Ideas are generally easy to come by, it’s the execution that’s hard. This is why you generally don’t pay someone for a good idea, because anyone can come up with something decent.
Usually.
But for the past month or so, when I have sat down to write something on this blog, without having something already in mind, I feel this strange sensation, almost like my brain is being slowly suffocated, as if any possible idea is squashed before it can escape.
This is why I often write nothing at all. Because the few feeble ideas–a haiku, for example, yield either nothing (that word again) or results that are so tepid I won’t post them just to spare the bots scraping the site.
I have no grand point here, but I do vaguely hope that articulating this will help. We shall see.
Last night I had a brief dream in which I was in bed and awake. It felt late at night or early morning and was still dark. As is often the case in dreams, the room geometry was on the creative side, as I cannot see the kitchen/den area through the bedroom door but in the dream I could.
While looking toward the kitchen area I thought I saw movement and although I can picture what I saw in the dream, I have a hard time describing it. I think it was supposed to be some sort of play on light and shadow that suggested someone moving into the kitchen (away from the bedroom). Next the smart lights in the den winked on, seemingly unprompted. It wasn’t scary, exactly, more unnerving. And I’m pretty sure I had this dream because we do, in fact, have most of the smart lights set to turn on/off at various times of the day and night, so my weary brain decided that maybe they also just do this on their own because they are “smart.”.
And come to think of it, this morning Fleetwood Mac’s “Second Hand News” started blasting from the Echo Shows in the bedroom, prompted by…nothing? I checked the Alex history and could find nothing to suggest why the music would have suddenly started playing when it did. But it’s all part of the charm of a smart home, I guess. At least the timers usually work.
Have I talked about this before? I may have, but I am lacking in imagination at the moment so I’m going to talk about this again.
As the title says, there are two perks to the pandemic that I have seen so far. Yes, there may be others, but these are the only ones that seem meaningful in a greater sense.
Work From Home. WFH is awesome. No commute, extra time for sleeping and exercise or doing whatever I want. Being able to step away from the desk and raid your own fridge for a snack. No distracting co-workers coming to your desk. It’s great. I don’t miss the office at all. I guess I am a solo player that also happens to work well with teams.
No illness. It’s ironic that as a pandemic swept the globe I have not had a cold, the flu or anything like that since January 2020. This is pretty much unprecedented, and it’s all due to one little thing: avoiding people. Basically, every time I have gotten sick it’s been someone else’s fault.
If I think of more, I’ll add more later. But really, these are the biggies and I would miss them dearly if I had to go back to an office. So my plan is to somehow arrange to never have to do that again. My plan is in its early stages.
After 16 years I have moved this site to a new host. The old host provided excellent support but had clearly moved away from webhosting, so it seemed like a good time to pull up stakes and move to a host that was actually focused on webhosting.
From the user’s perspective (both of you), nothing has changed, this is all backend stuff.
The process of moving was very simple, I never even had to post a blinking “Under construction” sign, though I really wanted to, and will do so now:
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted one of these. Perhaps it will help kick-start me onto a new burst of creativity or sunshine-filled thoughts or something.
Today I got an email from Telus telling me they are shutting down personal webspace as of May 31, 2021:
The notice is amusing in how they try to avoid saying, “Everyone totes uses Facebook now, move your cat pictures there.”
So I went to the URL to see what I had put up (if anything) and it turns out to be, in fact, a picture of my long-deceased cat (who was alive at the time, I should note).
Here is the amazing HTML code I wrote ALL BY MYSELF back in 2008 or whenever it was.
Yes, once again I have found another way to post to my blog. I am getting ever-closer to posting from a fridge or toaster.
This time I am posting from MarsEdit, which is software specifically designed to let you write blog posts and then post them…to your blog. Setting it up was dead simple and it works offline, which is nice if my connection flakes out but I SIMPLY MUST BLOG.
I can already do this in Ulysses, too, so I will have to see how MarsEdit makes things better or sexier.
I was originally only going to repeat “bluh” here, but it occured to me that I am also disorganized, so I’ll record that here as well.
Bluh.
I am disorganized.
It’s not that I don’t try to be organized, it’s that I have no consistent method for it. I will sometimes write something down using old-fashioned pen and paper, others times I might use:
Drafts (iOS app)
OneNote
iA Writer
Notepad
Notepad++
This blog
Something else
So when I go to find something I vaguely recall writing down, I end up searching across multiple devices and drives, hoping I’ll get lucky on a keyword. And Windows is still pretty slow doing searches. So for 2021 I vow to come up with a better way to organize my ideas and junk. Or else. Or else I won’t.
UPDATE: I found the idea that prompted my thoughts on being disorganized–it was made through iA Writer, but was saved to iCloud, which doesn’t show up automatically on the PC version. So I blame myself and the software.
April can be a rather damp month sometimes, so I wanted to record for posterity that we are in the middle of a week-long stretch of beautiful, summer-like weather. It was 23 today. 23! In April!
I’ve decided that it’s time to give the entire site an overhaul. As groovy as the Cooper black logo is, the overall design of the site is stale and a bit cluttered, as some sections have been neglected and others are a bit too buried.
I also need to find a way to make the running posts optional. Or maybe start a running blog. And then start running again.
My current thought is something like this:
Come up with a new compact logo that can sit in the top-left
Remove the entire set of menu bar items along the top
Add a left sidebar with simple links to all the usual stuff (archives, etc.)
Have “noteworthy items” in the right sidebar
Continue to post the usual nonsense for the actual blog part in the middle
Try to allow for a “customized feed” so people can skip stuff of little interest to anyone but me, like my running updates (or maybe post them elsewhere, like in a journal or a private/separate blog)
This is going to take a while, and I’m going to try to make it work with my current theme, GeneratePress, because I have grown so used to it (and it works well). For now, I will be frequently playing around with different fonts and things that are easy to change on the fly.
BONUS FAT UPDATE: I have hit a high of 179.7 pounds. This is ominously close to 180 pounds, which would be a bit devastating to hit psychologically. Today I weighed in almost two hours earlier, which usually results in the weight being higher. I watched the numbers flick past 180 before settling back to…179.7 pounds (again).
This week I have returned to work and I have experienced an odd combination of stress, frustration and simple boredom. I have partaken of crackers, but not excessively so.
On the other hand, I’ve gotten very good at not eating anything after dinner. Yay on that. I am also drinking more water, as I find more than a little (diet) soda now seems to be giving me heartburn.
Further incentive on losing weight: I have a bunch of old t-shirts that still look great but are too snug to wear right now. I tried on a pair of cotton shorts I normally wear in the summer–they are a size 31 waist, which is one size higher than my usual 30–and could not do up the button. It was physically impossible. I was embarrassed. But I vowed not to buy new clothes that would fit–I’m not going to backslide and give myself an out in the battle against fat.
I will lose the weight. Just weight and see (ho ho).
