Really starting to think of creating my own, eponymous, domain, following my prior experience with switching services, and the logic from micro.blog’s Manton Reece in his online book Indie Microblogging

Domain names are so important because they exist at a layer above any web hosting platforms. If you’re no longer happy with your web host, or they go out of business, it’s your domain name that allows you to move to another web host without breaking URLs, so that readers can still find your content. This level of indirection makes your content portable, which makes it your own.

A title?

A blog post?

I’m an inveterate tinkerer with a seemingly innate inability to forget the tools and processes, to concentrate on the message, story or narrative that I want to impart.

So I’m no back to trying out Byword on the Mac - back to the rather appealing white text on black (well, a strangely relaxing but equally distracting washed-out green-black that highlights the backlighting system on the display, with all its patches of lighter and darker black, redolent of swimming in a lake with its warmer and cooler patches of water).

I still love the idea of distraction-free typing - but I keep on getting tied up with the mechanics of saving and exporting these markdown files.

EXCEPT: I’ve just discovered that Byword can publish to Evernote, which is rather a nice little feature, now that I think of it. And it can publish to Blogger… where I’ve had an account and a blog for ages.

So Byword really is right for tapping out those disjointed nightly thoughts (which I have allowed myself all too rarely of late).

Parentheses - the jotter’s best friend, a reader’s worst enemy.

And now… do you know what? I’m revising this note on my Surface tablet, in Markdown via Dropbox, gradually escaping Microsoft Office’s orbit once again (or at least continuing my potentially hopeless task of reducing my dependency on the giants of software, Microsoft, Google and the like.) All I need now is to see if this edit truly makes it back to Byword, to continue my light on dark theme fad of today…

By golly, it works, even if nobody can understand what I just wrote above. _____________________________________________________________

So if this document is to become part of my lifestream, what message does it contain? What clues to my person does it hide more than it reveals? Most likely hints of the permanent dreamer: someone who feels the desire to write - to lose himself in writing - but isn’t quite capable of entering that world fully in mind and body. Someone with too many thoughts parked in his head, all of them just slightly too amorphous to write down in any meaningful way. Someone suffering from - and enjoying too much - diversions manifold.

This blog looks to be in grave danger of becoming an orphan; no writer to care for it, only the occasional glance in from human readers and data mining bots as they continue moving swiftly on to other digital destinations, only Google’s server farm keeping it from sinking into the digital abyss. A blogging pause has happened here before, of course, as noted in my Blogging State Of the Union post from October 2012.  I’ve again not posted here for several months, obviously because nothing of interest has happened to me in that time.

Perhaps that’s right. The day-to-day has been pretty overwhelming and I’ve found that whilst trying to keep my engineering blog a little more lively, there’s simply not been the headroom, or quiet time, or energy to work on this here blog. But what about the content? Has that been lacking, too? Thankfully, I think not.

What have I been up to since Shanghai? Well, I played in another symphony orchestra concert (Gershwin, Shostakovitch and Rachmaninov’s 3rd Symphony). I remixed a Jamiroquai track for their 20th anniversary remix competition, we were served notice and had to find a new house to live in, I started jogging again… and again…, I worked, and took part in general family life.

Over the Easter holidays, I enjoyed visits to the Steim Automuseum and to the Deutsche Phonographisches Museum - which I will describe in another post - and I worked.

So, lots of excuses not to keep this blog ticking over: many of those excuses could easily have been made into entries in this online diary of mine, building up my insignificant history, for as long as the Blogger servers and HTML continue…

…anyway, enough mulling and pondering, enough slumping into sofas, and onwards with the writing!

I think, after more than 18 months of maintaining this online presence, I can now confirm that blogging is not a trivial activity. Translating thoughts to series of words that have both meaning and flow can be surprisingly hard work. Perhaps I make too much of a meal of it, revising and editing my posts to the point of never finishing them, but neither am I comfortable with the splash and dash method: a blog is a document of some permanence, and is therefore worthy of being done correctly. Whilst blog posts can (and, really, should) be edited after publication, I still hold to the old concept of the publishing date bearing some relation to the date of an particular thought or event.

Still, jamais être content is a burden (umm, that’s content in the sense of satisfaction, rather than information). I can see eight unpublished drafts listed behind the scenes of this blog, plus another two or three on my On Engineering blog. It’s manageable, but there are strong indications that I’m not a great finisher. I would by no means call myself a perfectionist, but there’s something that blocks me from hitting that post button.