Something to Have Said

It’s long been a tradition on this blog that, when I’m having trouble coming up with a regular post, I take the opportunity to reflect on the blog thus far.  There are, in fact, 5 previous posts in this informal “series,” which you can find links to on the informals listing page (search for “Nothing to Say”).  Some of those posts were because I truly had nothing to say, some were because I had too many ideas but none of them were working for me, and some of them were because I ran out of time for a post and wanted to buy myself some extra time to finish up properly.

This is a bit like that last one: I did have a post all planned out, and I thought it would be fairly quick to write, but, once I started looking into it, it seemed like it was going to take more time than I could properly devote to it this weekend.  But there was also a bit more going on this time around, because I discovered a number of problems that needed attention.  None of them were particularly difficult to solve, but they added up.  And all these problems centered around blog maintenance.

See, writing a blog is about more than just the actual writing of the words, in the same way that making YouTube videos is about more than just standing in front of your webcam and talking.  There’s also editing, and the technical process of getting the work published on the web site, and, occasionally, going back and correcting mistakes.

In this particular case, I found of number of small typos in old posts while rereading them to get into the necessary flow state.  I also noticed a post or two that should have been added to a series listing page but had gotten overlooked.  And, even after I decided to turn this week’s post into a “nothing to say” post, I found still more issues.  See, in order to get a proper word count for blog posts, I’ve separated out my rough draft posts from the published posts, and I’ve written a little Perl script to count the actual words while ignoring the non-content bits.¹  So, the first thing I discovered is that there were a bunch of posts which I had neglected to move from my “drafts” folder to my “published” one.  Then I discovered that my wrapper script which ran the word counting script on “all” my blog posts had neglected to consider my ongoing novel, whose chapters and subchapters were indeed blog posts.²  Then, which I had fixed all that, I ran it and it said it couldn’t find the word counting script.  So I had to track that down and fix that too.³

And part of the reason for all this required maintenance is that I only do those sorts of cleanup tasks when I need to for one of these “nothing to say” posts ... and I just haven’t done one of those in a while.  The first such post was a year into the blog, and the second was a year later; after that, they fell into a fairly steady biannual pattern.  And, if I had kept to that schedule (loose as it was), this post should have landed in ... let’s see ... 2020.

Right in the middle of the pandemic.

So ... yeah.  That didn’t happen.

And now it’s been six years since the last time I counted up how much time and effort I’ve put into this blog, which means it’s been 14 years in total that I’ve been doing it.  Which is ... a lot.  In that time, the landscape of the Internet has changed significantly.  Text information has largely been replaced by videos; some opine that this is a sign that people don’t like to read any more, but I say it’s the nature of Internet commerce.  If you want to get paid for Internet content, good luck trying to make a buck writing posts of the length I typically do on this blog.  But it’s easy to monetize video content on YouTube, as long as it’s of a certain length.  Which is why the one sentence answer to a “how do I ...?” question is now a 2½ minute video which you watch at 2x speed because you’re just trying to GET TO THE FUCKING ANSWER: no I’m not going to like and subscribe and hit the bell icon, I just need to know how to reset my fucking garbage disposal!!!

So people don’t much write blogs any more.  Hell, I’ve even read that the entire concept of blogging is now considered passé.  Enh.  That’s okay: I’m old.  Although the truth of the matter is that this really has nothing to do with old vs young—it’s just that different brains work in different ways.  Some brains need to see and hear a real person explain a thing to them.  Some people prefer to read words.  My brain is a word brain; videos are ... I dunno, meh, I suppose?  I enjoy watching videos for entertainment, but not so much for information.  Unless they’re edutainment or somesuch.  But whatever.  The point is, I enjoy reading, and I enjoy writing, and I’m going to keep on writing this blog, and I don’t much care if it’s considered old-fashioned.  Or if no one reads it, even.  I even tell you not to read it right there in the blog title.  So obviously I just don’t give a shit.  I’m a rebel like that.

So, where are we in terms of stats?  Well, we’re about a week away from being exactly 14 years into it; this week is 729 weeks from the first post,⁴ which means that this should be the 730th post (because, again, you have to count both endpoints, ’cause there’s a post at either end).  Whereas my Blogger interface tells me I have 725 posts, not counting this one, so I’m actually 4 short.  Still, only 4 posts missed in 14 years—that’s not a bad track record.

I also used to consider how many were interstitial and partial and all that.  But that’s less relevant with the new blog schedule (which came into existence right before the last “nothing to say” post), since now every other post will be one of those two things.  Still, for completeness, I’ll run the numbers: of the 725 posts, 102 are interstitial (that’s 14%), and 100 are partial (basically the same percentage).  Which is not so bad.  But how about the big one? how many words are we talking?

Well, discounting all the quotes and footnotes and all that, the grand total comes out to 798,583 words.  So nearly 800K words in 14 years: 57K words per year, or 1100 words per week on average, even with the interstitials and partials.  That’s not too shoddy, if I do say so myself.  Nothing to sneeze at, I don’t think.

And whither hence?  I mean, I said years ago (in the aforementioned blog schedule post, in fact) that I would like to break this blog into several sub-blogs, each one aimed more specifically at its target audience.  And thus far I’ve totally failed to make good on that.  I still want to, of course, although blogging platforms to make that easier are getting harder to come by as the popularity of blogging declines.  But I have some thoughts.  Maybe ChatGPT (or other AI competitor) can help me figure out how to get going on that.  I have hopes.  And, occasionally, dreams.

But I see from my handy-dandy word counter that this “partial” post has once again grown into a full post.  Which I can’t really complain about, so I shan’t.  I’ll just say that I’m looking forward to ... what, another 14 years doing this?  I’m not sure that makes sense, at the pace technology is advancing these days.  But another 14 years of putting out something for you not to read, that’s for sure.

__________

1 I outline the exact specs of this script in the most recent nothing to say post, if you really care.

2 This undoubtedly means that my last official stats were off too.  But I’m not going to bother going back to correct that.

3 As it turns out, I had just renamed it since the last time I ran it from the wrapper script.  No biggie.  But it took much longer to figure out than it did to fix.

4 You may recall that I used the Perl date module which I wrote to work that out last time, and I lamented that it really ought to be simpler.  Well, now it is: perl -MDate::Easy -E 'say ((today - date("3/28/2010")) / 7)' prints “729.”

Something to Say (But No Time to Say It)

This is technically a “Nothing to Say” post, except that I don’t have nothing to say, so it’s also not really.  But, then, the “Nothing to Say” posts have always been among the most paradoxical posts in a huge sea of paradox, so no huge surprise there.  You could start with the last post in the series and work backwards from the internal links, or you could just go check out the series listing for ”the informals” and get links to them all.

The main point of the posts in this series is to do a bit of a retrospective on the Blog So Far—how many posts, how many words, that sort of thing.  Typically I do them whenever I can’t think of any other good topics, not when I just ran out of time.  However, this time I really did just run out of time: I’m attending another YAPC this year (yes, yes, technically they’ve changed the name to “The Perl Conference,” but it’ll always be “YAPC” to me), and, for the second time ever, I’m presenting a talk.  So I’m mildly stressed about it, because I radically overprepare for these sorts of things (which is amusing, as I’m terribly disorganized in nearly every other aspect of my life).  Preparation is the way I overcome stagefright: when people ask me if I’m nervous when presenting a talk, the answer always depends on how much I’ve prepared for it.  With little to no prep, I’m nervous as hell.  But my typical procedure is to write an outline, and then create slides or somesuch, and then write speaker’s notes, and then practice it over and over again (often in the shower), until I know it all cold.  And then I’m not nervous at all.  So I’m right in the midst of doing all that, and feeling like I’m running a bit behind (the talk is only about a month away, and I haven’t finished all my notes yet), and, while I do have a couple of topics worked out that I’d love to present, I just don’t have the time this weekend.  So I’m cheating a bit in calling this a “Nothing to Say” post. But it’s definitely a “Blog So Far” post, because I can do that fairly quickly and it’ll still be somewhat informative, without taking up a ton of my time.

