Oh, hi there. Don’t mind the silence. I’m taking a bit of a break from blogging and Twitter and all that. Not that I have nothing to say; I just don’t feel much like saying it right now. We will, at some point in the near future, return to our regularly scheduled program.
And there may be some changes coming. Nothing drastic, nothing tragic, all good (hopefully). Watch this space for further developments…
I’ve just installed Twitter Tools for WordPress, and this post is intended to test it. If I’ve set it up right, it’ll automagically send out a tweet when I publish a post. Which means I won’t have to tweet manually to inform people. Labor-saving devices FTW!
Update: Huzzah, it worked. Just what I always wanted!
And now, so your time isn’t entirely wasted, the world’s cutest dog.
You may notice (if you read the actual site rather than the RSS feed) that brianeisley.com has a new look. I was getting tired of my old WordPress theme and felt a change was in order.
The old theme, Atahualpa, looked pretty good when I first found it. I wanted people to be able to see everything I was up to right from the site, and the two side columns gave me lots of room to play with widgets. Twitter, Google Reader, LibraryThing, Delicious, all of them right there and constantly updated. Very nice.
Or so I thought at first. It wasn’t long before I realized how cluttered and confusing my site really was. There was just too much stuff, all over the place. And there were some funky design elements that I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of–like the wasted white space above the starfield logo, to the left of the RSS buttons.
Most importantly, though, I’ve decided that I really don’t have to have quite so much data up front. After all, I provide a handy list of links to all those profiles; if people want to see what I’m doing in these other places, they can get there easily. And removing those widgets allows me to use a cleaner, more minimal design with just one column.
So. I’m now using voidy, and I like it a lot. Spare, clean, easy to read–a far better design than before. And I’ve gotten rid of most of the widgets, except for Twitter. Overall, I think it looks great. Evolution is a good thing!
(Plus, now that it won’t look so crowded, maybe I’ll finally get around to having a blogroll…)
Haven’t had much to say the last week or so. Actually, this is a good thing; it means that the constant rush of events over the previous three months has subsided. Medical issues have subsided, my mother-in-law is doing well, my spouse is back at work, and things are returning to normal.
Of course, getting back to “normal” means getting back to such fun activities as my little part-time research job, as well as looking for the job that will replace it. (Not fun, due to the economy; currently, there are nearly five times as many job seekers as there are available jobs. Professions are a little better but not by much.)
Not to mention my writing, which is slowly sputtering back to life; I’m not producing any words, but I am doing research to develop an alternate-history world that I have good feelings about. I already have one story pretty thoroughly plotted. So, at some point, that should see the light of day.
Meanwhile, all my other interests are currently trying to crowd themselves into my free time, like students in the sixties cramming into a phone booth. There’s my volunteering, there’s studying Chinese, there’s pleasure reading, and now there’s also music (which I will surely discuss in further detail in a later post). I’m not working nearly enough to have this much time pressure in my leisure activities.
Oh, yeah, and there’s also the small matter of spending time with my honeybun. Which of course tends to trump everything else. But that’s okay. I have my priorities, after all.
So, last weekend we brought my mother-in-law home from the facility where she’s spent most of the last three months. She’s doing much, much better and is impatient to get back to her regular life. Which we think, with some ongoing assistance, she should be able to do.
And so, we are tentatively declaring the crisis to be over, and I’m happy to say that we’re returning to what passes for normality around here. My spouse is back at work today; I’m planning to resume volunteering this Friday; and in all respects we are sliding back into our usual routine. It’s certainly possible that things will go sideways again, but for now, praise Eris, we’re back to our regular programming.
Therefore, I think I can promise a return to my usual musing, whining, and general complaining about the world, rather than all this personal stuff. Stay tuned.
A short update. My spouse arrived home last night, having successfully moved her mother’s things into the new, more accessible apartment. And the MIL is continuing to improve. Target date for taking her home from rehab is the first of July.
So, after nearly three months of running around like mad–interrupted by travel and my own medical issues–it looks like we may finally be reaching the end of this thing. There are no words for how grateful we are.
And now, that means I can start easing back into everything I didn’t have time for before. Like museum volunteering. And learning Chinese (though I’ll basically have to start over with that). And learning to play keyboard. And writing–in fact, just yesterday I managed to identify a point of divergence for the alternate-history Western stories I want to write.
And, oh, yes, job hunting. Can’t forget that.
Not to mention wrapping up all my personal venting here. Soon we will be returning to the usual blathering. Aren’t you excited?
Regular readers of this blog (howdy to you both) will recall that I tend to post in bursts, with long empty stretches in between–punctuated by apologies for not posting. This will superficially resemble one of those times; however, the crucial difference here is that my current silence has not been due to laziness, but to actual hecticity in my life. Things have been well and truly ridiculous.
The major event has been a medical emergency involving a close relative of my beloved spouse. Out of respect for the person’s privacy, I will give no details, other than to say that while the situation has reached something of an equilibrium, it is by no means over. We’ve been running around madly for the last couple of weeks–including two, count ‘em, two trips to Santa Cruz and back–and things won’t be getting back to normal for at least another two more weeks. No fun.
