I’m sure you’ve all been wondering where I’ve been, and why I haven’t been blogging, so here’s the explanation. After the first time around, back before the blog was actually public, I realized that if I didn’t make a habit of posting every day, I’d eventually get stuck in the trap of having too much inertia to overcome in order to post again. I’d accumulate so much stuff to post that I wouldn’t be able to set aside the time to write about it. So when I did my stretch of daily posting for months on end in 2005, I had made a mental contract with myself to never miss a day.
Category Archives: Site News
State of the Ed
I know it’s been ages since I last wrote here. There have been a number of reasons for this. I hadn’t planned to go into silent hibernation for so long. Part of it was my motivation for writing and posting to my blog, which I’ll get to soon. Seeing as I’m not in Japan, and won’t be there in the foreseeable future, this space is no longer going to be about the land of the rising sun. Instead, I’m going to be posting more about my art practice, as I try to return to the path of being primarily an artist, as opposed to someone who identifies themselves based on their current “money job” and secondarily as an artist. Oh yeah, and rants about England. I’m likely to be posting lots of those.
Obligatory Post for August 2005
I’m writing this tonight because I feel bad for not having posted anything at all yet in August, and with less than an hour left before September starts, time is running out. Read on to find out what I have and haven’t been up to, and a few thoughts on my blogging future.
Searching For Some Things
It’s search results time again. Today I’ve selected my favourite searches that have directed people to this blog. Unlike the last time I did this back in June, I’m not going to post links or commentary on the individual search phrases. You can draw your own conclusions from the list.
The Coming Week: Blog on Autopilot
Between apartment cleaning, packing, disconnecting my internet connection at home, and travelling this week, I won’t have a lot of time to post, and I’m not sure if and when I’ll have a reliable internet connection again.
Having said that, I’ll probably have written enough posts to allow my automatic posting software to keep up with the daily blogging schedule until Friday. Beyond that is a huge swirling vortex of uncertainty. I’ve set up the posts to go online in the late afternoon (Japan time).
Plans: Moving and Blogging
I had what amounted to a big infodump of miscellaneous stuff today. Topics included, but weren’t limited to: our moving plans to Canada and then to England, my blogging plans, answers to an old question about tea plantations, and stuff that’s been happening around here lately: Jarrod and his pet lizards, the rain, and the noise.
But the first two items on that list took on a life of their own so I’ll be posting the rest as individual daily entries as I write them. It’ll help keep the entries focused, as well as allowing me to break them down into more manageable pieces. Plus it’ll keep the archives a bit cleaner.
Random Prizes: The Results
Way back in late April, in a bid to get more people to comment here, I offered up some random prizes. Then last week I finally got around to taking pictures of them. Today I actually figured out the winners, and wrapped up all the packages. It was a bit like preparing for Christmas, except that the recipients are, in general, people who don’t usually make it onto my Christmas list.
So, who are the five lucky winners?
Random Reader Rewards: The Prizes
The dogs at the local Buddhist temple are making a big ruckus—their barking is echoing off the concrete building and creating a feedback loop—which means it must be nine o’clock. This random bit of trivia has nothing to do with today’s post topic but is part of the nightly reality of Kannonji-machi.
I only just remembered my promise about sending out random gifts to commenters. Well, that’s not exactly true, but I’ve only just had time to make good on the promise. Today, you get to see some of the wonderful prizes that I’m going to put into the care of the Japanese postal system later this week.
13 Ways to Find My Blog
Today I wrote about time, but what I’d thought would be a short post has grown to over 1200 words so far. It’s in need of some major editing so I’m going to file it and take another look at it in a few days. Meanwhile, just when you thought statistics were boring, I’m going to demonstrate that they don’t have to be that way. As with most things, it’s all about how you choose to interpret them.
Coding Exhaustion, Plus a Tobata Festival
I’m trying to keep these site maintenance posts interesting by including something completely unrelated. Is it working?
Last Friday and Saturday we had the annual Culture Festival at Yahata High School, so today I had a day off for having gone to work on the weekend. How did I spend my day? Well, if any of you were trying to read my blog, you may have figured out that I was fiddling with the code.