alexpgp | The strange workings of the mind...

The urge to find patterns is, I think, an overwhelming aspect of being human. We look for patterns everywhere, and are often rewarded by new discoveries as a result. We also sometimes "discover" things that aren't there at all.

So when a number of "completions" made themselves apparent in various forms (Galina and I coming to the end of all of the Phryne Fisher episodes on Netflix, as well as to the end of all the Mozart in the Jungle episodes on Amazon, and paying off a particularly irritating credit card, and my managing to neatly finish off all outstanding translation assignments for the year by 11 am yesterday), I began to quietly attribute entirely too much significance to such endings, which gently led to my wondering why so many loose ends were being tied off just now, and thus found myself quite open to the idea of initiating some project that could not possibly be finished in the time remaining in the old year.

And so, when Galina suggested I actually take concrete steps with regard to a plan we had discussed informally—that of moving all the stuff out of my office so as to replace the old, dingy, soiled carpet with hardwood—I actually "turned to" and got a pretty good-sized chunk of work done by the time the ball dropped in Times Square.

Apropos of which, I find myself no longer capable of getting terribly excited about watching network television feeds intended for people watching on the East coast. Showing me—a resident of the Central time zone—the arrival of the New Year at 11:00 pm my local time seems an open invitation to turn off the Tube and rely on my own resources.

As it turned out, Galina and I settled down to watch a 1966 Paul Newman film titled Harper, which I had recorded previously on our DVR, and even though I managed to remember to pause the playback and hit the network channels to get a gander at what was going on at 11:57 pm our time, by the time I got back from the kitchen with the glasses and the bottle of bubbly, Galina had already returned to the movie.

* * *Today was mostly a continuation of yesterday, which is to say: moving stuff out of my office, As I look around my office as I type this post, what's left is my desk, the library table, a hutch with stuff in and on it, a printer stand, and one all-but-empty shelf.

I did take time out in the middle of the afternoon to work with the web site materials I had backed up from my moribund work blog, but decided, after a while (and a number of false starts), to start afresh using a wiki model (with Dokuwiki) instead of using every hacker's favorite target, WordPress.

As it turns out, I'm going to have to give some serious thought to just how to structure my work blog, particularly if I want to entertain any notion of monetizing it. Over the course of its previous iteration, something like 3,000 fake users registered with the site (along with 2 actual users) and the generated "blacklist" of dodgy URLs caught by a plugin I had installed was nearly 6 MB in size! One thing is for sure: I have quite a way to go before I can seriously think of creating a stream of income from my work blog!

Then again, monetization may just be a pipe dream, and it might make better sense to change models and do the whole thing using TiddlyWiki!

Hope everyone had a good day!

Cheers...