Uh oh, he’s back…

As the kids say: “It’s been a minute…”.

My first post was on Christmas Day, 2006. It was short and “hesitant”. My second post was almost a month later, even shorter, and contained a typo (which I never fixed).

That same day, I made my first real post. It’s really long, meandering, and captured everything that I could think of about the topic. That became my style from that day forward (long and meandering). My return is likely to be no different. Consider that a TL;DR warning for this and all future posts…

Since that day, I’ve written roughly 770 posts. The vast majority of them were music related. For roughly 6 years, Lois and I went out to see live music an insane number of times (in particular, from 2009 to 2012). I blogged about every single show. In the beginning, if we saw multiple shows in an evening (yes, that was a very regular occurrence), I stuck them all in one post. Eventually, they got broken out into individual ones, so there were nights that produced 5 separate blog posts!

In 2012, something happened that changed my life forever, and as a result made me (practically) stop blogging. We retired. I say we, but Lois really didn’t want to. I’m thankful that she never really regretted it, even though she was dragged into it a little kicking and screaming (yes, I’m exaggerating a bit, but only a bit…). Since June 2012, I’ve blogged exactly 6 times (not including this post).

It seems ironic that when I had dramatically more free time, I stopped blogging. But that’s not the root cause. The bigger irony is that when we had so much time to do whatever we wanted, going to see live music (which was a huge source of joy for us) became less of a priority (for a number of reasons, most of them mundane).

When we were workaholics, we needed a release from the stress of the workday. Going out at night was exactly what the doctor ordered (Dr. Dre that is). But, when we were just home all day relaxing, going out at night felt light more of a chore (ugh, getting dressed, staying up late, etc.). We didn’t need a transition from a tough day, since our days were extremely pleasant!

Going out less (for long stretches, not at all) meant less things to blog about. Getting out of a rhythm of blogging made getting into that mindset difficult even if we did catch a show (yes, I saw shows that I didn’t blog about, heaven forbid!).

But, here I am, thinking that I’ll be somewhat regular again in writing things down. Why, and why now?

The why is easy. For many months now I’ve read many articles on why one should blog frequently on their own site. The majority of those articles were linked to by a friend of mine, Jamie Thingelstad, who blogs, micro-blogs and has a weekly newsletter that I read religiously. His newsletter (which is eclectic but largely oriented toward technology and management) can be found here.

I found all of the arguments for writing regularly very compelling (having done it for so long in the past). In fact, I was doing it all along in a different forum. I have written a crazy number of long emails to a friend of mine over the years since I stopped blogging. So many, that I seriously considered scrubbing any of his personal details from them and publishing them under a series of blog posts called “Letters to my friend”. But, I didn’t.

Now for the “why now”. I have had a large number of technology projects kicking around in my head for the past few years. I’ve procrastinated starting many of them for too long and I promised myself that 2023 would be the year that I tackle most (if not all) of them. I’ve already started in earnest and with a vengeance (in the most positive way) that it gave me the incentive to treat blogging with the same renewed vigor.

I’ll likely cover some (or possibly even all) of the technology projects in future posts (I’ll certainly want to cover the frustrating parts to “think out loud”).

So, unlike my first ever post, or my second one, this one is hardly minimal in length. But, it is definitely in my style and is therefore just the right length.