How I usually start one of these posts is by checking the control panel of my blog.  Today it tells me that I have 423 total posts, from the first post (March 28th, 2010) through last week (May 13th, 2018), which is 425 weeks (if you count both endpoints, which you have to, because there’s a blog post at either end).  Assuming my date math is right, of course ... which, considering my upcoming talk is all about date math, it damned well better be.

(For those who are familiar with my Perl work and know of my Date::Easy module, this is the code to get that answer:

perl -MDate::Easy -le 'print( (date("5/13/2018")->epoch - date("3/28/2010")->epoch) / 86_400 / 7 + 1 )'

Which is really not as easy as it should be.  I’d like to add subtracting two dates—properly!—to the module before YAPC next month, but we’ll see how my time holds out.)

So, how many of those posts should count as actual posts is always up for debate.  The first thing we should subtract this time around are the “series listing” posts, which are categorized as “crosslinks.”  They super don’t count as weekly posts, because I did them all at once, not one per week.  So that leaves 415 posts in 425 weeks, which means I’ve missed 10 weeks in a little over 8 years.  Not awesome perhaps, but not particularly tragic either.

Then we have 55 posts on my Other Blog, but they totally count.  There are 38 interstitial posts, and they really shouldn’t count.  And there are 77 partial posts, which I last time tried to count as ⅓ of a post each (on the grounds that my normal posts average about 1,500 words and my partial posts are closer to 500).  Which is mildly odd math, but, if we roll with it, that puts us at just under 334 posts across 425 weeks, which is roughly a whole post every 9 days, so that’s still respectable, I’d say.

When it comes to words, I don’t do rough word counts any more.  I wrote a script a long time ago that I keep revising: it sucks in the whole blog post file, splits the text on three things—whitespace, pipe symbols (which I use to format links), and double-hyphens, which my posting script turns into proper em-dashes—filters out anything that doesn’t have any letters in it, throws out any formatting symbols I use that do have letters in them (e.g. “h1.” or ”{img}” or ”~~CENTER~~”), then counts the results.  And then I start removing things and recounting, so that I effectively subtract out certain kinds of words that I feel shouldn’t count towards my final word count.  The things I throw out are:

• “type” lines: These are lines at the very top of my post that tell my formatting script which blog they’re destined for, possibly the name of the post, etc.
• block quotes: If I’m quoting a long passage of text from someone else, that should hardly count towards my word count, right?
• links: Meaning the actual URLs themselves, not the words you click on (those still count).
• footnotes: This one is a bit more debatable, but I figure you can choose to skip over the footnotes if you like, and, assuming you do, then I shouldn’t count them in my total words.
• code blocks: Sure, I wrote them (usually), but code is not words in the traditional sense, and it often artifically inflates word count (e.g. ”$d” shouldn’t really count as a “word”).
• fine print: By which I mean those disclaimer-y things at the tops of my posts, like “this is part of a series” and “don’t count on the next part of the series being next week” and so on.  A lot of that is reused boilerplate, and, while I did have to write it once, I don’t feel like it’s fair to count it for every post.

So, according to this script, if I suck in every post in the “published” directory and every post in the “novel” directory, I come up with this:

total words          551189
- in links           3645
- in blockquotes     64602
- in footnotes       19457
- in code blocks     6128
- in fine print      5568
net words            451789

That’s around half a million words, even discounting as much as I do.  (I suspect there’s a few more posts somewhere that I’m not including, but I seriously doubt it could be more than 50 thousand words’ worth.)  About 20 thousand words just in footnotes (I thought it’d be higher, actually), and over 60 thousand that I’m quoting of other people’s words (of course, some of that is quoting myself, and some of it may be just for formatting purposes, like poetry or whatnot).  Still, a perfectly reasonable total, I think.  I have no complaints.

This post itself is a bit light, but not so much that I’ll mark it as “partial,” I don’t think.  I’m already over 1,100 words (final count, after editing, and adding this not-quite-a-footnote: 1,330).  And that’s good, because, despite the lack of time this weekend, I really don’t want to fail to deliver on my new blog schedule.  I already feel a bit lame for dropping back to half as many posts as I was making.  If I can’t even maintain that level, I really will feel a failure.  So this week I’m cheating a bit by doing a topic I can pound out very quickly, but I think it still qualifies as a full post ... even if mildly short on really interesting topics.  But celebrating half a million words spewed forth into the void of the Internet is not nothing, even though it may not particualrly impress you, dear reader.  But, as always, I can but point out that you really shouldn’t be reading this blog anyway.

See you next week.

A modest proposal

After long and thoughtful consideration, I’ve decided to make this blog biweekly instead of weekly.

Now, I suppose I could just stop there—after all, if you’re taking my advice and are not, in fact, reading this blog, then I’m only talking to myself, and I already know why I’ve made this decision.  But there may be a few people out there who are interested, or perhaps I’m talking to myself, but in the future, when I may will have been forgotten why I came to this verdict.  Maybe future-me is thinking, hmmm, I should go back to doing blogs weekly ... it wasn’t that hard!  In which case future-me needs a dope-slap.  Or at least a good talking-to.  Which this post will have to serve as.

See, one starts a blog with the best of intentions.  It’s a way to keep one’s writing skills sharp, for one.  And you can put down all those pesky thoughts that are running through your head liked trapped animals: get them out into the world where they might do some good, as opposed to making you crazy with unbirthed ideas.  And you pick a time interval—once a week, say—and you pick a rough post length—1,500 words, say—and you keep to that for a long time.  But eventually you miss one, and then it’s easier to miss the next one, and sooner or later you find yourself missing your goal regularly.  Because life happens.  Life pays no attention to your puny goals ... in fact, life often laughs maniacally in the face of those goals.  Life has a tendency to force you to prioritize, and, while I suppose there are some people who consistently prioritize their blogs over everything else (though I suspect those are only the people that don’t have any other job), most of us don’t.  We can’t all be professional writers, and I’m okay with that.  As I’ve said before, I originally became a programmer just to support myself while I worked on becoming a writer, but I’ve found so much joy in it that I have no regrets.

So, for me, a hard look at the priorities here means that the numbers don’t make sense to even attempt to prioritize this blog over other life stuff.  And such attempts would likely be fruitless anyway.  I mean, I’ve been trying to prioritize the blog over other things for quite a while now, and look how well that’s been going.  Prior to this one, I have exactly 400 posts on this blog, 37 of which are interstitials (that is, posts which essentially say “I’m not doing a post this week”) and 66 of which are partials (that is, shorter entries that I don’t consider full, “proper” posts).  That’s 26%.  But, if we look back at the most recent 100 posts (which takes us back almost exactly two years), there are 14 interstitials and 18 partials, which is 32%.  So the ratio of non-full posts is creeping up on me.  And, to add insult to injury, I still feel like I’m always scrambling to come up with a post.

I mean, I don’t mind if it feels like a chore.  It is a chore: I’ve set myself a goal to write every week, and it’s not always easy to do that, but pushing myself to write even when I don’t want to is part of the whole thing.  So if I was feeling pressure (only from myself, of course, but pressure nonetheless) to come up with 1,500 words every week, and it was a bit stressful, but ultimately rewarding because I was achieving that ... well, that might not be so bad.  But to be constantly feeling like I’m failing, and then to be actually failing on top of that ...

Plus there’s another issue as well, a bit more subtle.  When I first started out, I just put everything here in this blog.  Oh, sure, I labeled them all—gaming, or family, or music, or whatever—but there’s no getting around that this blog is pretty much a tumbled profusion of mismatched topics.  Anyone who might be interested in my music posts probably doesn’t care that much about my family, and may have zero interest in my ideas on business or technology.  Contrariwise, if someone thinks my posts on business are thought-provoking, how likely is it they will also dig my rambling explorations on gaming?  When I wrote my first post about Perl, I put it here.  By the time I got around to my third post about Perl, I started thinking it might make better sense to put it somewhere where Perl people might actually find it, and read it.  And thus my Other Blog was born.  Because it makes sense that different topics get different “faces,” and maybe even different locations, where they can perhaps better find their target audience.

