Scott, after all this time, has got himself a blog.
After looking at MovableType and getting a little frustrated by the setup process, he decided to use WordPress instead. So now we’ve got a Battle of the Blog Platforms in our own home! 🙂
I’m waiting for the first bug-fix patch before I go to MT 4.0 though.
Four years ago today, Fiat Lux came online.
I’ve averaged a post every 1.21 days since then. Not bad, for a solo effort (plus one guess post from Scott).
I’ve had days where fewer than a dozen people came to my site, and a few days where more than 6,000 people stopped by.
I’ve had days where I couldn’t wait to get something up onto the blog, and days where I’ve though about shutting it down entirely.
I’ve learned a lot about the mechanics of web marketing — SEO, how to build traffic, how to get links — that I use in my professional work.
I like to think that the discipline of writing this blog has made me a better writer (although this post is probably not one of me better efforts in that regard). At the very least, I’m more aware of my weaknesses as a writer now, and hopefully I do a better job of working through them.
Lately, though, it feels like most of what I want to write about is me, me, me. And this blog is at it’s best when it’s not all about me. Not sure how to resolve that contradiction right now; perhaps I need a few more days away from the blog to get my groove back.
I closed my first post like this:
What next? Who knows. But I think that I’d like to blog the journey.
And now, 4 years later, I still do. So let’s see what happens.
Scott and I were supposed to be taking a week’s vacation back East this week. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. I posted some of the headlines in Twitter over the weekend, but if you’re not a Twitter fan, here’s the long and the short of it:
On Friday afternoon we were told that what we though was a mild-to-moderate shoulder injury Scott suffered while out on a bike ride was, in fact, a lot more severe than that — basically, the accident broke both the left ball joint and shoulder blade in several places — and surgery was required to put Scott’s shoulder back together.
He went under the knife first thing Saturday and is now home recovering. The vacation has been canceled. Long-term, Scott will be just fine, and everything could be much, much worse — which I’m infinitely grateful for — but I am also bummed about the lost vacation. We don’t travel home anywhere nearly as often as I would like.
There’s a lot of interesting things going on out there in the world to blog about, but I’m not feeling very bloggy right now. Please feel free to peruse my blogroll for a list of folks doing a much better job of this blogging thing than I am.
In a little more than a week from now, this humble blog will celebrate its 4th anniversary. But that’s not what this post is about.
I was actually blogging all the way back in 1996, although back then, it was called an “online diary”. I thought that I’d lost those web pages forever, but I finally got the Wayback Machine to cough them up (I’d forgotten the correct URL, silly me).
So, if you’re curious, you can see what I had to say all the way back in February 1996, and intermittently the rest of that year. Nothing momentous at all, really, but I’m pleased about it. And I’ve downloaded a copy of the file, so that I won’t lose it again.
Insomnia and a massive blog spam attack are not the most promising start to the week.
Just saying…..
A New York Times article on the millionaires of Silicon Valley is garnering mostly negative feedback today. And it’s easy to see why. It’s hard to have sympathy for people like this:
“You’re nobody here at $10 million,” [Gary] Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar
I can’t say I’m all that sympathetic to people who got themselves onto a money treadmill and now feel that they can’t get off it. You always have a choice, and if you think you don’t, it’s because you’re not looking in the right places for options. If your role models are the folks with a net worth of $50 million, then yeah, you’re a schlub for only having $5 million. Perhaps you might try spending a little time with people whose net worth is only $500 thousand instead? Is that too demeaning for you? Those people, after all, can’t afford a nanny for the toddlers and new Acuras for the teenagers. They might even — dare I say it? — rent their homes and join the Y instead of a country club.
Is that too much like “admitting defeat”?
Cry me a freaking river.
Here’s where I come from on this: I went to a very exclusive private school when I was growing up, and my family was on the lower end of the income spectrum for the school. Kids didn’t have ipods and multi-function cellphones and $200 Gucci sunglasses back then, but some things were the same; many of my classmates had brand-new cars, designer jeans, shopping sprees at Bloomingdales, and spring break skiing trips to Aspen. I didn’t. I’d like to say that it didn’t matter, but that would be a lie. Of course you’re going to feel bad if some people in your peer group have stuff you don’t. What’s important is how you deal with it.
If you’re lucky, you take away the lesson that ‘stuff’ doesn’t necessarily make you happy, that somebody is always going to have more stuff than you, and to be happy with the stuff you do have. If you’re less lucky, you walk away with the ambition to get all that stuff, and then some, when it comes time for you to raise your own kids. And thus, a new generation of overworked treadmill-walkers is born.
Any accusations of sour grapes aside, there’s also a business lesson to be drawn here. I was interested to see that one of the subjects of the article earned much of her wealth from being an early member of the team at Handspring (and later a senior staffer at Palm). One wonders if that company’s ever-increasing inability to deliver products that people wanted might be linked to their own staff’s disconnection from what life for “normal” people is like.