jmoiron.net

I think I've done this before.

There was a time in the distant past where I was relatively stupid, and made stupid, short, inane posts about things nobody cared about. The small echo chamber at college reinforced the value these posts, and all was good. Then I left the echo chamber.

Now I make long drawn out carefully constructed posts about mostly stupid inane things that none of my declining "readership" (hi mom) actually cares about. C'est la vie. I usually wait until I can work philosophy or some greater truth into a small realization I've made in order to post it. That's why in 2007 I've made about 2 blog postings per month. Virtually every night, ideas for something to write flood into me, and words don't come out because it seems trite or unimportant. Bruce Eckel has written about this at length; peruse his article if you are looking for my usual verbosity.

I think ideas are important. I've learned more about software engineering from two newsgroup posts (by Elizabeth Rather and Alex Martelli) than from all of the books I've read on the subject, not because the books were crap (although some were), but because their content was undeniable; pure ideas so right they needed no exposition.

My aims are lower. The other day, I was reading over entries into this blog with pranay and noticed that I use quite a lot of parentheses. I had a quick idea to write an output filter that would dynamically change parentheticals to some kind of little on-hover ajax thing. Quick posts about this, or my post about uromkan; a short post I was thinking about making on
pâté, and a brief description of nankotsu; surely they're all better than long periods of nothing dotted with the diatribes of the self righteous?