So I’ve been pondering starting even more blogs, such as a separate blog for my music series, or a separate blog for gaming—hell, maybe even one targeted more specifically at D&D—and moving the existing posts over, and then new posts get to live in their respective homes.  On the one hand, this is not more work than I’m already currently doing, because I would never post to two differnt blogs on the same week.  I would still write one post every week, but it would just go to whatever blog happened to be the most appropriate.  It would mean that every blog would have a very infrequent posting schedule, but I’m okay with that.  But, on the other hand, it does require more work, at least at first.  I have to find someplace to put those blogs, and I have to set them up, and add some basic info about who I am, and what makes me qualified to write about the whichever-topic-this-is.  For the gaming blog, I would want to add some info about my experience with the various editions of D&D, perhaps; for the music blog, I might talk about my record-collector father and my introduction to “alternative” music, or my large collection of CDs, or whatever.  There’s a certain amount of look-and-feel that has to go into a blog as well: I personally have never spent much time worrying about that sort of thing (as I’m sure you can tell from the visuals here), but you can’t ignore it entirely.  Once all that stuff gets settled, then, sure: you don’t have to worry about it any more after that.  But you have to get to that point.  And that takes time.  And I’m already at the point now where I feel like I can’t devote any extra time to this whole writing/blogging thing at all.

So I’m going to give myself some breathing room.  I’ve made a decision that I will only make a full post (to whichever blog) once every two weeks.  My initial goal is that I will make either an interstitial post or a partial post—perhaps only a paragraph or two—in the off weeks, but I’m not making that a promise or anything.  Let’s play it by ear and see how it goes.  This will allow me to spend less time on blogging, but actually accomplish more (theoretically).  And with less pressure on myself.  And also I want to set expectations for anyone who might still be reading this, despite my best efforts to convince you that there are better things you could be doing with your time.  Because there really are.  But I thank you nonetheless for reading—I know you have many options for how to waste your time in today’s busy world, and I’m flattered that you’ve chosen me to help you fritter that time away.  So I thought it only fair to let you know that you should only come around biweekly from now on.

Hopefully this new schedule will breathe some new life into my writing, whether that’s here or in new vistas on other blogs.  As always, if I do post to other blogs, there will always be a pointer to it here.  This is my “master blog,” so to speak, and this is the place where I will always go to compile statistics and count words and get (and sometimes post) my overviews.  So, if you were inclined to want to read all my writings (and I know that’s a hell of a big “if”), you can still do so just by keeping up with this one blog.  And hopefully the extra time will allow me to explore new blogs, explore more topics, and explore the existing topics in more depth.  This could be an exciting change.

Or it could totally flop and I could end up missing even biweekly posts.  There’s really no way to know without performing the experiment.  So, here we go.

Musings on the past, and on the future

I’m once again locked into that mode where I’m wrestling with a thorny problem for $work, and behind on some personal/family chores as well.  Add to that the fact that our A/C doesn’t work and the “feels like” temperature outside was 111° today, so that I spent a good deal of my weekend time in the pool, and that our middle child has a friend over for the night so that I’ve had to do a minimal amount of “entertaining,” and I just don’t have the time (or energy) to devote to a proper post this week.

Now, I know that this scenario is becoming all too common lately.  And that’s a shame, because I have no shortage of topics that I want to write about.  And, even if all of you (or I suppose all of the potential “yous”) have actually taken my advice and nobody is reading this blog, that doesn’t particularly deter me.  I like having a place that I can reference by throwing out a link to in an online discussion, or a place where I can point my family to if they want to understand me a bit better.  To expand on that last point, The Mother is a scrapbooker: she’s constantly taking pictures and making pages out of them, and our children don’t necessarily look at them ... right now.  But I’m sure one day they’ll be pleased to have all those pictures to remind them of the good times they had as kids.  Similarly, most of my family (even The Mother herself) don’t pay a lot of attention to my ramblings from week to week.  But I have faith that, someday, they may be interested to go back and learn some things about their old man that they might not remember ... or maybe even never knew.

So I do intend to keep this blog limping along, even considering the recent reductions in posting frequency.  Whether you, dear reader, will keep tuning in to read the next installment—or just to see if there is a next installment—well, that’s entirely up to you.

Something to Say

(although not necessarily anything good)

In my informal “nothing to say” series, I have typically taken advantage of having nothing that I really wanted to write about to do a retrospective on how many words this blog has spewed forth.  But last time I had nothing to say, I said something instead.  Which means it wasn’t really a post with nothing to say.  This is a post in the “nothing to say” series, but it actually has something to say, so it’s the opposite of a “nothing to say” post just like the other one was, but in the other direction.  It’s a good thing I believe in balance and paradox, elsewise all this saying something while having nothing to say would really scramble my brains.

So, where do we stand?  Well, as I mused in that previously mentioned non-post, I’ve gone ahead and recategorized many of my “interstitial” posts as “partial” plus some other label.  For instance, if I wrote about not having time for a full post because of various goings-on in my life like birthdays or house-hunting or what-have-you, I labeled that as “partial” plus “family.”  Or if I went into some detail about a problem I was dealing with at work, that would be “partial” plus “technology” (or perhaps “partial” plus “business” if it was less of a technical problem and more of a corporate or workplace issue).  Whereas, if I just said, “I’ve got no time to post this week; sorry” then that I left as a true “interstitial.”

With this new system, about 62% of the former “interstitial” posts are now “partial” instead, making “Perl” now the top category, followed by “partial” (which almost doesn’t count any more, since there aren’t any posts which are only labeled “partial”), followed by “family,” then “fiction” (meaning my ongoing novel), and then “music.”  Not too shoddy.

There are now 333 posts altogether.  If we look at it from an estimation viewpoint, we should not count the “interstitial"s at all, and we should count the “partial"s as perhaps ⅓ of the word count of a regular post.  So that would give us just over 400,000 words.  Doing an actual count of my source files yields closer to 340,000, but that doesn’t include my novel.  (It does, however, eliminate some of the problems that I reported with previous word counts of files: I’ve now separated out what’s actually published from my working drafts for future posts, and I’m now using my more sophisticated script which discounts words in block quotes, URLs, footnotes, and so forth.  So this is far more accurate than ever before.)  Adding in the novel bumps us up another 60,000 words, roughly, which puts us right at that 400,000 figure again.  (In fact, even if I stop rounding, there’s less than 2,000 words difference in the two methods.)  So that seems a rational number to go with: 251 full posts and 51 partial ones for a total of about 400k in terms of words.

Which is overall not a terrible output for roughly six and a half years’ work.  It’s about 1200 words a week, on average.  Sure, Stephen King is pumping out more, but he doesn’t have a full-time job on the side.  (Well, I guess pumping out words is his full-time job, to look at it another way.  But you get where I’m coming from.)  It’s respectable, is what I’m saying.  Nothing to be ashamed of.

Now, whether that sort of pace can continue for another 6½ years or not, I can’t say.  Part of me feels like it’s not sustainable.  But part of me wants to try it and see.  So—for now at least—that’s the part of me I’m listening to.

Hope you’ll stick around to find out as well.

To post or not to post

It’s been nearly 2 months since I skipped a blog post, and we can’t have that, so I’ll be skipping this week.

Well, okay: to tell the truth, it’s only been a month or so since I actually skipped a post.  But it’s been 7 weeks since I posted saying I wasn’t going to post.  The other skipped post was my annual traveling-for-YAPC-and-just-spaced post.  That hardly counts at all.

