Lincoln/Coverdale

My love/hate relationship with blogging continues without resolution. I’ve been busy as hell lately and when I’m busy, taking a moment to share a random thought just isn’t high on my list of priorities. There is also the problem of putting too much information online. Although, I am a firm believer that much of the interesting content on the web comes from regular folks with stories to tell, I want to exercise some control over how much of me ends up online. In a perfect world, we would all be producers as well as consumers of this content. It’s not a perfect world and I’m not a perfect person. I don’t think I really have any passion for blogging; I have passion for certain topics (e.g., Civil War-era America and Whitesnake). When I’m engrossed in one of these topics and I happen to have nothing to do and a computer is nearby, I might post something. More often than not, I’d rather just have a beer and a conversation.

I actually had the intention of taking my blog down tonight (er…this morning), but I just can’t seem to do it. For a brief moment, I convinced myself that in the name of www-integrity (a name I may have just made up) I should not just delete content that can be found through a web search because knowingly enabling a 404 is a sin. There is more to it though. I think this is the third blog I’ve started. I’d rather not have a fourth. So, rather than abort yet another attempt, I’ll let this thing hang around. When and if I feel I have something to add, I’ll do so.

Well, I just had my first really annoying WordPress moment — I somehow lost a post midway through writing it. I’m not going to take the time to carefully write it again, I’ll do what I should have done in the first place and just stick to the main points.

I just watched the first episode of John Adams. I really enjoy American history — especially the Revolutionary era — but I am constantly reminded of how little I know. Was I not taught in high school that John Adams represented the British troops that opened fire at the Boston Massacre? Did I just forget? Well, I know it now. One of the first of Adams’s values we learn is his adamant view that even the the least of men are entitled to proper representation at trial. He does not represent the British in spite of what they’ve done and symbolize, but precisely because they are people and endowed with rights which are not created and cannot be abrogated by the King or Parliament.

In a later scene, John and his cousin Samuel are witnesses to the tarring and feathering of a British sailor. Paul Giamatti’s Adams shows palpable disgust as the mob strips this man and covers him with hot tar & feathers and proceeds to parade him around the docks on a rail. Even the expression on the face of rebellious Samuel turned to chagrin as the man screamed in excruciation.

I recall in grade school not thinking much of tarring and feathering. Like so much of what I read in history books, this was something that happened long ago — so long ago that I never internalized it as having actually happened. This isn’t like covering someone in glue and glitter. The tar is hot enough to cause permanent disfigurement. The colonists certainly had grievances against the Crown, but the image of a mob terrorizing a helpless man doesn’t make my heart well up with patriotism.

I’ve been dinking around with blog software for a few days now. I started with Simple PHP Blog because it does not require a database backend (I’m a sucker for simplicity). Unfortunately, themes are short in supply and it’s templating system doesn’t seem mature enough for me to write my own in short order (I could take the time, but it’s bad enough that my days are spent developing web). The themes are also deficient in standards compliance. It bothered me enough that I knew I would spend hours rendering the code compliant and still be unhappy that the layout looks like crap. And then I found WordPress. I had heard of it before, but I didn’t know that the code could be freely downloaded for personal hosting. Not only is it rich in features, it boasts W3C compliance which calms my nerves enough to allow me to, you know, actually post stuff.

It seems to be a pattern in my life that I get excited about a project and spend lots of time reading up and preparing. I’ll buy materials and get advice from people and when I’m right at the point where I should be starting the project, I retreat. I make up all kinds of self-defeating excuses and avoid failure by avoiding effort. (I don’t know if it’s encouraging or sad that I am consciously aware of this.) Here’s a list of projects or ideas from the past few weeks that could go nowhere:

• this blog
• finishing my basement
• taking the Patent Bar exam
• learning how to program the iPhone
• reading Canterbury Tales in Middle English

I’d call 3/5 between now and August a success.

Edit: I totally forgot to include “writing a Facbook application” in the list above.

Many years ago, I got into using Blogger to record random thoughts and other nonsense. I eventually got sick of displaying my malformed arguments for all the world to see and took it all down. Since then, I have often felt the tug to jump back into blogging without any pretense of a theme. There will of course still be random thoughts, but I also want a place to collect solutions I find to problems. (Maybe I can save someone an hour of forum or Google trolling.) I’m curious to see how disciplined I can be about this.