A reflective post...

This is a reflective post... what does that mean for all 2 of you reading it? Well, that means that any notion you had of this being a topical blog is about to be blown out the window. From this sentence onwards, it's all belly button lint and me, me, me, me...

If you're still reading, and you're not me, then know this: I like footnotes... I like parantheticals. I use them liberally... and without shame or guilt. So, be prepared. The following will contain a lot of paranthetical statements. Word.

I've been studying blogging for a while now... and I feel the need to take a moment and talk about blogging itself. Danah (who, by the way, is the first result on Google for query "danah", which means that she'll get wicked software discounts from these guys and whose name can be capitalized when used as the first word in a sentence) taught me a while back to appreciate the fact that there are bloggers, journalers, xanga-ers, etc. Each one of these lives within a different culture of blogging (shout out to SIMS-incoming Judd!!!). I came into blogging largely through my first conversation (and subsequent friendship) with Mary... the first blogs I started to read (or recognize that I was already reading and just didn't call them "blogs") were largely Movable Type blogs... (which is a classification I use for some vaguely defined notion of a culture of bloggers that I started reading which were largely but not exclusively Movable Type blogs... I don't link to Movable Type because I don't agree with their end user license agreement... which you'll have to find yourself).

I read very few journalers. I still think I read only one journaler (Ping) regularly. Something that I have come to appreciate in my study of bloggers (with Yuri, the man "with the insights we all wish we had") is that people regularly appreciate making use of their blog in a way that mimics a traditional diary. People who tend to use their blogs more as journals are often called "journalers".

All this build up and for what? Well I'd like to start infusing more of a journaler-like vein into my blog. And, unfortunately, there's nothing you can do about it (unless you're me, of course).

So here goes: I've been a little stressed lately. Fortunately, I've got some serious vacation coming to me, soon... I'll get to see a good chunk of my family. What's got me stressed? I'm working on three projects. That may not sound like a lot, but they're all jobs that seem to require a commitment of half-time at the least to do anything substantial. As I've been saying to a few people I see regularly on a face-to-face basis: The more projects you take on, the less you can do on any one project. This is damn frustrating for me... I like to be able to do a good job and do it on time. And a few things, like rock criticism and being a licensing volunteer at the FSF, have basically become distant memories.

A large part of this is because two projects are related to election systems. The November election is approaching and looking ever so much as close as 2000 and seeming ten times as hopeless. And this hopelessness I feel is not related to the merits of the two candidates... it's related with a basic funciton of our society: the right and duty we have to be informed about persons running for political office and even more basically, to use this information to express our preference for the people that occupy these offices based on the information we have. Can you imagine a Florida 2000 but without anything to recount (and by anything I mean votes and laws and regulations the govern what should happen when official records of the votes are stored on electonic storage media)

I'll have to stop... if you've read this far, you'll be pleased to know that I'll have more journal-like entries coming your way.