it doing interesting “value addition” tasks. The idea is to maximize the latter, and one thing that I’m going to try to do is to not merely repeat what someone has already said (possibly in a different medium). Analysis is the key.

While looking for inspiration, I came across Google’s Steve Yegge’s excellent post called You Should Write Blogs (which will make you want to Alt-Tab and start writing straightaway) and Jeff Atwood’s post titled How To Achieve Ultimate Blog Success In One Easy Step (which will make you stop for a moment and think).

Enough blogging about blogging, let me get on with it now!

• Step 1: Make a minimal blogging schedule
• Step 2: Stick to it
• Step 3: When in doubt, read this post again

I Survived, So I Must be Crazy

Well, it’s been a long time, and I owe an apology to the folks I so enthusiastically ranted about this blog to (and that includes you, dear reader). It started out as a big, interesting idea, but like most of my big, interesting ideas, it became too interesting first, and then too big (for me). I started running out of time and energy pretty quickly as real-world events started taking over.

I switched jobs in July last year, and the strict Internet policy at my new place of work restricts access to blogs and forums. Between that and driving to and from work, I was left with little T&E and an ever-growing backlog of stuff I wanted to write about.

And then I suffered the effects of acute dehydration at a rally race last October, which ended with a week-long stay at the hospital in December. It’s only last week that I finally caught up with my huge backlog of work.

I’m not sure what to do, there’s a lot I want to write about, but I doubt if I’ll be able to do it in a consistent way. And I don’t like that thought. I have lots of notes, but no time to fill in the gaps to make them complete. I’m trying to think of a workable plan to commit time to my writing, but in the meantime I guess these random spikes in the stats would have to do. Thanks for reading!

I came across this while looking for inspiration : Growing Rich by Blogging is a High-Tech Fairy Tale

Also, someone sent me this, a scientifiic explanation of “enlightenment”:

The Last Mile

This journal took much longer than it should have to get finished, but we have only one life, and opportunities have this bad habit of not sticking around for too long. Besides, I figured it wouldn’t make much difference to anybody’s life if I finished this later rather than sooner!

It took some effort carrying around all that I wanted to write in my head, but evidently my head is mostly empty and there was enough space to hold it all. So here it is, the last of the lot…

Massive Update

I’ve added in quite a bit of stuff this evening… please go down and visit the Older Posts page. The article I wrote on EDM was linked back with very kind words within an hour of it being posted!

Montreal 2007 Update

I know I haven’t written anything in the Montreal 2007 section for more than 10 days now. I’ve been tied up with some deadlines at work and some that I had set for myself. My body has also been a little uncooperative lately and has been screaming for some rest. Hopefully, I’ll write a bunch of updates over the weekend. It’s all in my head, somewhere…

Blogroll Goes Live

The blogroll (currently at the bottom-left of this page) is finally alive.

BLTN… Again!

Another attempt at catching up with a life moving by so fast I’ve started looking for my seatbelt…

BLTN

Better Late Than Never… I’ve been extremely, extremely busy for the last 10 days or so and my health has also started revolting again… plus I got my hands on the Colin McRae Rally 2005 game… so I haven’t been able to write at all. I’m gonna try and cover the backlog tonight!

-Site Update- New Sections Added!

I put in a lot of hours over the weekend and added several new categories, notably BrainDrive, Collections and Movies. *Finally*, I’m writing something more useful than ranting about what I did during the day . If you’re still interested in what I did during the day, please click on the Montreal 2007 section on the left…