Ripples

One year already

Today it is exactly one year ago since this post launched this English language blog(*) on TypePad. Such an occasion is a good excuse for some introspection, so I'll oblige.

What can I say after one year of blogging? First of all, and most obviously, I'm still here. This is not so evident, if you consider all those blogs that are started in a first rush of enthousiasm, only to quickly wither and die. This doesn't surprise me: I learned from experience that it's not always easy to come up with things to write about with any regularity. And as you may have noticed, my blogging frequency has not always been as regular as I may have wished for... Sometimes, you're just too tired and have no desire or energy left to sit down behind the computer and try to send out a halfway decent post. And as anyone trying to build or change habits will know, after the initial enthousiasm wears off, it's very easy to let things slip. And each day you skip makes it more tempting to skip the next one... Which increases my admiration for people who manage to blog daily, like this one.

What about readership and statistics? This is certainly not a highly scoring blog. After one year and 130 posts, TypePad tells me I have an average of about 7 hits per day. I suppose this is not counting any people subscribing to RSS feeds of this blog. I'm not technically proficient enough on this domain, or rather, I didn't spend the necessary time to investigate this subject, so I cannot tell how many more hits this represents (if anyone can give me a quick pointer there, you're welcome!). Bloglines tells me there are 6 subscribers to my blog feed, so that's something.

A lot of the search hits to my blog come from Palm and GTD related queries. But a surprising search that keeps sending hits down my way is "The law of diminishing returns", which points people to this entry. Why this search is so popular escapes me.

So what's next? I'll continue to write entries as regularly as I can manage. Try to tune the subjects and the writing a bit to increase readership maybe. Not that having a large audience is my objective, but it's nice to be able to build a small comunity of people who are interested enough to read what I write and possibly connect back in some way. But most of all, I'll continue as long as it remains fun and satisfying for me to do so.

So here goes for another year!

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(*) I also keep a dutch language blog, Squonk's Musical Box, that almost exclusively focusses on music. But this obviously also requires some time and energy...

Meditation walk

Today I had a nice experience during my lunch break.

I was walking around in the commercial centre near my office, listening to music on my mp3 player, as I often do. And as always, there were quite some people about. If you're again walking through a crowd, try noticing what's going on in your head. If you're anything like me, chances are that you're continuously observing, evaluating and judging people: they're looking elegant, sloppy, ugly, nice and friendly, threatening, stupid, happy, angry, agressive, bright... All this judging goes on almost unconsciously, it's so automatic that we hardly notice it. But it's there.

But today, something special happened. I don't know if it's the effect of the music I was listening to(*), but at some point this internal chatter faded away and stopped. I just looked at people passing me by, without thinking or judging. Their faces seemed to become more real, more present. It was like some state of meditation, just being totally present in the moment without any intrusive thoughts. This was really a peaceful and relaxing feeling.

I tried to stay in this state for a few minutes, and then it was gone. I think I'll try to practice this state of mind again in the future, it feels so good...

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(*) I was listening to "god has failed" by German band RPWL: recommended!

Don't try this at home

How stupid can one get? Yesterday I came pretty close to championship level, discipline creative stupidity. And it wasn't even intentional...

As you may know, I'm addicted to music, and in order to have as much music as possible with me at any time, I bought an hard disk mp3 player more than a year ago (a 10Gb D.A.P., also known as Nomad Jukebox, from Creative Labs). These devices are now superseded by the current generation of iPods, Zen and similar compact players. But I still like it, for it has a few advantages that cannot be matched by the current crop of players. First, it has a line out, so I can connect it to my hifi. And second, it uses plain standard AA batteries instead of those proprietary LiIon things. These may give a shorter playing time, but it's quite easy to carry a spare set, so I never have to stop using the player because it has to reload (*).

So yesterday I had the brilliant idea, while out and about listening to my player, to have this spare set with me. And for want of a better place to keep them, I just dumped these 4 batteries in my key pouch in my right trouser pocket. No problem. Except that, sometime later that day, I started noticing a warm feeling in this trouser pocket. At first this puzzled me, but I quickly located my key pouch as the source of the heat. That's when it dawned on me. I quickly took the batteries out, using a handkerchief to do so, as some of them were almost too hot to touch. Obviously, putting batteries together with metal keys was not one of my brighter ideas.

And so we learn...

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(*) By the way, as a loader I use the fantastic Ansmann Powerline 4 Traveller, which is relatively expensive, but superb quality.