Still running late…
Late to work, late to home, I suppose. 6 pm and just now I’m finally getting out of the office. Last minute changes to projects, emails that wouldn’t send, and crashing computers were the order of the day.
It wasn’t overall a bad day, though. Well, not any worse than usual. I got to set a couple more things up on the Z, and everything seems to be running smoothly (Konqueror Embedded is a superior web browser to the Z’s built in Opera browser in almost every way so far). I got to have lunch with Natalie (bestest girlfriend in the world, for nearly 2 years now… gimme a w00t!), and got in touch with the guys on AniGaming (which I’ve been slacking off on). Hopefully we should be getting the graphics templates for AG’s new look by tomorrow, and we’re planning to get together tomorrow night to work on that (and just hang out) tomorrow evening. So stuff is taking shape.
Natalie seemed bemused when I told her I was starting up this blog. Can’t say I blame her, I have a long history of starting projects and then not finishing them. And I know she’s still hurting somewhat over the whole Long Live The Lemur fiasco. For those of you who don’t know, LLTL was a little site done in PHPNuke that started out as a blog like this one, and a programmer’s playground of sorts, that started getting too big for its britches. I got hit with a late dose of the dot.Bomb ‘irrational euphoria’ that infested much of the late 90’s, and next thing you know I’m making up merchandise for it, creating spin-off businesses, and generally making a grand old fool of myself. And since Natalie is the most supportive girlfriend in the world, she let me drag her along into this ill-conceived venture.
Of course, the site wasn’t anywhere near a success (though I did learn a lot from it) and eventually I lost interest in it and let it fade. Didn’t affect me too much, since that’s my usual modus operandi: get excited about something, dive into it headfirst with everything I’ve got, and eventually burn out on it and drop it for the next project. It’s taken me a lot of effort to find things I want to commit to for the long haul, since it sort of goes against my nature, but I know certain things (my relationship with Natalie, AniGaming.com, this blog) are worth the effort and investment.
Anyway, while for me the slow death of LLTL wasn’t really a big deal, it hit Natalie rather hard. She’d invested a lot of herself into that pipe dream, and it wasn’t quite as easy for her to get those pieces of herself back. So she’s understandably leery of any projects I show enthusiasm for now, including this blog. But the new TechGnosis is a completely different beast from what LLTL was. I think I’ve figured out part of what went wrong there: I let something that was a personal, pet project, grow too big. I started imagining possibilities for it far beyond what it was originally supposed to be, and when those possibilities failed to materialize, I grew disillusioned and let it drop. PHPNuke makes it easy to get into that mode of thinking, because it just lets you do so much.
Therefore, I’m'making this blog a simpler, more limited, and more personal affair. It’s just a blog, no more and no less. It’s not meant to become anything more than an online journal and nothing else. That’s why I decided to go with Moveable Type as the engine for this blog. Unlike PHPNuke or a lot of the other software out there, it’s a fairly focused program that does one thing and does it well: blogs. Even if i wanted to turn it into something else, it would be such a mammoth undertaking that I don’t wanna even consider it. So this is a fundamentally different endeavour: it’s more personal: the open journal I’ve always wanted to keep (my first real attempt to do this was a notebook that I had taped over my bed while I was in highschool. Anyone who found the notebook was welcome to read through it and write an entry of their own. I still have that notebook.), and nothing more. And this project is all me, not dragging anyone else along (though everyone’s invited to comment). Here’s hoping I’m right.
