Tag Archives: milestone

Update from the archives…

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Since it’s sunday morning and dinner is happily doing its thing in the crock pot, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to load up this week’s update from the archives. Today’s offering includes the last post from October and the first four from November 2007. There are no epic rants this go around, but they lose dramatic effect if one pops up every week, don’t you think?

Today’s posts also mark a milestone in the “from the archive” series. There are now less than a year’s worth of back posts waiting to get transferred here to WordPress. It’s bittersweet. I’m sure I enjoy this weekly trip to the recesses of my brain as much if not more than anyone. I’ll be a little sad to see them come to an end.

Enjoy this morning’s posts and remember we’ll be back with poppin’ fresh content tomorrow.

Sometimes you can’t be too cynical…

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(c) University of Florida

(c) University of Florida

Government work tends to be one of those odd environments where up is down, good is evil, and logic is nonsense. It feels, at times, like a none-too-subtle combination of Groundhog Day and Dante’s Inferno. Maybe that’s an exaggeration… but only a little. I can say that with a degree of certainty because that’s the kind of day it’s been today.

At just after 11:00 this morning I was handed my formal notice that the United States Government plans to furlough me one day a week beginning on July 8th. Exactly 148 minutes later I received an email congratulating me on ten years of service to the government and notifying me that I’d be getting a certificate at the next office awards ceremony. You’d have to work pretty hard at sending two more discordant messages to your employees. Timing, as they say, is everything… even when it comes to giving with one hand and taking away with the other. I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m not in a rush to agree to parading across the stage, smiling for the photo op, and pretending that I give a good goddamn about another certificate in my three ring binder.

I’m sure at some point in the distant past, a nice suitable for framing certificate was a fine motivational tool… but unless I can barter that certificate for goods and services, under the circumstances, I think you can understand why I don’t think it’s worth the paper it’s printed on. I’m going to improvise, adapt, and overcome… but don’t expect that I’ll be thanking anyone for the opportunity.

And people wonder why I’m cynical about almost everything.

Three zeroes and a birthday…

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Let me say that it’s a big week for me personally and that as a result I’m about to geek out on you guys a little bit. Today marks the 3rd birthday of jeffreytharp.com and running this blog as an independent website. After spending my formative years blogging on MySpace a short stint on Blogger, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed having a permanent place to hang my virtual hat. Having the name right there as the web 1000 Postsaddress means you’d damn well better be willing to be accountable for whatever comes flying out of your mouth. Even though it’s occasionally caused some friction, it’s made be a better blogger and a better writer in general. It’s absolutely worth it.

In addition to marking a birthday, this week also saw my 1000th post go live. Since there is still more good stuff coming from the archives every Sunday, I look for that total to keep going by leaps and bounds. All my old blog posts from MySpace are now available here and I’m working my way through the Blogger years every Sunday. I’m really looking forward to finally having all my posts under one electronic roof sometime in the next four or five months.

Finally, thanks to everyone for keeping up with me from June 29, 2006 to today. I know the “about” section claims that I don’t write for an audience, but we all know differently. No one throws this much life and opinion into the ether if they don’t secretly enjoy being the center of attention from time to time. I supposed that’s not really much of a secret anyway.

19,526 visits, 1,003 posts, 314 comments, and 59 countries over the last 1,095 days. For one sane voice in the wilderness, that’s a pretty respectable record.

10 years on…

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10-year-anniversaryAround this time a decade ago me and about 30 of my brand new friends were herded into an auditorium that would be our home for the next six months. We were handed about 371 pieces of paper needing our signatures, took our oath of office as government employees, and, as I recall, spent the rest of the day trying to figure out what the hell we had gotten ourselves into after accepting a rather vague sounding job from an obscure sounding Army office.

I’m not going to lie, this career hasn’t been what I expected. It hasn’t been all good, but it hasn’t been all bad either. All things considered, Uncle Sam carved out some amazing opportunities for a guy with a history degree whose only real ambition in the winter of 2003 was to get as far away from teaching as possible. Ultimately, work is work. I’ve had some good days and there have been some spectacular flops too. On balance, it feels like there has been more good than bad, though.

Ten years feels like a pretty impressive milestone for a guy who up until that point had never stayed with an employer for more than three years… of course the pessimist in me can resist pointing out that all a ten year anniversary means is that I’ve got twice that amount of time before I can even think about hanging it up. That sounds like an awfully long time until I remember just how fast the last ten years have seemed to go. I have a disturbing feeling that I’m going to wake up one morning a month from now and see the 20 or 30 year mark coming over the horizon.

