Ok, a confession: I totally ran out of my usual backlog of blog posts, that keeps these pages humming with the signs of life despite the fact that I don't have time to write a post every day, and often don't have reliable weekend time to write blog posts. This hasn't happened in a few months, so it's sort of disconcerting. One of the reasons why I ran out, is that I've been busy doing non-writing things for a few weekends, but a third (or forth?) weekend away from home was too much for my backlog to bear, so here we are.

Here's a brief overview of what I've been up to and the kinds of projects I'm working on, and what the near future holds:

  • I'm going to Dance Flury in a couple of weeks. I've not done the usual dance weekend thing before, aside from the Morris Dance gathering I've been going to for years. I'm really looking forward to it.
  • I'm trying to get a better handle on the blog. I do this binge cycle thing with my blog posts, that leads to situations like the one that I'm currently experiencing, but also doesn't actually mean that I have spare time to write fiction in a way that I might like.
  • I'm working a bunch, and while every day is some kind of learning experience, I think I've figured out (largely) how to do what I do in a way that doesn't have me leaving every night feeling like a fraud. There will be more learning curves, for sure, but it's nice to not feel like I know what I'm doing.
  • I've been throwing around the idea of writing poetry (hynms) vaguely in the tradition of the sacred harp. I'm not much of a poet, and the project I have in mind is a little bit peculiar (but then, this is me we're talking about, so lets not be too surprised.) At the same time I'm irrationally interested in this project, and we'll see how it goes.
  • I switched to using Chromium as my primary browser. There are still a few plug-ins that I really liked on Firefox that aren't quite as awesome or comfortable in their Chrome-equivalents, but it's close and I'm sure it'll get there. I've been looking for a viable non-Mac WebKit browser for a while, and am pretty happy with the Chrome.
  • Check out git for writers, wiki page that I've been working on over at wikish to try and explore how writers use and might use the git version control system to manage their writing. Contribute if you like.
  • This weekend (yay! snowpocolypse) I hooked up my laptop to my desktop rig, and have basically abandoned my desktop as a machine that I will interact with directly. (I'm a server guy, so it'll get used.) This means I'm using xrandr with StumpWM (pretty swank,) and I must say that I love it. While I adore my laptop, and I really like only having to manage one computer, having this "desktop" setup makes it really perfect: I'm often most comfortable in desk chairs and I like the bigger screen and a real keyboard. So it works well. At some point I'll write up a more thorough account of how I hacked this together.

Ok, this document has been open on my desktop for a few day and I don't have anything new to add to it, so lets call it done.

Onward and Upward!