r-l-w.net

I’m not Joseph Conrad

January 3rd, 2008

I didn’t mention it here yet, but I have determined to get back to daily posting. There’s really no excuse not to. My dad does and has for years- after I nagged him for probably a couple of years to get started writing online at all. Now he is diligent and I wrote like eight posts last year.

Back in the good old days- 2002, 2003, 2004 I used to write almost daily using MovableType. Then when the crappy host I had back then gorked me by changing version of Berkley database they ran without telling me, my MovableType install was unsavably broken. That was OK, I had most of the static HTML backed up and stored on a local hard drive. Unfortunately, I somehow managed to lose that backup. I use WordPress now but most of that old stuff is just gone, though a small bit of it is available as static files somewhere here on this host and a bit more it available from the Internet Archive, but the only real response is to forge ahead and do better from now on.

While talking to my abovementioned dad last Sunday afternoon, he hit a nail on the head when he made an observation about my character that, though I was aware of it myself despite never having mentioned to anyone else, I was surprised he had intuited about me. He’s known me a long time though, so I guess I shouldn’t really have been surprised.

Anyway, the observation was that frequently my desire to do things right creates an almost insurmountable barrier to doing it at all. That is, if in my mind task X requires elements Y and Z, then if I can only get a bit of Z and no Y, instead of using the Z and making some Y substitute out of a pile of J and all the X I can scrape up, I’ll postpone the whole project until I can get my hands on some genuine Y.

Well, no more of that I say- at least in the subject of writing this website. I’m not Joseph Conrad and I never will be. I know that, nonetheless that personality trait I described with the Xs and Ys has become the reason I wrote only eight posts last year because I want every post to meet a certain quality and quantity standard. So it has become time to begin overcoming my X Y Z syndrome by just writing stuff whether I actually have a good topic or not.

Afterall the number of regular readers of this site consists of about maybe five people including me and dear old Dad, so I figure my target audience is more interested in just reading something all the time than reading something long eight times a year. So here it is: my first just-a-post post of 2008. It’s probably the first of many, but hopefully I’ll carry through and there will be many posts.