Tag Archives: blog

A final gift…

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For most of last week I wasn’t fit for service. Sure, I managed to feed and bathe myself and tend to the life, health, and safety requirements for Maggie, Hershel, and George, but otherwise I was lost in the tall grass. If I had needed to submit a readiness report, it would have read “not mission capable.” Anything that wasn’t essential just got left on the side of the road.

I don’t handle grief well. I don’t suppose most people do. My approach is almost universally to put my head down and grind through whatever the situation is in low gear. I doubt that my psychologist friends would call it a particularly healthy coping strategy, but it’s what I do. Drawing inward, circling the wagons, defending the keep – call it what you will, but history tells me that it’s what works to get me through to the other side of any individual crisis of the moment. 

Consequently to all that, most of the administrative minutia of life stayed on the wayside until I was better able to get and keep my head “in the game” as it were. That means this week I’m just now starting to pick back up with the business of keeping the household running smoothly – groceries, laundry, and cleaning. It was also time to check in on the administrator’s panel for the blog and pay some fees, and tend to the minor details that keep my small part of the internet up and running.

It was in checking the back office side of the blog that I discovered one last gift that Winston gave me. Without me knowing it, my tribute post to a good and faithful dog rocketed into first place as the single most viewed post in the nine year history of this blog. In fact it didn’t quite double the previous “most viewed” record, but it came awfully close. It turns out the internet isn’t always the dumpster fire we make it out to be. Every now and then its collective users can find a way to leave even the most jaded among us more than a little bit surprised with their generous spirit and kind support.

Winston raised the bar on me while I wasn’t paying attention. If I never write another thing to exceed that mark, I’ll be more than happy with the result.

A rambling post at the end of the year…

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Looking back, I’m forced to admit that I have something of an uneven history of New Year’s Eve posts here on WordPress. It seems to weave between the extremes of overly sentimental on one side and barely acknowledging the changing of the year on the other. It’s easy to slip down either path, depending on the mood that strikes me when I sit down at the keyboard.

Today’s mood is decidedly introspective. I’ll just assume it has something to do with the rain falling again in what feels like a year where it hasn’t really every stopped falling. In spite of the introspection, I’m afraid I really haven’t come up with any deep year end message to leave you here. Instead, I think I’ll use the opportunity to just say thank you for reading along with whatever crackpot ideas and personal screeds show up here. Screaming into the internet’s void is a fairly inexpensive form of four or five day a week therapy for me. It’s always gratifying to find that others may also have a passing interest in whatever it is that’s rattling around my head on any given day.

Those numbers are up a little from last year, but a still off the heyday numbers back in 2013. I can’t bring myself to feel badly about that. The sheer amount of online content created in the last five years makes the fact that anyone finds my slice of it a bit remarkable, really – especially when you consider that it doesn’t involve embracing videos, porn, memes, or even pictures most of the time.

It’ll be 2019 in a few hours. I expect I’ll be asleep by then, but it means I’ll be able to catch the first few peaceful hours of the new year while the average revelers are still tucked soundly into whichever bed they’ve poured themselves or face down drooling on whatever floor they’ve happened to collapse onto. I’d like to think those early hours will give me a first look at a year bound to go better than the one we’re ending… but we’ve been given the opportunity to live in “interesting times” so I expect 2018 is just scratching the surface of what we can expect once the collective hangover starts to lift in 2019.

Easing towards the end…

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Chalk this up to one of those nights where my worst enemy is a blank screen and a flashing cursor. There are worse problems to have – ass cancer for instance – but I really do try rather hard to have something engaging, interesting, or otherwise worth reading here four days a week… even if sometimes the word count runs a little bit short.  There are a few days a year when getting across that bar is harder than others. 

I’m going to blame it on the onrushing calendar and the impending arrival of Christmas and the long sweep of days off that goes along with it. It wouldn’t be entirely true to say that I’ve engaged cruise control and switched my brain over into rest mode, but it would’t be entirely misleading either. The fact is, I’m doing my level best to make the next week and a half as absolutely low key and minimally demanding as possible. 

There are plenty of external factors I can’t control, but there are plenty that I can exert influence upon – like when someone asks if I’m going to scheduled a meeting about some random project coming up in April. The answer to that one is a hard no, spoken with conviction. Something, of course, could come along and convert that no to a yes, but it won’t be because I’m calling a meeting just because we haven’t had one in a while. 