So I’m posting here to say that I’m not posting, which is already both oxymoronic, paradoxical, and meta, all at once.  (Yes, that’s right: it’s all two of those three things.  I said it was paradoxical.)  And, while I’m posting about not posting, I’m telling you about my other type of not posting, which was not posting about not posting.  Now, often when I post about not posting about not posting, I post about posting, which makes my non-post almost a post, although it’s typically not as long as an actual post, so I often don’t count it as a post, but rather a post about not posting (which it also is).  But this is not that.  Rather, this is a post that is reflective of the collective of my posts about not posting.  See, my posts have labels.  All my posts.  Even the posts about not posting.  Those posts get a special label, “interstitial,” which indicates their non-postiness.  You know, in case you don’t want to actually read the posts about not posting, on account of their lack of postiness, you can easily skip them, because they all have the same label.  “Interstitial,” of course, means “between things”—in this case, it means the posts about not posting which are between the actual posts about things.

But there’s also a little “word cloud” over to the left (near the bottom), and, you know what I’ve noticed recently?  The “interstitial” tag is the biggest one.  That’s not really how I’d hoped this blog would turn out.  Now, on the one hand, it’s not particularly a fair comparison, because the posts about things all have different labels (22 of them, not counting the the posts which are not posts at all and the posts which are essentially just links to other posts), while the posts about not posting all have a single label.  So, it makes a certain amount of sense that that label has more entries.  That doesn’t make it any more palatable though.

There are 82 posts with the “interstitial” tag.  The next closest would be the “Perl” posts (i.e. the posts which are links to other posts) at 52, then the “fiction” posts that represent my ongoing novel, at 37.  The largest “proper” blog post label is “music,” which has 32 posts, primarily because I find those really easy to crank out, so it’s a standard fallback when I’m pressed for time.  But another interesting point about these labels is that any post can have multiple tags.  So many of the posts which are tagged posts about not posting are actually posts about things, but just not full posts about things.  So they get stuck labeled as “interstitial” when they’re really just ... short.

Like this post, for instance.  I’ll label it “interstitial,” and perhaps also “metablogging,” since it’s a post about posting.  Which is even more oxymoronic and paradoxical (and meta) because now it’s going to be tagged as a post about posting and a post about not posting.  Mildly bizarre.

Now, 37 of the 82 posts tagged “interstitial” are also tagged something else, meaning that only 45 of the posts about not posting are actually about not posting ... or at least only 45 are only about not posting.  I’m starting to think that maybe I need a different label for posts about things that are not full posts about things.  Perhaps “partial” would be appropriate.

Anyhow, this post about not posting has turned out not to be about not posting so much as about posting, and posting labels, and posts in general.  Not sure that makes up for it not being a “proper” post, but perhaps it’s still better than being about not posting at all.  I’ll let you be the judge.

Giving thanks

No proper post for you this week, I’m afraid.  I’m coming down off a lovely Thanksgiving weekend, still stuffed with pie and potatoes and ... well, stuffing.  We had a lovely, quiet meal here at home.  A part of our family’s tradition is for each (human) person to come up with three things they’re thankful for.  This was the first year that our youngest was really old enough to participate in that tradition.  It was quite entertaining.

I, of course, am thankful for many things ... more than three, even.  For instance, it occurred to me that I am thankful for you, dear reader.  I’m thankful that you keep on reading, week after week, despite my rather firm admonishments to just cut it out.  You’re quite stubborn in that way, you know.  And I wanted to let you know how much I admire that in you.

Happy Thanksgiving.

birthday time again

Another birthday weekend for our family: mine this time, as it happens.  I didn’t really want to do much, so it’s been mostly sitting around just avoiding any responsibility for a few days.  And, as it also happens, part of the responsibility I’m avoiding is writing this blog post.  So, you know, I didn’t write one.  What you’re reading is just a figment of your imagination.  What a vivid imagination you have!  Keep it up.  Perhaps you can imagine yourself a post you might actually want to read.

Blog update

Instead of doing a full-length post this week, I’ve been working on my series lists, which I’ve now posted over there in the sidebar.  I started last week with my series listing for my music mixes.  This week, I polished off the rest: my series listing for The Barefoot Philosophy, my series listing for Saladosity, and the listing for my infrequent “Guides” series.

Then, just for completeness, I put together a page for my “informal” (meaning, mostly accidental) series, and another which outlines those series which appeared on my Other Blog.

Mostly these are just listings of links, but there’s a bit of writing here and there.  Most especially in the music mix series listing, where I added a glossary of terms I use in those posts.  I plan to keep these updated with any new posts in those series which are still ongoing.

Enjoy.

A Lament for a Lost Post

Well, I missed another blog post last week: only the seventh one since I started this blog almost five years ago.  So, more than one a year, but not so many as two per.  (The exact statistic is 7 out of 250 weeks, or 2.8%, for those with a more pedantic turn of mind.)  I suppose that’s not so bad.

The reason, such as it was, was simply the holidays ... last Sunday fell 3 days after Christmas, which of course is 3 days before New Year’s Eve.  There was still a lot going on, and I’m guessing I was playing Little Big Planet, in its latest incarnation with my boys.  That’s quite a common post-holiday pasttime currently.

I thought it might be interesting to go back and review those 7 occasions when I missed posts.  Here they are:

• On 6/27/10, I was in the middle of a two-week vacation and apparently just spaced.
• On 11/28/10, I was in the midst of moving into our new (current) house, and everything was in flux.  I can probably be forgiven for that one.
• On 6/26/11, 6/2/13, and 6/22/14, I was traveling to or from a YAPC.  For some reason, I have a tendency to miss a week around my yearly Perl conferences.  Less excusable, but not entirely feeble, hopefully.
• On 7/24/11, I missed a post for no reason that I can determine. 
• And 12/28/14 was last week.

Of course, all this virtual hand-wringing over missed blog posts presumes that anyone cares, and, as I am constantly reminding you, you, dear reader, should not.  Because you should not even be reading this blog.  Nonetheless, I’ve tried to maintain a consistent schedule, and, when I miss a week, I upset that schedule.  And it tends to bother me.  Perhaps it might be appropriate at this juncture to ponder exactly what my goals are for the blog itself.

The blog was originally a suggestion from The Mother.  She pointed out that I was an aspiring writer who never wrote anything, as well as a technogeek, for whom theoretically at least the creation of a blog would be much easier than it would for most of the rest of the populace.  I had no excuse, she pointed out, for not creating a blog and writing a post a week.  I resisted this at first, of course, given my staunch opinion on blogs in general.  But eventually I gave in and agreed to make the commitment.

And the commitment, once given, should be honored.

Of course, there’s still no particular penalty for missing a week.  But, the thing is, now that I’ve gotten into a rhythm, it’s an excellent way to keep me on track producing work.  Without the commitment, I’d probably just spit out a few thousand words every 9 months or so, instead of a moderately steady 1500 words a week.  Oh, sure, even when I don’t skip a week, I often produce an anemic, underfed post (such as this one), which I mark as “interstitial,” and which doesn’t come close to the 1500-word mark.  But, even so, I’m still writing something ... and I find that’s often sufficient.

So I’ll apologize for another missed week, even as I tell you that you really shouldn’t care.  And I’ll tell you once again to tune in next week for another blog post that you really shouldn’t read.  Because it’s become something of a habit.  A good habit, I think.

Nothing to Say Again ... Yet Again

I can’t think of anything to write about this week.

Well, actually, I thought of several things to write about, but all of them seemed like they’d be more work than fun, and, if I spend several hours writing something that I don’t enjoy writing, you’re not going to enjoy reading it either.  Trust me on that one.  Maybe next week I can get my thoughts more organized and actually complete one of the several ideas I have in my “topics” file.

So, this is the third time I’ve written a post like this, and I seem to have started a tradition of using these posts as a retrospective on the blog itself.  And far be it from me to dismiss tradition, even one that I invented myself, mostly accidentally.