Add to this the fact that we are preparing to go to Colorado Springs for three days next week. This is a business trip that my sweetie has been planning for a year–a state-of-the-art veterinary dental seminar–and that she absolutely cannot reschedule. This will be the first time we’ve flown together, which is a big deal in itself; and the timing has worked out abominably with the previously mentioned emergency. Not to mention that Colorado Springs is hardly the place we would have chosen for our first long-distance trip. But oh well; we expect things will work out fine.
But still, it’s a mess.
Oh, and we’ll probably have to go to Santa Cruz again the weekend after we get back. And I’m having dental work and minor surgery the week after that (for an embarrassing problem that I won’t discuss here; those who need to know, already do). So things are going to stay unsettled for a little while yet.
So, just take me at my word when I say: I’m sorry, dammit, and I’ll try to post more, but I just can’t promise when or how often, okay?
Mar 09 2010 Published by brian under meta, personal, technology
Lots going on the last few weeks. Work, writing, travel. But the biggest of all was that I finally dumped my Palm Centro, which I’ve actively loathed since the day I got it, for a shiny new HTC Hero. Now this is a 21st-century device. I’m still sorting out all that I can do with it, but none of it is the hard slog that it was with the Palm.
There’s a blog post about interconnectedness brewing in the back of my head, partially inspired by the new device. Something about the parallel between the ever-denser connections between people and the connections between neurons in the brain. I know, I know, it’s been done. Which is why I haven’t done it yet; I’m trying to come up with a new angle.
Actually, I’m considering starting up a separate blog for my wonkier philosophical ideas. There’s a lot of weirdness floating around in my head, and somehow this doesn’t seem like quite the place for it. I still own verystrangeloops.com, but I may buy a new name instead. We’ll see.
Anyway, that’s it for now, methinks; I know it’s not much, but it’s late. Tomorrow we go to Harbin once again (only for one night, alas), and so sleep is badly needed. We’ve both been running at full speed for the last few weeks, so even this short of a break will be welcome.
So, I’ve just gone through one of my periodic phases of agonizing over the direction of this blog, as utterly predictable as the sunrise. It always happens; I start off with lots of enthusiasm, post semi-regularly for a while, and then gradually drift away. It’s quite boring.
This happens pretty frequently, as you may have noticed if you’ve been reading me for awhile. I’ve blogged off and on since well before they started calling it that, starting in roughly 1998 (cue Grumpy Old Man: “In my day, we didn’t have WordPress; we wrote raw HTML files in Notepad, and we liked it!”).
And this is my usual pattern. I decide that I want to talk about things that interest me and to hone my writing skills, and so I go and write about some subject or other: science fiction, technology, politics, libraries, even my personal life. And I always end up losing interest and quitting–until I decide to relaunch with a post that reads much like this one. Lather, rinse, repeat. And I go around in circles without ever gaining the benefit of writing regularly.
But I think I’ve found a solution (somewhat inspired by John Scalzi–whose blog collection Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded is currently bringing the funny in the Eisley household).
See, I’ve come to believe that the reason I keep getting bored with blogging is that all this time, I’ve focused mostly on being informative when I could have been working a hell of a lot harder to be entertaining. At least to myself. If I were to start having fun doing this–rather than putting pressure on myself to be informative–then it stands to reason that I’ll keep doing it, right?
Oh, and there’s also the small perk that making my blog entertaining might actually keep YOU coming back. You get something interesting to read, I get ego gratification. Everybody wins!
So: as of this moment, I’m going to stop giving a damn whether I’m informative or not, or knowledgeable or not, or holding to a chosen theme or not. From now on, I’m writing solely for fun. My goals are going to be to (a) write every day if at all possible, and (b) enjoy doing it. Whatever it takes.
And if anybody else likes it, awesome. But if not, hey, there’s millions of other blogs out there that I’m sure would appreciate some refugees from mine.
So, enough of this. Let us go forth and see what we find, shall we?
I’ve revised the design of this site a little. I updated the theme (Atahualpa), which fixed an issue I’ve been having with the Twitter applet. I’m still not happy with the Delicious applet–I don’t like how each link has its own line; it’s not supposed to–but it’ll do for now. I also moved things around in the header and the tops of the sidebars to reduce clutter. I think it’s now a lot cleaner and easier to navigate.
I also (finally!) got rid of the default images for the header and replaced them with my own. The new image is from the Spitzer Space Telescope, and is of a star nursery in Rho Ophiuchi. (I found it in the Universe gallery at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory‘s Photojournal site; original image is here.) I like this a lot and I think I’ll be keeping it a while.
Finally, I’ve added a widget to show items I’ve shared in Google Reader. Now, anything I find interesting is only a click away from here.
Slowly I’m proceeding toward the ideal of making this the one central location for everything I’m up to. Onward and upward.
A perennial student, with an utterly insane variety of densely interconnected interests, carefully plotting his course through the Singularity.
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