On or off. True or false. One or zero.
This is how life feels right now, as another year ticks off on my personal odometer. The input/output circuitry has been set on high input and appear to be stuck. I’ve been inhaling books, web pages, podcasts, lectures, art museums and more for the past year or so, and now I feel like there is little to show for it. Everything is unidirectional.
The blog has languished for many months but this will hopefully be the beginning of a new wave of publishing around here at EcEc. To the whopping 16 Feedburner subscribers, most of whom are probably bots, I ask you not to hold your breath for too much. For those looking for archives: things are broken temporarily until I get the new software sorted out and import my old entries in a format that I can tolerate
The year has to come to a very quiet end here at chez Suomela. I finished my third of four terms on December 18, drove home to Minneapolis on the 19th, and spent the last twelve days relaxing, reading, watching TV, and exchanging gifts with the family.
To be thankful for:
A life without drama. You know the kind of drama where everything becomes a production and life is continually lived on the edge.
Another month has come and gone on this blue globe. The annual marks of mortality have left another ring and my weblog has been mostly silent. It’s not because I don’t like you, all half dozen of you who have subscribed to my feed, it’s because I pretend to myself that I’m busy, that there are other demands on my time. It’s a poor excuse my friend.
In “real life” I’m nearing the end of my third semester as a master’s student at the School of Information at UMich.
October was a sparse month for weblog updates. To the few who might be reading, I’m sorry. I’ve been putting my head down and plowing through a bunch of midterm papers, exams, and presentations. The last major one was today.
In theory that would give me a week to relax, but the inevitability of looming deadlines at the end of the semester make any relaxation feel like procrastination. Pleasure just turns into anxiety.
Well the fall semester is officially underway. I had my first class session today with Paul Resnick on recommender systems. The class is a short one, only half the semester or seven weeks. I look forward to it. More classes to come tomorrow and next week.
Over the weekend I was less than enthused by the start of classes. Once the actual event occurs and I get back in the rhythm of things I’m sure my outlook will improve.
Among the many writing projects that I’ve considered pursuing was a series of essays based on gerunds, in English these are nouns formed by adding -ing to the end of verbs. Some examples are falling, reflecting, refracting, wishing, pondering. For example, the essay on falling might have made connections between falling in love, the idea of losing control, the power of gravity, etc. This post isn’t that essay, instead it’s about reflecting, the gerund du jour.
The heat wave has broken, at least here in Michigan. A cold front finally moved through earlier this morning. Yesterday the temperatures were in the mid-90s and the humidity was high. Even at night the lows were only into the 70s and the dewpoints stayed high.
I had hoped to watch some of the lightning and thunderstorms roll through last night. But the storms were moving west to east, just north of Ann Arbor.
July is coming to an end and it’s hot, hot, hot. The weather service has issued a heat advisory for Michigan from now until Tuesday. According to the NWS the heat wave began on Saturday and is going to continue while high pressure locks in over the southeast and low pressure over the plains combine to send southwest winds my way.
So it is time for another meta post. Since I returned to the daily blogging routine in mid-June I’ve been thinking about what weblogging does for me.
There comes a time in any project where it seems like everything is going in too many directions at once. That the center cannot hold and things are about to fly apart.
Blogging is no different. There’s a constant cycle of push and pull inside of me between keeping everything I write here, in a single location, and writing multiple blogs on different subjects. In the past I’ve also been torn between wanting to try different weblog tools.