So, my handy dandy blogger.com control panel tells me I have 219 posts.  Checking how many of them are “interstitial” (that is, posts which mostly say that I’m not going to do a full post), I see 79, although some of those are more substantial than others (such as the very first “nothing to say” post), and of course 34 of them are posts over on my Other Blog.  Counting the Perl posts but discounting the remainder of the interstitials, that would leave us with 174 posts, which average around 1,500 words each.  At least, 1,500 is what I generally shoot for.  Why, you ask?  Well, I suppose it’s because I wrote my very first post, then went back and counted how many words it was, and it was 1,536, and I said to myself: that sounds about right.  Of course sometimes I fall short, and the post is only around 1,200, or even, very rarely, between 800 and 900.  But, then again, sometimes I manage to crank out 2,000-word monsters, so it probably all balances out.  If we figure 1,500 words as an average, that would be 261,000 words, which is pretty overwhelming.  If I just do a raw count of words in all the files in my blog folder (which not only includes several half-finished posts that haven’t been published yet, but also counts words in quotes and links and other things which I typically exclude in my personal word count, and would also count the interstitials), I get 250,001, plus the chapters of my novel (in a whole separate folder) adds another 56,687 words, for a total of 306,688.  (Also, it might be that there are some posts which aren’t in the directory: the very first post wasn’t in there, as it happens, although I downloaded it so I could count it just now.  But there might be others missing as well.)

Either way, somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter million words doesn’t seem an unreasonable guess.  That’s a lot of words for you not to read.  I do continue to remind you not to read this blog, as if the title weren’t sufficient.  Occasionally I post links to this blog, especially on my other blog, when I don’t want to repeat myself and I’ve already expounded on a topic plenty.  Inevitably, this leads to someone’s smartass comment: “I went to the link you provided, but it said not to read it, so I didn’t.”  Oh ho ho.  Perhaps it actually does bear saying explicitly: I don’t particularly need you to remind me of the name of this blog.  I’m the one who named it.  If you’re confused about the name, please go back and read the first post, or even go back and peruse the first ”nothing to say” post, which contains some interesting meanderings about the nature of paradox and its application to a blog which I continue to write weekly at the same time I exhort the public not to read it.  Go on and read (or reread) those; I’ll wait.

Done?  Good.  Let’s move on then.

The name is really more of a warning that you have to make a conscious choice to read a post here, despite warnings to the contrary.  Perhaps a more realistic name would have been ”Warning: Management assumes no responsibility for any time wasted while perusing the content herein.  By continuing to read, you assume all responsibility for any crappy opinions you may encounter, any statements that may cause you to be enraged and/or disgusted, and/or any words that might be considered ‘bad’ by more sensitive readers.  The reader proceeds at his or her own risk.”  But, you know ... “Do Not Read This Blog!” just seemed shorter.

So I keep on writing and telling you not to read, and that’s unlikely to change.  After a quarter million words, why stop now?  I seem to have a winning formula going.  Plus, I’m starting to enjoy it.  At least a little.  Theoretically, you do too ... else why keep reading?  I doubt anyone is assigning you my blog posts as homework, so you’ve exercised your freedom of choice to read this far.  Said freedom of choice may realistically be better exercised elsewhere, if you ask me, but you’re a big boy or girl and don’t need my permission nor my advice.  In fact, you’re sort of ignoring my opinion to read all about my opinions on various topics.  And, at the end of the day, that’s the real reason this blog is named “do not read.”  Because, that way, if you ignore me and read it anyway, you’re forced to confront the fact that you can’t possibly listen to anything I have to say without simulataneously ignoring something I have to say.  It’s a great reminder that you should take crap you read on other people’s blogs with large quantities of sodium chloride.  And it makes you confront the paradoxes inherent in life by making you live one.  And you know how I feel about paradox.

So keep reading, if you must.  I’ll keep writing.  Except when I don’t.  It’s a crazy ol’ world we live in, but it’s the only one we’ve got.  May as well make the most of it.

Twice as long to get half as far

As promised (or perhaps threatened) last week, I’m taking a break this week to concentrate on getting a few other things done.  Of course, given that last week’s post was twice as long, you could just go back and read that again and it should work out the same.  Assuming my math is correct.

At any rate, I’m sure you have some cat video to watch or somesuch, so I shan’t keep you further.

What Morris Wrought

So, this week I’m going to talk about the titles I came up with for my 13-part blog series on my relationship to Perl that I did on my Other Blog.  When you do a long series like that, you have a number of challenges: presenting the topic concisely, laying the groundwork for the following week, the simple grind of cranking out the next 1500 words.  But there’s also the issue of coming up with titles.  Naming things is hard.  In my technogeek life, it’s probably the thing that we fight most about.  In fact, there’s a famous quote we’re wont to trot out at times:

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. —Phil Karlton

Sometimes you see people online wondering why this saying is famous: naming things is easy, they say.  These are invariably young programmers who have never had to deal with users who can’t understand why a feature doesn’t (or can’t) work because they’re confused about what it is because it’s so poorly named.  Or the pain of having to use a word in one sense when talking to sales (because they use the industry standard definition) and a different sense when talking to fellow techies (because they use the literal meaning) and an altogether different sense when talking to management, because they use a completely arbitrary defintion that they got from the guy before the guy before the guy before you, who was invariably a young programmer who didn’t understand that naming things is hard.

So, yeah: coming up with good names for things is hard.  Coming up with consistent, good names for things is harder.  Coming up with consistent, good names for things 13 weeks in a row is very difficult indeed, and so hopefully I can be forgiven for doing only a mediocre job of it.

The first two or three came to me fairly naturally, and they established the pattern: quotes, either direct or paraphrased, that referenced different cultural things.  These might be songs, poems, television shows, movies, quotes by famous people, or whatever.  Several of them were as easy as the first few; some of them were so hard that I almost spent longer searching for a good title than I did writing the post in the first damn place.  Some of them are so obsure I don’t expect anyone else to know what the hell I’m on about; some were obscure enough that I didn’t know them myself until I Googled them for the purpose of the series.

Here’s the 13 titles I came up with, along with the hints I gave out last week.  Honestly, some of the hints are fairly obscure as well, but I didn’t want to make it too easy.

1. The Road So Far: a Winchester recap
2. The Power of OOP: Johnny Colla would have done a mean sax solo
3. A Møøse Once Bit My Sister: I apologize for the obscure references; those responsible have been sacked
4. A Worthy Program, Exceedingly Well Read: also, profited in strange concealments ...
5. Speaking with the Speech of Coders: a present from Vietnam
6. Perl is Engineering and Art: what’s to learn? it’s a snake ..
7. The Most Powerful Weapon Which You Can Use to Change the World: according to Tata, not Perl at all ...
8. Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Most Wonderful: there was grandeur in his view of life from the Beagle
9. That’s Why I Failed Recess: it was funnier when Rudy said it to Fat Albert
10. What We Talk About When We Talk About DWIM: involving two couples and a bottle of gin
11. Please Mr. Perl, Will You DWIM?: a plea to m’colleague Hugh
12. The End of the Beginning: once described as “sounding more like the Primitives than the Primitives”
13. Here’s to Future Days: why are they called “twins” if there’s three of them?

Now let’s look at which each one references, as well as discussing its relevance to the particular post it ended up tagging.

The Road So Far

This is what they put on the title card when they do a longer recap on the TV show Supernatural.  The card looks like this, or maybe like this.  The protagonists of the series are the Winchester brothers, thus this is “a Winchester recap.”

This was a fairly natural choice for the first post in the series, which told a highly abbreviated version of my programming life, from age 14 or so, up to the present.  It’s a cool reference if you get it, but it still works well if you don’t.

I think a lot of people think of Supernatural as a teeny-bopper series, probably because it’s on the CW along with other teeny-bopper series like Gossip Girl, or The Vampire Diaries.  Of course, I was watching Supernatural when it was on the WB ... which was the home of Charmed and Dawson’s Creek, so I suppose I’m not digging myself out of that hole very well.  I dunno; I suppose it is a teeny-bopper series in many ways, and it’s probably gone on far beyond when they should have called it quits, but I still enjoy it.  Call it a guilty pleasure.  Besides, every now and again Felicia Day shows up, and that just makes it all worthwhile.

