While we were out…

If we shadows have offended,

    Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber’d here

    While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

    No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend:
    
if you pardon, we will mend:

And, as I am an honest Puck,
    
If we have unearned luck
Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,

    We will make amends ere long;

Else the Puck a liar call;

    So, good night unto you all.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

    And Robin shall restore amends.

How long has it been? This is, of course, a rhetorical question because all one has to do is look at the syndicated feed for this blog, and it is painfully obvious. It has been 3 ½ months since the last substantive post on Tosocnet. Sadly, right after a commitment to bring the blog back up to speed after a week off.

So, today we’re going to answer the following questions:

1. Why has the blog been neglected?
2. What is the future of the blog?
3. What are you going to do about it?

The latter will be answered with a new relevant post tomorrow.

As was mentioned closer to four months ago; I was one of the allegedly five thousand victims of Microsoft’s 2009 layoffs. In general; this tends to put a bit of a damper on your day… week… year. My original perception was that this would give me more time to blog. However, in a weakened economy and with a family to feed, you pull back on the lighter needs in favour of the things that will eventually put cash in your wallet such as employment. As much as I may have dreams of being paid to speak around the world on the concepts of social-networking (and I can hear Dave Winer laughing at my impudence already) No one so far has offered me any cash for working on the topic.

The good news is that I am a software engineer who specialises on the Macintosh platform. As long as I’m willing to move, there are jobs to be had. Within a week of the announced layoffs, the interviews rolled in. First interviews were done by phone, later in person. Microsoft layoffs at main campus were done as a two-month shift. “You will be terminated in two months, so pack your office today, give us your ID Badge and go find a new job.” Now, you were off your team and unable to get into buildings on campus; but you were still on the payroll. I started my new job in the metropolitan St. Louis region on April 6. With the economy as it is… I did the entire move through the kindness of friends (and MANY boxes of pizza) entirely out of my own pocket without professional movers.

If I haven’t made this clear. March consisted of an interview halfway across the country, a job offer, a flight back to find a place to live, packing a 4-bedroom house into a truck, and driving cross-country. If you’re wondering why April didn’t see my return to the online blogging world, I’ll be happy to explain the pneumonia I had for a week from the adrenaline crash. My unemployment was officially 11 days. And that was to allow me to be able to move.

But now, I am settled back into a work schedule; seeing my boy off to daycare; not eating off paper plates on a drop cloth in the living room; and sleeping in my own bed. (Okay, the queen sized box spring had to be sacrifised to the moving gods of, “Won’t fit up the stairs.”)

Lest you believe that I have spent no time at all doing social networking… I will now comment about how that went.

While I haven’t utterly dropped off LiveJournal, I’ve become beyond neglectful of it. I also seem to have passed through my Facebook phase, as the flurry of well-timed, nostalgic interest in my childhood friends seems to have waned during the move. I’ve been using twitter excessively of late. It’s easy to track and cache even if I can’t check it in a few days. I will admit that I am (like many users) disappointed at the decision to remove replies to people you don’t follow from people you do.

Mostly what I’ve had time to do is to honour my exhaustion by reading Twitter, watching TV (Thank you Fox for renewing Dollhouse), and sleeping.

So where do we go from here?

I wish I’d retained the posting; but, someone noted that if you want to be fabulously wealthy blogging on a topic; you need to do it non-stop for about 9-18 months. I made it for two months and then had life intervene. Therefore, it is assuredly my intention to start contributing to this blog again. I will however be reducing the amount I put on the blog as at this point… life is not going to allow me a 2000 word per day regimen. At least… not yet.

Posts throughout the week will be smaller and sometimes just consist of links and maybe a few comments. My plan is to work on a full post during the week and publish it going into the weekend. We’ll see how well this does as my last declaration of return I must admit was pretty much a failure.

I’m also looking into how to better organise the material that I post. I want to improve the content of the post as well as the categories and topics. This, I will hope, will come in time.

This leads to the other confession. While apparent to my wife, every other pedant I’ve dated, and every other pedant who lives on the net; writing and composition are not my forte. (If you are gasping it is either from the painful obviousness of the observation or the confusion over the time that it took me to get over the obliviousness about the observation.

I was one of those kids in High School who’d lose a letter grade on my papers due to the grammar and spelling. In retrospect, I blame the school systems. I remember receiving papers with comments like, “Passive Voice” and “Misplaced Modifier”… But I honestly can’t remember ever being taught what the difference is between active and passive voice; how to recognize when you’re committing the heinous crime; and techniques to remedy it. I just got marked wrong a lot for it. It’s sort of like handing back a math test in Calculus when you’re in Algebra with all the wrong answers marked and no explanation of what you did wrong.

As a result, I love my content and am perpetually self-conscious about my writing.

Next post up tomorrow. Who are you? Who-who… Who-who?

Bookmark this entry

Hide Sites