There’s hardly a worse way to end a vacation than catching a flu. There are also better starts to flu then midnight spells of vomiting, when your stomach is completely empty. All you do is spit acid and brush teeth afterwards in hope they might stick around a bit longer.
The good thing is that it beats catching malaria, which I hopefully didn’t, and that it only gets better onwards. I seem to be left only with a slight cold and a nasty *censored* problem that I’m hoping will disappear in next few days. I’m almost through my unread emails as well so if you’ve sent me something and haven’t heard from me yet, this would be a good time to send me a reminder.
This vacation has been very much unlike the others. It was the first time in years, well, since I started working really, that I didn’t work at all while being on vacation. I didn’t think of work either, an odd experience I enjoyed with gusto.
Still, a long way home provided ample opportunity for reflection, hazy thoughts and dubious decisions one of which is that I’m going to rewrite this site and create my own publishing platform, which will be better suited than those known to me for things I need and things I’d like to try out.
I’ve also given myself a deadline, a year, in which to come up with this thing. A deadline that I think provides enough time to hope for sucess and not enough to slack.
What won’t change is the low frequency of my posts, a belief strengthened by wading through hundreds of unread posts accumulated in my feed reader while I was gone, majority of which being little more than a waste of time. But who am I to complain.

I’ve been writing less lately, which had little to do with summer laziness and more with me thinking about publishing on the web.

Many have said that Internet (or Web) is not a television, but neither is it a magazine or a book. Yet I find myself again and again leaning on preconceptions picked up from my favorite medium. So this summer has been spent exploring my preconceived notions and trying to find out which of them still make sense on the web and how to tackle those which don’t.

And the result of this exploration? I still don’t like WordPress, so I might go about writing my own publishing platform which would offer me an opportunity to test some of newfound ideas. Or I won’t, recognizing vast amount of time needed and I’ll end up only writing an article or two. But what I’m certain I will do is write less.

In a world where every monkey can publish so almost every one of us eventually does restraint is a virtue. There were too many posts that neither benefited me nor those who came across them. Maybe I won’t change the signal-noise ratio, but I will put less crap out there in absolute terms.

Related to all these thinking is a recent announcement of HyperScope . Doug Engelbart’s vision of Open Hyperdocument System (link may not work in every browser) has been a source of many ideas this summer and it’s certainly nice to finally have available a system to test at least some of them.

It’s normal and expected that part of every industry’s terminology will look weird or even obtuse to outsiders. But when a music executive, in an otherwise very interesting podcast , keeps referring to music lovers as consumers and to act of listening or even enjoying music as consuming it, it just makes me want to rip his jugular out scream.

There’s not any less of it after I’m done listening and I wasn’t hogging it in the first place.