The Power of OOP

My second post in the series was about object-oriented programming, or “OOP” for short, and what makes it so useful.  So it seemed natural to harken back to Huey Lewis & the News’ classic 80’s song, “The Power of Love”.  The hint refers to the great sax player of the News, Johnny Colla (who was also a co-writer of “The Power of Love,” as it happens).

I’m not actually a huge fan of “The Power of Love,” nor its companion piece “Back in Time,” both off the Back to the Future soundtrack.  As far as I’m concerned Lewis & the News peaked with Sports, and it’s all downhill from there.  By the time Huey was declaring that it was “Hip to be Square,” I was embarrassed to admit that I’d ever seen them live.  (But I did, with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble opening, and it was a great show, I gotta tell ya.)

A Møøse Once Bit My Sister

No self-respecting programmer should have missed this one, which is of course is a reference to the ultra-classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  As you probably know, all the credits of the film are at the begining, and the Pythons couldn’t let it get too boring, so they peppered it with lots of moose references (for whatever reason).  The title is a direct quote from the credits, and the hint is a paraphrased version of a later credits quote.

For a post extolling the virtues of Moose, but also lamenting a few of its warts, there was no way I could pass up this title.

A Worthy Program, Exceedingly Well Read

This is one of the ones I spent a lot of time trying to find a good reference for.  The post was about legibility: the idea that a good program should be able to be read like a good story.  After several fruitless Googles, the phrase “well-read” popped into my head.  I wondered what the origin of that phrase was.  Of course, if you’re a native English speaker and you spend any time at all poking at the origins of common phrases, you know what the answer is 80-90% of the time: Shakespeare did it.

As it is here.  I paraphrased the relevant bit for the title, and I used the surrounding context for the hint.  Here’s the full text, from Henry IV, Part 1:

In faith, he is a worthy gentleman,
Exceedingly well read, and profited
In strange concealments, valiant as a lion
And as wondrous affable and as bountiful
As mines of India.

This is Mortimer speaking about Glyndwr, whoever that is.  I never read Henry IV, personally.  Still a good quote though.

Speaking with the Speech of Coders

Every once in a while we Americans wake up out of our egocentricity and remember that not all our blog post readers share our Western heritage.  By this point in my blog series, I felt it was time to pick a reference from the other side of the world.  I spent some digging through the Tao Te Ching, which is normally my go-to source for pithy quotes from the Orient.  I poked around The Art of War and Hagakure, both of which I also like, but they weren’t very helpful for this post, which was about linguistics.  I think I even explored the Analects briefly, but I lean much more towards Taoism than Confucianism, as you might imagine of one so obsessed by balance and paradox.

Then suddenly, after long and futile searching, it hit me: I already had a great source which would be perfect for this.  “The Red Cockatoo” is a short poem by Chinese poet Po Chu-i (also romanized as Bai Juyi), who lived in the Tang Dynasty and is very popular in both China and Japan (at least according to his Wikipedia page).  There are several different translations, but I prefer the one by Arthur Waley, the great British sinologist who gave us excellent translations of both the Tao Te Ching and the Analects.  Here it is in its entirety:

Sent as a present from Annam
A red cockatoo.
Coloured like the peach-tree blossom,
Speaking with the speech of men.
And they did to it what is always done
To the learned and eloquent.
They took a cage with stout bars
And shut it up inside.

Beautiful, and piquant.  The hint refers to the fact that “Annam” is an ancient Chinese name for Vietnam (or part of what is modern Vietnam).

Perl is Engineering and Art

This one was obvious to anyone who read this particular post, which spent a good deal of time analyzing a sidebar from the O’Reilly book Learning Python entitled “Python is Engineering, Not Art.”  I almost didn’t use this title, actually, as it’s so much more obvious than all the rest.  But then I decided that this title was just too good to pass up.  The hint is obvious as well, or at least is so in hindsight.

Fun side note: the animal on the cover of Learning Python is a rat.  Write your own joke here.

The Most Powerful Weapon Which You Can Use to Change the World

Another tough one to title.  This post covered several different subtopics that didn’t really fit anywhere else, so there wasn’t a great choice for a title anyway.  One of the topics I covered was my school experience with programming, so I started looking for quotes on education and ran across this one by Nelson Mandela:

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

There’s a bit of contention on whether he actually said this or not (and whether he used the word “which” in it if he did), but overall it seemed solid enough.

The hint refers to one of Mandela’s nicknames: “Tata” means “father” in Xhosa.  His other nickname is “Madiba,” but some have argued that it’s inappropriate for non-South-Africans to use that one.

Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Most Wonderful

This one was a little easier.  The post was about evolution, so it made sense to peruse the words of Charles Darwin, who was not only a very influential scientist, but also an eloquent writer.  The full quote is:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

This is from the conclusion of Darwin’s seminal On the Origin of Species, and is in fact the only time Darwin ever uses the word “evolve,” in the first edition.  (And, in the second, he added the phrase “by the Creator” to make it clear what he was talking about.)

The hint, of course, is a bit of the quote above, combined with a reference to the famous ship that Darwin sailed on, HMS Beagle.

That’s Why I Failed Recess

The ninth post in my series was about Getting Shit Done, and, when I was trying to think of a title for it, I kept remembering a joke from my childhood.  As the hint suggests, I’m pretty sure the first time I heard it was on Fat Albert.  It might have been Rudy who said it, or then again it might have been Russell—he was always a smartass.  Then again, we’re talking about 40-odd years ago, so I might be misremembering altogether and it was never in Fat Albert at all.

Anyways, here’s how I remember the joke:

A: I don’t play.  That’s why I had to quit school in the third grade.
B: Whaddaya mean?
A: ‘Cause the teacher said “recess,” and I said “no, I don’t play.”

There are countless variations of this joke, including the more concise version I used for my title, used in the common venacular, multiple rap songs, blog posts by other people, Facebook user names, tweets, and Internet memes.  In fact, this is a meme from before we knew what memes were.

Plus it’s really funny.

What We Talk About When We Talk About DWIM

Along about Part 10 I wrote a post that was so damn long I had to break it into two pieces.  Originally the title of this post and the following one were going to be switched, so that the title of this one could be a callback to the mention of “m’colleague” which I had dropped into the text.  (Instead, I ended up using that for the hint for Part 11.)  But eventually I made the switch to the titles that we have now because it just made better sense: this post was a fairly long digression in the form of a story from my college days, and this title fit that perfectly.

The title, of course, is a paraphrase of the title of a famous short story by Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” as well as the book which contains it.  In the story, two couples talk about everything but love over a bottle of gin (thus the hint), but really love is all they’re talking about.  You see the parallel in my post.

Really, though, I’m not a huge Carver fan.  The best thing about “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is probably the title.  “Cathedral” is better.

Please Mr. Perl, Will You DWIM?

If you are a connoisseur of Britsh comedy, the television series at the very top of your must-see list is of course Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  After that, it should be The Young Ones and Blackadder, although we might quibble over which one should come first.  Next on your list, before Fawlty Towers, before Red Dwarf, and, yes, even before AbFab, should be A Bit of Fry & Laurie.  If you think of Hugh Laurie simply as House, or (even worse) as the insipid father of Stuart Little, you really don’t know Hugh Laurie (in fact, you may not even realize he’s British).  Likewise, if all you know of Stephen Fry is his voice—he’s the Cheshire Cat in the Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland, the narrator of Little Big Planet, and a prolific audiobook narrator, including the UK version of the Harry Potter books and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—you’re missing out.