I’m easing into the end of 2018. So bear with me if anything around here feels just a little less energetic than usual. 

Style versus substance…

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I’ll probably live to regret this, but WordPress asked me today if I wanted to switch over to a “new and improved” editor. I’m firmly in the camp of if something is advertised as new or improved it’s practically guaranteed to be worse than whatever it’s replacing. 

I’m going to try keeping an open mind about this thing – although it’s currently very tempting to dismiss it since I can’t figure out how the hell do do things that took two clicks using the old editor. It’s probably just a learning curve kind of thing, but writing is hard enough without needing to spend a lot of time and effort figuring out how to make things look right too. 

That’s probably a lot much to ask from the internet, of course… especially considering the layout this blog hasn’t changed in any meaningful way since the day I first set it up. I’m a guy who’s usually more concerned with content over looks in all things and if my own layout happens to be a little long in the tooth, I suppose that’s a little telling. 

It’s probably a good thing that I’m trying to get this sorted during Thanksgiving week. It’ll give me at least four or five days to figure out what the hell is going on before anyone starts paying attention again.

It was a weird day…

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Today was weird. Unfortunately it was almost certainly the kind of weird that should probably stay embargoed for blogging purposes. It’s a shame, really, because those usually make the most interesting stories. Sigh. Maybe someday when I don’t have to at IMG_3043least be minimally concerned with not throwing too large a wake all over everything. For tonight, though, you’re just going to have to accept my pronouncement that it was, indeed, weird on all counts.

Instead of that, let’s focus instead on the glorious news that Amazon has started shipping my “Fall release” preorder books. I buy a lot of second hand reads, but for some authors I’m willing for fork out the premium to have them brand spanking new. Plus, it feels good buying from a source where a living author, who is presumably making a living from his writing, is going to get a cut of the proceeds. There are million good books out there you can have access to for next to nothing, but helping to make sure new material stays in the pipeline feels like the right thing to do now and then.

When I’ve already got 100+ books sitting on a shelf waiting to be picked up, you could be forgiven for thinking adding two more to the stack wouldn’t make me unduly happy. In this case, you would be exactly wrong. I get a little sparkle in my eye every time one of these little gems walks through the door. Now if I could just make more time for reading and require less time for weird, I think we’d be all set.

Addle minded…

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It turns out that all it takes to throw me off schedule is a long-standing holiday weekend. I can’t remember the last time a fresh post didn’t go up on a Monday evening, but sure as anything I was laying comfortably in bed last night when I realized I’d missed it.

The good news, I suppose, is that nothing melted down for lack of my shouting at the internet on a random night in September. The bad news is that this means I’m inevitably going to have to add “post something” to the daily list of things to do in order to make sure that it gets done. You’d think that it’s one thing so ingrained in my daily routine that it would be hard to miss. Obviously I thought so to, which is what brings me to the sad pass that we currently occupy.

That said, it was a long holiday weekend. I managed to not leave the happy confines of Fortress Jeff for well over 72 hours. It was glorious even if it didn’t lend itself well to anything particularly interesting happening. With all the inputs controlled, there’s considerably less need for ranting and raving than there would be on any typical Monday (even a Telework Monday).

So there you have it. As much as I wish I could tell you I was saving up for something big, the week was truncated purely because of my own addle mindedness. Lord I wish there were more weekends like that.

Fridays…

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It’s been a long time since I’ve had to think of an original post to cap off the week on a Friday night. With the archives now well and truly exhausted, though, I’m left with no choice.

What I’m thinking about doing, now that there’s a more than twelve year deep back catalog of posts, is to use Friday evenings to revisit some of the “best of” posts from the last 4,380+ days. Maybe this is the chance to trot some of the golden oldies out of the barn for a fresh look using something like an “on this date” format.

I’m giving it some thought – do I add fresh commentary, note where I’ve changed my mind and where I haven’t, try to provide some fresh insight? Yeah, I don’t know yet.

