Happy Blog New Year

Happy new year, Internet. According to Feedburner, there are on the order of 20 of you reading this over RSS. Thank you for sticking with me! Can you believe it’s been almost six years since the first entry on this blog? Wow.

My friend Hannah just celebrated her ninth year of blogging, and her “blogaversary”(?) posts got me thinking, “Why don’t I write on this thing more?”

Long-time readers know the typical excuses. They mostly involve my work, how much of it there is and how I don’t have enough time to do it.

I’m going to do a little experiment, gentle readers, and you’re going to have to hold me to it.  New Year’s resolutions have never worked for me; I know how to make them, but not how to keep them.  That’s why this year, I’m going to resolve to do something that I have literally no excuse not to do.  I’m going to resolve to sit here and type something for this blog once a week. At least.  That means that by the end of the year, barring severe illness or natural disaster, there will be 50 additional posts here.

To put that in context, the post 50 posts older than this one was written in May of 2007.

Why, you might ask?  Well, frankly, I’m a little ashamed that I’ve been neglecting this space for so long.  I’ve also been looking for places to exercise my ability to write something longer than a tweet or an e-mail.  While I still do a lot of technical writing, most of that is a giant jumble of passive-voice technobabble and collective pronouns. Seriously, I can’t explain anything I do anymore without using the word “we”, out of force of habit.

So, things are going to change around here. But how?

One post a week, every week, I promise. I’m not going to promise that they’ll be long. It might be a link to something I thought was interesting or exciting. It might be a random throwaway thought on something. Might be technical, might not be.  All I can tell you is that I’m going to put it on my to-do list and my compulsive desire to not have overdue to-dos will hopefully carry me forward.

Blog posts older than September of 2007 are hidden. Because seriously, nobody wants to hear angst-y college Alex grousing about how hard school is and how much of a tool George W. Bush is, especially me. Even though school was hard. And Dubya was a tool. On that note …

No more political posts.  You know that old chestnut that says that you should never bring up politics or religion at a dinner party? There’s a reason why. You have the 24-hour news cycle to beat you over the head with constant coverage and analysis of all things political. Frankly, I don’t think I can do anything but add one more voice to the ceaseless din and make people angry, and I don’t want to do that.  Unless it’s technology-related and/or I feel like I can add to the conversation or am specifically asked to provide my $0.02, it won’t be discussed here.

Most of it will probably be technical. Get used to it. My personal life isn’t nearly interesting enough to be put on the Internet and, at any rate, I don’t want the content of this blog to affect my job prospects. Most of my time and attention these days goes toward technical things, which means that most of this site’s content will probably gravitate in that direction whether I want it to or not. This doesn’t mean that all posts will be of the form “how to get the most sequential read bandwidth out of XFS” (although I can certainly bore you to tears with that one); hopefully I will make at least most of this accessible to a non-technical audience.

So, there you have it. One post a week. Every week. See you before next Sunday night.

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