A Bit of Fry & Laurie is at once similar to Monty Python and also removed from it.  There’s still a certain amount of the surrealism (perhaps a bit less), but very little of the physical comedy such as the Ministry of Silly Walks or the Gumbys.  Most of it was like taking the best verbal humour of the Pythons (such as the Argument Clinic, or my all-time favorite, the penguin on top of your television set) and cranking it up to 11.  Stephen Fry would often do the heavy lifting in such sketches—playing the Groucho, or the Abbot, role—but Hugh Laurie had many talents other than just being an outstanding straight man.  One of which is an amazing range of musical ability: he plays guitar, drums, harmonica, sax, and, of course, piano.  At the end of every show, Fry would turn to Laurie (who he often referred to as “m’colleague”) and say: “Please Mr. Music, will you play?”  To which Laurie would respond by playing the piano in a loungy sort of way, usually while Fry mixed ridiculously named cocktails such as the Swinging Ballsack.  Occasionally he would elaborate the phrase to enhanced levels of flowery silliness; my favorite of these was:

I say, as I like to on these occasions, those six refreshing words that unlock the door to sophisticated evening happiness. I say: Please Mr. Music, will you play?

If you’ve not yet had the pleasure, I highly recommend it.

The End of the Beginning

Here at Part 12 I finally decided to start wrapping things up.  However, I knew it would take me (at least) two posts to conclude satisfactorily, so I needed a title to reflect that.  “The End of the Beginning” is (appropriately) the final track on the sophmore album of the Darling Buds, Crawdaddy.  Although Crawdaddy came out in 1990, it definitely has that late 80’s sound, including a remarkable similarity to the Primitives, particularly their first two albums Lovely (‘88) and Pure (‘89).  Although technically speaking the Primitives were English while the Darling Buds were Welsh.  But to us stupid Americans that subtle distinction is lost.

Although it was a Brit who made the comparison I reference in the hint: specifically, Dave Kendall, creator of MTV’s 120 Minutes.  He made the clever observation in his review of Crawdaddy, and I couldn’t help but agree, even though I probably like the Darling Buds a bit more than the Primitives.  But it’s a close thing.

The first track on Crawdaddy, “It Makes No Difference,” has one of the coolest hooks of the 80’s.  Too bad you’ve never heard it.

On the other hand, if you want to hear this track, YouTube is your friend.

Here’s to Future Days

And finally we reached the end, and I decided to touch on my thoughts about Perl’s future.  The title for this one took absolutely no thinking or searching at all.  While there can be no doubt that Into the Gap is the pinnacle of the Thompson Twins’ career, Here’s to Future Days is also a great album, the last of the good TT records before they transmogrified into Babble (whose debut was better than the last three efforts from the Twins put together ... not that that’s saying much).

Here’s to Future Days was also (probably not coincidentally) their last album as a threesome: it may not have seemed like Joe Leeway was adding much other than standing around looking cool (much as Andrew Ridgely did for Wham!), but apparently that was an illusion, because they sure sucked without him.  Definitely most people think of the Thompson Twins as a trio, and wonder what’s up with calling themselves “twins.”

But of course the truth is the name has nothing to do with the number of band members.  The first (little known) TT album was recorded with four members, and the second featured a whopping seven, before they trimmed it down to the famous three, who would go on to produce the Twins’ three great albums: Quick Step & Side Kick (known simply as Side Kicks in the US), Into the Gap, and Here’s to Future Days.  Nope, the name was simply a reference to Thomson and Thompson, the detectives from The Adventures of Tintin who only look like twins.

“Future Days” is the track on this album that contains the lyrics “Here’s to future days / Here’s to future ways,” which is what I hear in my head whenever I read this title.  If you’d like to have it stuck in your head as well, YouTube can arrange that for you.

In Conclusion

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I spent quite a bit of time mentally wrestling with a title for this post itself.  Should it be some sort of self-referential thing, being that it would be the title of a post about titling posts?  Should it somehow proclaim to the world that it was a meta-title?  Should it be a quote about naming things, or about clever wordplay?

In the end, I decided to make it a shout out to one of my favorite book-gifts as a child.  I got my fair share of fiction, certainly, but my family also recognized that an aspiring writer must have a love of language, so I got a fair number of dictionaries, thesauri, etc.

I was eleven years old on Christmas in 1977, the year that my grandfather presented me with the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, which had been published for the first time that very year (although much of it was derived from the earlier version, which was similarly titled but without the “Morris”).  It’s a “dictionary” only in the sense that the entries in it are alphabetized.  Lovingly crafted by husband and wife William and Mary Morris, it’s not so much a reference work (although it can be used as such) as it is a mishmash of fascinating tales of how English expressions came to be; I was fond of just opening it to a random page and reading whatever I found there.  I was rarely disappointed.

The Morris’ youngest son Evan carries on the family tradition on the web, writing as the Word Detective.  On his “about” page, he quotes fellow etymologist John Ciardi:

The more words I traced back through time for our readers, the more I appreciated Ciardi’s observation that each word, no matter how humble, was “a miniature fossilized poem written by the human race.”

And that’s what this exercise in naming was like: a verbal archaeology expedition, a paleontologist finding words trapped in amber.  My love for this sort of thing is certainly directly traceable back to the Morris dictionary, and the many hours I spent perusing how words and meanings become bent and reshaped to suit new ends across the generations.  Yeah, I was a weird kid.

So, this week’s installment, while longer than I’d anticipated (and probably longer than you’d hoped), at least may provide some insight into how these titles get here and where they come from, and why I tend to obsess over them more than is probably healthy.  Next week I probably won’t be so garrulous, most likely because I’ll be busy catching up on all the things I didn’t do this weekend because I spent too much time on this blog post.  But it’s been fun.  For me, anyway.  For you ... well, didn’t anyone tell you not to read this blog?

Perl blog post #16

I had hoped the fact that the family was gone this week (camping) would allow me to get ahead on blog posts again, but, alas, it didn’t work out that way.  So I’m cheating a bit, by revisiting the same topic I essayed last week, since it seemed to stir up some strong emotions.  Toddle off to my Other Blog if you’re interested in seeing my rantings for this week.  This one doesn’t require any Perl knowledge at all, really; it’s more of a reflection of the nature of these sorts of debates on the Internet (such as they are).

Nothing to Say ... Again

Once again, I find myself in the curious position of having nothing really to say.

Last time this happened, I wrote nearly a thousand words on having nothing to say.  Needless to say, I didn’t lose the opportunity to point out the inherent paradox therein.  I also took a moment to look back and see how many useless blog posts I’ve put out.  You’re not getting a thousand words out of me today, but I can do the retrospective thing, I suppose.

Let’s see ... 113 posts, 29 of which are interstitial.  Of course, 7 of those interstitial are pointers to my Perl blog posts, and those are real posts, just not here.  I’m counting them anyway.  So that’s ... 91 (yep, still went to another window for my computer to do the math for me).  Which is coming up on 2 years’ worth of weekly posts.  (And, since there are so many posts like this one, where I just flake out and don’t post anything, we actually passed two years’ worth of calendar time about 3 months ago).  Now, 31 of them are my fictional ramblings, and you may or may not want to count those (if you didn’t want to, that’d be 60 (and no, that time I did the math in my head (but only ’cause I knew it would end in zero))).  But, any way you slice it, it’s a fair number of words.

But, today, I have no words.  Or none worth spewing, anyway.  Too much other stuff on my mind.  Next week (or the week after at the latest), I hope to get back to the fictional rambling: I recently had an actual good idea on that front, and I’m anxious to write myself up to it before I lose the general shape of it.  But this week, I’m just going to chill and try to catch up on a few things on my todo list.  I’m sure you won’t mind.

A Tale of Two Bloggers

So, if you know anything about this blog (like, say, if you’re capable of reading the name of the damn thing), you know that I don’t have a high opinion of blogs, not even my own.  I gave a fairly complete explanation of why in my very first post, which was nearly two years ago, but I haven’t talked much about it since.  But recently I was reading a blog post that made me remember why I hate blogs, so I thought I’d revisit the topic.

The funny thing is, I didn’t hate the blog post.  Nor did I hate the blogger.  In fact, I have great respect for that particular blogger.  And yet ... it’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with the whole concept.