The thought of going on a deep dive expedition way back to 2006 is equal parts tempting and terrifying. I like to think that in the intervening years my writing style and substance has improved. Then again maybe it hasn’t. Honestly so much of that was written so long ago I’ve entirely forgotten it. I want to imagine that the Jeff who’s sitting here at the keyboard now is very much a kindred spirit to the one who wrote those early posts. Believe me, you don’t want me to delve too deeply into how much of my self-identity is tied up in being blissfully consistent.

So, I guess the only think I’ll say tonight is “we’ll see.” If next week around this time you find yourself reading something dated from 2006, don’t worry. You’re not caught in a time warp, it’ll just be me doing more excavation of the past in the never ending search for clicks.

Something cool just happened…

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So, something cool just happened. Well, I guess it’s something cool if you enjoy blogging, facts and figures, and establishing order out of chaos.

A few minutes ago I hit “post” on the last of the archive material I was bringing over from my long-defunct and anonymous alternate blog site. For the first time ever every single post I’ve made now resides on WordPress right here at http://www.jeffreytharp.com. That’s 2,774 posts stretching back all the way through 2006 and the early days when MySpace was considered a legitimate blog hosting alternative.

I’m not even going to guess at the word count or the number of hours that have poured into this little endeavor of mine. Both of those factoids would fall into the “interesting but irrelevant” category for the moment. Instead, I think I’ll just fix a bit of a drink, sit back, and be pleased that I’ve done a thing.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Perception. Working for our Uncle lo these many years has given me an odd relationship with money, particularly with my perception of what constitutes a “large amount” of it. Sure, in my personal life $100,000 is a big number. It’s almost twice what I paid for my first place. In my professional capacity, though, throwing out round numbers in the tens and hundreds of millions is the rule rather than the exception. That’s why having long drawn out conversations about spending $100k makes perfect sense to my tax paying soul, but drives my professional self to madness. In the overall scope of the budget it’s barely a rounding error and I’d just like to get on with other stuff.

2. Facebook. I secretly suspect that we all have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. It turns out due to a recent policy change, my blog, hosted on WordPress, is no longer allowed to communicate directly with my Facebook profile. What I use to be able to do with one click can now conveniently be done with about twelve. I do love it when technology is used to make simple tasks even harder to do. I also enjoy it when the solution to having a handful of bad actors exploit a feature is to terminate that feature for all users. Look, I know Facebook is a “free” platform and they can do what they want, but honest to God at some points their tweaks and “features” are going to drive one to ask if it isn’t just easier to interact with the other platform instead.

3. The Privilege Police. I have a bad habit of browsing the comments when I read news articles or opinion pieces. I’d probably be far less agitated by the news if I’d stop doing that. On one recent article, every 3rd comment was some variation on “this was so written from a place of privilege,” as if that were somehow sufficient reason to invalidate someone’s opinion or personal experience as detailed in an article written from their point of view. It feels patently ridiculous to assume every American, living and, dead has had the same American Experience. I feel not one ounce of shame about where or who I’ve come from and will continue to tell my story from my perspective no matter the gnashing or teeth and rending of garments it may cause the Privilege Police. After all, they are perfectly free to write an article addressing the same topic or experience from their point of view. Apparently creating original content is harder than just sitting at the keyboard being offended by every damned thing.

It’s pointy sticks for WordPress…

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It’s come to my attention over the last several days that the bit of technology that connects my WordPress account to Facebook to provide a helpful little notification that there’s something new to read seems to be not working as it should do.

Having been in at the creation of the internet, spending my formative technological years in newsgroups and chat rooms before moving on to more modern offerings like Classmates, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. I only mention it to establish my credibility as one who is steeped well in the art of screaming into the online void. The fact that nothing happens to be screaming back at any particular moment isn’t particularly surprising. The void is a big place after all. However, that little notice that “Hey, Jeff published something new” is something I looked forward to five nights a week.

The beauty of the basic WordPress account is that it works just about flawlessly 999 days out of 1000. There’s not that much administrative work to keep up with unless you have a deep desire to figure out what all the switches and buttons do. Mostly it just sits there and runs itself based on whatever selections you made when first setting up the account. I’ve stayed firmly rooted to this platform because it has required so little in the way of upkeep over the years.

There are, of course, there’s the odd day when something behaves oddly and you have to climb down into the engine compartment and start poking things with pointy sticks until it starts working again. That’s what it’ll feel like anyway, because I’ve very clearly lost touch with how anything deeper than the surface layer of technology works.