The Progress of Progressive Odyssey

My timing was perfect/awful.  Right after the first storm this past Thursday and Friday, I ran my computer in for repair.  We were literally on our way out of town and I wanted to drop it off so the repair could get started over the weekend hoping it would get back to me more quickly. I didn't anticipate the second snow storm that closed the school the following Monday and Tuesday.  No access to school, no computer at home.  Like it or not, I took two days off from working on my dissertation.

I used this forced hiatus to do some organizing here on the blog, categorizing all my posts and getting a chance to review what I've written about over the years. (The categorizations now appear on the right side of the home page.) I'm also going to be migrating photos that I linked to on Flickr back to the blog itself; just trying to keep everything in one place.

Reviewing and re-reading what I have written over the years is a great activity for a snowy winter day. Though writing for this blog has been far from the super-regular activity I thought it would be, I have managed to put up over 300 posts over the past (almost) eight years.  This has been the length of time I have spent in Wichita; my first post was several months after moving to town.

The topics for this writing have been as varied as I would have expected, being determined by the events of my life and the thoughts running through my head.  Going back to school has brought in a lot more of the academic material from my studies and the semi-revival of my hobby electronics projects has also been a significant theme as of late. I'm very much a board game player as well but it doesn't look like I've written a single post on that topic.  That will probably change.

And regarding the topics: this blog is a poor reflection of the entirety of my life. Most of what gets put up here is the miscellany of my life with many many subjects I care deeply about getting no webpage space at all.  There are a variety of reasons for this:

• It is hard to write clearly and effectively for an audience that consists of the entire internet.
• There are areas of my life that I don't want broadcast to the world.
• Keeping the material here on the lighter side means the stakes are a lot lower and the burden of writing well is greatly reduced.

When I set out writing this I hoped to keep most of the material accessible most of the time and looking over my writing these past years it seems like I've done that. The more technical material is challenging to this cause, though, particularly the hobby electronics.  In the spirit of the internet I'd like to be able to contribute back and post the technical details of my projects for others to use but I don't know if this blog is the place.  I guess its easy enough for you the readers to skip over the material you aren't interested in but maybe a separate blog just devoted this topic would be in order.  I'll have to think about it.