Let me tell you about two bloggers whose posts I read occasionally.  I don’t read any blogs regularly (for obvious reasons), but, every once in a while, someone whose opinion I respect will say “hey, there’s this cool blog post you should read,” and then I do, and sometimes I agree.  Since I’m a technical guy, mostly these blog posts are technical in nature, blogged by fellow technogeeks.  And, of course, blogs being what they are, often you end up seeing the same names over and over again on these sorts of things.  Some folks are just better at this whole blogging thing than others, and you start to recognize their names.  Now, if you happen to be a technical person yourself, you’ll probably recognize these names too.  If you’re not, just mentally substitute the names of some bloggers in whatever field you follow; I’m sure the points will apply just as well.

The first person I want to mention is Joel Spolsky.  Joel has a fairly popular blog that he’s been writing for over 10 years now.  He’s written on many, many different topics in the software industry.  He’s a working programmer, but he’s also run his own company, so he can hang on both the engineering front and the business side.  Joel is a smart, smart man.  I mean, he’s developed a lot of wisdom in 20 years in the software biz, but he’s more than just street-smart: he’s a very bright guy from the get-go.  He’s also very close in age to me, we’ve spent roughly the same amount of time as professional developers, and we’ve both owned our own shops.  In general, when Spolsky has something to say, I listen.

And here’s the thing about Spolsky’s blog posts: they’re either brilliant, or moronic.  There is no in between.  In fact, quite a few of them are both brilliant and moronic in the same post (see also my thoughts on balance and paradox).  There are various reasons for this.  Probably the main one is that his first job in the technical field was working for Microsoft.  Now, from everything I’ve been able to determine, from both reading stuff and talking to people, is that working for Microsoft (successfully) involves drinking some Kool-Aid.  I’ve read (or talked to) people who worked for Microsoft and loved it, people who worked for Microsoft and hated it, people who reported on Microsoft for a living, people who studied Microsoft and its employees, people who had friends at Microsoft, people who just interviewed there, people who volunteered for them online, people who had to interface with them, etc ad infinitum.  Microsoft is a huge presence in the software industry: it’s pretty much impossible to spend as much time in the business as I have and not run into many, many people with personal experience with Microsoft.  And, you know what?  They all agree about drinking the Kool-Aid.  Oh, the ones who loved it there don’t actually call it that, of course.  But you can see the red stains on their lips just the same.

And the thing about Spolsky is, he didn’t just drink the Kool-Aid, he friggin’ gargled with it.  And, see, if Spolsky just went on about how great Microsoft was, that would be okay with me.  I mean, I’d roll my eyes (I have definitely not partaken of that particular brand of Kool-Aid), but, you know: support what you love.  I can dig that, even if I disagree with your personal choice.  But Spolsky doesn’t just love Microsoft: he hates anyone who doesn’t also love it.  Basically, from where he sits, if you don’t think Microsoft is the greatest thing since the invention of the microcontroller, you’re a moron.  This makes him hard to take sometimes, and leads him to some conclusions that make me think that I’m not actually the moron in this equation.  If you see where I’m coming from.

The second person I wanted to talk about is the person whose blog post actually inspired this post: Steve Yegge.  Steve has a blog going back to 2006 (and one before that going back to 2004), and, while his output isn’t as high as Spolsky, his quality makes him just as well-known in technical circles.  He’s famous for “drunken rants” (his words, not mine) where he sets propriety and common sense aside and just tells it like he sees it.  While Steve has never worked for Microsoft (that I know of), he has worked for both Amazon and Google, so he’s got some insight into two of our other tech monsters.  Also unlike Spolsky, he never seems to have drunk the Kool-Aid—of any flavor—and is famous (some would say infamous) for criticizing his employers (whether his blog posts count as constructive criticism or not is in the eye of the beholder).

Yegge has a flair for peeling the veneer off of polite conversation and revealing the true face underneath.  He comes off as a bit of a jerk, but not the kind of jerk you want to punch: the kind you want to cheer for.  The anarchist who’s sticking it to the man.  The guy who’s not afraid to point out that wearing a necktie all day is probably cutting off all the oxygen to your brain.  The guy who works at the bottom, but is not afraid to tell it like it is to the man at the top.  Yegge has roughly the same amount of wisdom that Spolsky has, but he’s not so much deeply intelligent as he is just damned entertaining.  Not to say that Yegge is a stupid guy—certainly not!  Just pointing out that his insights are less intellectual introspection and more common-sense-is-not-so-common revelations.

Now, the opinions of either of these guys are absolutely worth reading.  If you’re a technical person and you’ve never read a blog post from either, you either haven’t been around long enough, or you’ve got your head buried in the sand.  More likely you’ve read a blog post from both, and even more likely you’ve read several of each.  There’s a lot of them out there, and many of them are great.  I highly recommend them.

But here’s why they’re still poster children for why blogs suck.

Reading a Joel Spolsky blog post is like listening to a speech given by a learned professor of a quasi-scientific discipline (paranormal psychology, perhaps, or cryptozoology).  You try to listen very intently to the brilliant parts, and just sort of ignore the insane parts.  Reading a Steve Yegge post is like listening to a drunk guy you just met who’s climbed on top of the bar and is listing off all the people that make the world suck, and, in the middle of cheering him on, you realize he’s a bit of a bigot.  It’s like “Yeah! Yeah! Fuck yeah! Wait, what??  Dude, get the fuck down from there and shut the hell up!!!”

In both cases, there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance going on.  You realize that here is a someone who knows a hell of a lot about your discipline, who has just as much experience as you do (if not more), whose opinions actually matter ... and yet they’re still capable of being just as short-sighted, just as prejudiced, just as downright stupid as you are (if not more).  Why in God’s name should I have to suffer through thousands of words from these people?  Half of them are going to be gold, but the other half ... man, I need those hours back.  Not just the hours I spent reading them, but the hours I spent shaking my head over the stupidity of them, and the hours I spent ranting about the audacity of them, and the hours I spent explaining to my friends and co-workers the unsoundness of them.  And that last part is hard, right, because everyone thinks these guys know what they’re talking about.  ‘Cause they have blogs.  Popular blogs, even.

But, the thing is, ANY MORON CAN HAVE A BLOG.  (Speaking from experience here.)  And popularity is no measure of intelligence or correctness, as I hope I don’t need to explain.  And, as I say, both of these guys are smart, and experienced, and entertaining, which makes it even worse.  Because they absolutely are worth reading, about half the time.  It’s just the other half that makes it problematic.

You know what I think the problem may be?  Editors.  Or lack thereof, to be more precise.  Back in the days before any idiot could slap together a blog and call themselves an expert, the bar to publication was convincing an editor that you had something worthwhile to say.  Now, I’m not saying that system was perfect.  On the contrary, it effectively suppressed the thoughts and opinions of millions of people, and many of those didn’t deserve that.  But the point is, many of them did.  And it’s impossible to tell the difference, now.  And even the ones who did manage to convince an editor that they had something to say worth sharing with the world often had many of their words cut out, and I bet you many of those words deserved it too.  Never underestimate the value of a good editor.

So, when I tell you that you shouldn’t read my blog, what I’m really telling you is this:  I’m a guy.  Just a regular guy.  I’m pretty smart, and I’m fairly experienced in a few areas, but I’m still just as stupid as you are.  I’m no better than you, and I don’t deserve to be listened to any more than you do.  And there’s no editor over here monitoring what I’m saying to make sure that, in the end, it’s going to be worth your time to read it.  When you read this blog (or any blog), you’re taking a chance on whether you just wasted half an hour (or so) of your life.  Is that chance worth it?  Well, I suppose you must have figured it was, since here you are.  But don’t forget to bring your salt.  And, in the final analysis, use your own common sense to decide how much of what I say is valid, and how much is my own demented rambling.

Because, after all, I’m just a guy, and this is just a post on a blog titled Do Not Read This Blog.  What did you expect?