Anyway, I wish I could claim that big life events from the past 6 months or so were being expressed in those chunks of 140 characters or less, but things have been pretty quiet. Oh, not to say *nothing* has happened, but nothing I’d bore the couple of people who might have forgotten to remove this blog’s feed from their RSS reader with.

Don’t despair, however: as is wont to happen, I occasionally have something to say, and I’ve got a few things running around in my head. I’ll do my best to expand those beyond 140 character chunks and attempt to make them resemble English (with real sentence structure, and everything!). At least to the point where both of you will reconsider removing that RSS feed…

Of course, this makes me wonder about how many other comments I’ve lost out on. This blog isn’t widely read, but I do get a handful of interesting people leaving me things about the things I post, which makes this a lot more interesting, so I want to be sure it’s easy for them and others to do.

Comments?

The first is that I am, by nature, a fairly private person.  I know that probably seems weird to say, given my online presence, but if you examine everything about me that’s out there, it doesn’t really go that deep.  Regardless, there is a definite amount of resistance I need to overcome just to write something here (or anywhere public, for that matter).

The second problem, more directly related to blogging, is overcoming the mostly-subconscious, self-imposed expectation of having to posting something really great (which I imagine people whose blogs have an audience have), which grows worse the longer the silence gets.  There have been things I could have written about and didn’t because I didn’t think I had the time to do it justice, or just forgot about it.  Then there’s looking at the date of the last entry and thinking “wow, it’s really been a while – I need something to write about”, and then rejecting most of the ideas as “not good enough”.

I have the head-knowledge bit of overcoming this (just write something!), but is there a practical thing I can do to overcome this other than just “getting over it”?

More is coming – there’s been a lot going on lately, in our lives, and, of course, the geeky stuff too.

The result is a tumblelog. I’ve been keeping an eye on this for sometime, and although I could have gone out and signed up for one, on tumblr.com, for example, I’m too much of a DIYer. A while back, I’d come across an open source software package called gelato cms, which was a PHP/MySQL-based tumblelog. Back then, it was in the early stages of development, and mostly unusable. I’m happy to report that it is now mostly usable (it’s still in development, there are bugs, and there are still features missing), and I’ve got it going on my site!

It’s going to be very stream-of-consiousness, covering everything from humour, photography and quotes to geek-stuff, technology, music and system administration!

You can find it here. So click, subscribe to the RSS feed, add it to your favorite Technorati blogs, and enjoy!

This would be the part where I mumble something about it being the beginning of the year, and resolutions, and making an attempt to do better, but I’m not going to do that. Actions speak louder than words, and all that (which means you’ll probably soon be deafened by the silence resulting from the aforementioned cycle beginning another turn).

Anyway, the story so far, in particular order (that chronology thing):

* reverential bought a new sound system: a Bose Cylindrical Radiator Loudspeaker, and a JBL subwoofer, which sound amazing.

* I got a piano: a Yamaha Clavinova CLP-230. An excellent practice instrument for the lessons I started back in September.

* I attended the USENIX LISA conference in December in Washington, DC. At the conference, I was able to meet Cory Doctorow and have him sign one of his books for us.

* We lost our cat, Oscar, as due to a series of problems that came on pretty suddenly, we had to put him to sleep.

* We saw Thomas Dolby (with BT) in concert at the World Live Cafe in Philadelphia, and got to meet them afterwards.

* We went down to Little Rock, Arkansas for Christmas to visit Michelle’s parents. As they’re looking to retire in the next year or two (back to Canada), this could have been the last Christmas at their AR house.

Well, I think that hits the major highlights for last year. reverential has 4 or 5 gigs already lined up for this year, so there’ll be lots more news there, along with live photos of venues we play and gear! And there’s a few other things that I’m saving for separate posts. Enjoy!

So to that end, I think it’s time to try to break out of that mode, and start posting shorter stuff more often, and not worry about the level of profoundity (it that even a word?).

Hmmm…just saying that feels liberating.  We’ll see how long it lasts…

Oh, yeah, my new keyboard worked wonderfully. More on that next.