First Post!

OK, so I kinda sorta ran a blog on rickterrill.com for the last year. Problem was, I was all gung-ho on Ruby on Rails, etc. so I was running Typo … running under Apache … proxied over to Lighttpd … using a special port that host Textdrive gave me … with a SQLite database … on a shared hosting environment …
I was concentrating on the cool technology under the hood rather than writing content.

Anyway, the blog was offline more than it was online and I never wrote new posts anyway. Now I’ve moved over to WordPress.com and will start concentrating on writing content!

Why finally start blogging?

Lots of reasons, but overall I feel like I’m losing touch with the goowey geeky inside. I’ve been doing lots of neat stuff at work lately: learning about business, strategy, marketing, etc. That’s all well and good but I’ve been totally neglecting my nerdly nature.

Writing

Another reason is that I recently noticed a serious decline in my writing ability. The words used to flow very easily when I would write a report, a project brief, or what have you. A month or so ago I sat down to write up a proposal and it took forever. The end result was a pile of crap and I was ashamed to hand it over to my boss. I vowed at that point to start blogging… months later here I am.

Writing is definitely a “practice makes perfect” art form. I’m going to put effort into being concise (I write too much stream-of-conciousness) and practice formally-informal copywriting. You know, the kind all the web 2.0 kids are writing these days.

Slack

I disgust myself lately with how much ambition I fail to act on! Jeff and I were trading witty programmer banter over IM today and I said that ["I've included far too much conditional logic in my startProject() method"]. Speaking of Jeff, he’s the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. He started a blog over at hillemania.wordpress.com and has been posting good content for a few weeks now. Way to go Jeff!

To that end, I’ve started using TiddlyWiki as an effort to get organized. Specifically, I’m using an adaptation called MonkeyGTD which is actually a GTD adaptation of MonkeyPirate which is a plugin set for TiddlyWiki. That sounds complicated, which usually turns me off, but the implementation is actually quite elegant! I could rave about this system for an hour, so I’ll write up a post about MonkeyGTD and TW soon.
A nice side feature is that TiddlyWiki is totally tweaking my geek meter. I spent an hour customizing my dashboard on the Acela this morning.

Formalizing Thought and Keeping in Touch

It seems weird, but I feel like a lot of “stuff” just goes into some psychological black hole. I think about a LOT of topics throughout the day as I rapidly switch hats, and I’m constantly thinking “oh, I should put some more thought into that” or “oh, I’d like to share that idea with some people.” If I accomplish that one goal, then this blog will be a success for me!