Diversions Manifold

A title? A blog post? I’m an inveterate tinkerer with a seemingly innate inability to forget the tools and processes, to concentrate on the message, story or narrative that I want to impart. So I’m no back to trying out Byword on the Mac - back to the rather appealing white text on black (well, a strangely relaxing but equally distracting washed-out green-black that highlights the backlighting system on the display, with all its patches of lighter and darker black, redolent of swimming in a lake with its warmer and cooler patches of water). I still love the idea of distraction-free typing - but I keep on getting tied up with the mechanics of saving and exporting these markdown files. EXCEPT: I’ve just discovered that Byword can publish to Evernote, which is rather a nice little feature, now that I think of it. And it can publish to Blogger… where I’ve had an account and a blog for ages. So Byword really is right for tapping out those disjointed nightly thoughts (which I ha

This blog looks to be in grave danger of becoming an orphan; no writer to care for it, only the occasional glance in from human readers and data mining bots as they continue moving swiftly on to other digital destinations, only Google's server farm keeping it from sinking into the digital abyss. A blogging pause has happened here before, of course, as noted in my Blogging State Of the Union post from October 2012.  I've again not posted here for several months, obviously because nothing of interest has happened to me in that time. Perhaps that's right. The day-to-day has been pretty overwhelming and I've found that whilst trying to keep my engineering blog a little more lively, there's simply not been the headroom, or quiet time, or energy to work on this here blog. But what about the content? Has that been lacking, too? Thankfully, I think not. What have I been up to since Shanghai ? Well, I played in another symphony orchestra concert (Gershwin, Shostakovitc

I think, after more than 18 months of maintaining this online presence, I can now confirm that blogging is not a trivial activity. Translating thoughts to series of words that have both meaning and flow can be surprisingly hard work. Perhaps I make too much of a meal of it, revising and editing my posts to the point of never finishing them, but neither am I comfortable with the splash and dash method: a blog is a document of some permanence, and is therefore worthy of being done correctly. Whilst blog posts can (and, really, should) be edited after publication, I still hold to the old concept of the publishing date bearing some relation to the date of an particular thought or event. Still, jamais être content is a burden (umm, that's content  in the sense of satisfaction, rather than information). I can see eight unpublished drafts listed behind the scenes of this blog, plus another two or three on my On Engineering blog. It's manageable, but there are strong indications t