Apparently time doesn’t just fly when you’re having fun. Time just flies.

The place to be…

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In case you’ve missed it, Sundays are special here at jeffreytharp.com. They’re the day I get to mostly turn my brain off and post some of the gems from a bygone era rather than try dredging up new material. I like to think of it as being like a TV show in syndication, except for the part where people get residuals when those old episodes show up again. Here’s it’s mostly just a good way to get all of my posts back under one roof.

While I was tinkering around with a few settings this weekend, I gave my metrics a good hard look and was surprised to see the total number of posts here steadily creeping towards the 1000 mark. After looking at the number of old MySpace posts that still need to make an appearance and doing some back of the napkin math, I’m pretty sure I’m actually already past that milestone. Nevertheless, I don’t feel right about making that official until I see the official WordPress post-counter roll over that third zero. Even with my five-every-Sunday posts, it’s going to be a few months before we cross that bridge. Don’t worry, though, I’ll be sure you let y’all know when we get there.

Like your average nine-year old, I like having something to look forward to almost as much as I enjoy actually experiencing or getting the thing itself. Since it doesn’t seem like there are any exotic trips or new toys in the immediate future, I’m pretty much throwing my lasso around 1000 as the next big thing. I know Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming, but those show up every year around this time, but how many times can you look back at six years of misspent time on the Internet and be truly amazed that you managed to come up with 1000 snarky, petulant, vaguely inappropriate, and occasionally heartfelt things to say. And it all started because MySpace use to be the place to be…

Missed milestone…

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In the mayhem and chaos that has been the month of February, I have to confess that I completely missed a major milestone for jeffreytharp.com. You see, February 13th was the two year anniversary of landing here on WordPress and making the leap into hosting and managing my own domain. I don’t mean to make that sound more complicated than it really was. Basically all that means is I registered the site, pointed it towards WordPress, and then set up a few widgets. Oh, and then paid for the privilege of not advertising someone else’s service as part of my web address. Everything costs, even here on the internet.

What I’m trying to say here is that two years ago, I got serious about writing for the first time. I’ve always had the bug, but this is where I found my voice and turned something I’d largely been doing for myself into something that would be seen by an audience. That’s a huge step, even when the audience is mostly made up of family, friends, and a few random people that discover you by accident. Writing here has led into other opportunities to contribute and work with other writers and to take on other “spare time” projects that I wouldn’t otherwise have attempted.

Writing is a deeply introspective act. It’s a force for refining and clarifying where you stand and who you are. It’s also a tremendously time consuming pain in the ass. I’m glad I’ve never stopped to calculate the amount of time it takes to churn out four or five new posts a month, let alone what it’s taken to throw in on those other projects. I can see now why it’s only the one in a million who ever make any money doing this. I have a new appreciation for even the worst of the hack writers who have managed to scrape out a living based on the written word.

I’ll resist the temptation to go into the usual list of statistics and just say that it’s been a good two years. Site visits are up, comments are up, and pretty much any meaningful metric is up from this point a year ago. Writing in a lot of ways is its own reward, but knowing there are people out there interested in what you have to say is decidedly a feather in my cap. Thanks for sticking with me. Let’s see how things look a year from now.

Big round numbers…

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Even while I’m writing this, I find it a little hard to believe that somehow I’ve churned out 500 posts as we’ve hopped along from Blogger to WordPress and finally to our permanent home here at http://www.jeffreytharp.com. That total probably bumps up another hundred if you include the “lost posts” made on my original MySpace blog. I still have those saved somewhere and if I ever figure out how to post them as a group, I’ll republish them so the entire canon is here in one place. Still, 500 is a big number and worthy of a momentary pause.

It occurs to me that through the last seven years of changing jobs and changing geography the blog has been almost my only consistent touchstone. I’m sure a good quality head shrinker would say that says more about me than anything I’ve bothered to write down. Maybe that’s a fair point. Still, keeping this blog up and running and making almost no topics off limits has been a massive commitment of time and effort. It’s a labor of love.

Who knows, maybe I’ll give it up tomorrow to and go off looking for something else to keep my mind occupied. It seems more likely though that we’ll be back here 500 posts from now being suitably impressed by the next big round number.

Pee…

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A full day at work and there was no pee on the floor when I got home this afternoon. I know it’s impossible to identify a trend with only one data point, but God, I hope this is the beginning of one. It’s amazing the things you get excited about when you’ve got a puppy in the house. The small victories feel like major milestones.