That Was the Year That Wasn’t
Hello, and welcome to this false dawn of a non-blog-entry. I figure I owe some sort of explanation to the dwindling number of visitors to this cryogenic URL for why there hasn’t been anything here in almost a year, and thought I might as well use this banner I made back when I was hoping to get it up and running again any day now.
The explanation is pretty straightforward. The flat-hunting ended successfully in November, followed by selling our own just in time, heading out to Australia for a month of visiting family and friends, and returning to a few weeks of frantic renovations and moving into the new flat (where “new” equals 1887). Since then it’s been more renovations and DIY, punctuated by visitors from Australia and the arrival of stuff that had been in storage for eight years, the sorting out of which will probably keep me busy for eight more. Work has been its own parallel world of busy; and of course the boy has been growing and changing throughout, and I haven’t wanted to spend many of his waking hours staring at this screen. I suppose I also just got sick of it all, really: the sound of the blog, the sound of my own voice. I needed a break.
I still don’t feel like going back to the inward gaze of a journal-style blog, and whatever comes next probably won’t be that. It probably won’t be for a while, either, because between now and next semester I have other things that need doing. But there have already been a few modest updates at the site this year, and one in particular might even fill that blog-shaped hole...
One thing I miss about blogs whenever I’m on hiatus is having a dated archive of bookmarks—yep, old-skool blogging—and I was getting a big backlog of unfiled links since I stopped dumping them here (del.icio.us never did it for me). So a couple of months ago I wrote a PHP script to turn an edited version of my bookmarks file into importable blog entries, converting its Unix timestamps into proper dates, and then imported those into the ex-ex-Feed, effectively creating a post hoc blog. It was mostly for my own amusement, but there’s a chance others might find some of the links interesting, so there it is. I might as well keep it up, too, even if it’s just by repeating the import-dump every week or two. You can keep track of it at the revived RSS feed.
So, that’s the false dawn. Stay tuned for the false shower, false breakfast and false bus into work.
21 July 2008