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January 8, 2005

Dear Diary: Connectedness, Housekeeping, Categories, Blogcation

Weekends are great. Al and I take turns sleeping in (she sleeps in on Saturday, I on Sunday) and waking up with Ben, who's usually up around 6:30 or 7 (though that gets later and later as he becomes more able to get himself around and gets more tired doing it).

This particular Saturday morning, I finally got around to rearranging some of my 'net inputs and straightening up some papers that had been piling up. After an unhappy flirtation with client-side mail filtering, I'm back to using procmail to pre-sort most of my mail, which makes a lot more sense for someone who deals with multiple mail clients. That's my quarterly tech confession, I guess: client-side filtering isn't, you know, for wimps or anything, but I'd rather deal with the "inconvenience" of writing a procmail recipe than figuring out a way to make a bunch of clients think the same way about incoming mail.

There's still some stuff to do in the way of writing scripts to manage mail archiving, backups I've been neglecting since the file server in the house threw a hard drive, and general "make my digital life hold together" stuff that always seems to slip over time.

When we got rid of the satellite dish, I was hoping it would mean a return to better evening routines than we'd fallen into. I held on to our Netflix subscription in the hopes that we'd get back into watching more movies. So far, so good. Al likes it that way, too. We spent at least one year averaging about 1.3 movies a night, and that was cool. We've still got a few things left that the TiVo captured, but I haven't gotten around to reconnecting an antenna to the television, so no broadcast t.v. yet.

Disconnecting comments and trackbacks has proved to be a relief, too: A few trackback spams came through, but it was an immediate relief to know that the redesigned pages wouldn't show them, and it reminded me that MT's templates include RDF data with pointers to trackback information, so I went back in and removed that as well.

Resolutions?

I said in the entry before last that I wasn't making any resolutions this year, but it occurred to me that I have been acting with a little more resolve, all the same.

Killing the dish was a pretty big deal. Not resurrecting the downed server was a pretty big deal. Today I dropped my MSN and Yahoo! IM accounts off of Adium and went around the site scrubbing my e-mail address from a few places and replacing it with a valid one I can use to filter unsolicited mail from legit stuff. Not spam, so much, as "contacts currently unknown to me." Keep whatever you have in your address book for me. The new address is for random passers-by.

On the meatspace-facing side, I've gone after some things that have been crowding my mind lately, too, but I won't go into them.

It's all about two things, though: time and connectedness. I want more of the former and less (or better, anyhow) of the latter. One way to get those things is to scale way back on everything, and see what I feel compelled to do after freeing myself from the things that I think of as optional.

None of it is particularly dramatic, and isn't meant that way. But if I'm anything, it's a dabbler. I get ideas in my head about things that would be cool to try, and I start doing them, then I get bored, then I quit doing them, and they sit around undone and unfinished and they make me feel cramped and weighted down. So the best thing to do is set them aside for a while, see what seems like it's really worth doing, and gradually disappear the rest.

Blogcation

And all that goes toward announcing that the "mph" half of "mph & pk" up there in the banner is going to take a vacation from the blog (and the blogmarks, and mp3friday, and whatever else is running here on the site that I've forgotten about). I'm not going to take anything down or whatever, because Puddingtime! and the linklog are, at least, joint efforts, and if I were to be taken out by a bus I would hope that pk would make brief note of that and wait a respectable period before changing the banner to something like:

But I'm taking some time off from thinking about it all and messing with it so I can get a better idea of what I want to do with my time. The idea was tumbling around in my head for a while, but it took someone stopping by and reminding me that we can always choose to just stop something we're doing for things to gel. Thanks to him for that.

So that's about that. I'm going to get on with my weekend now.