Quiet Nights

I’ve mostly stayed offline the past few days, due to the usual seasonal mix of sick kids (better than last year, but still troublesome), sinus trouble (always tiresome and a major drain of stamina) and lack of untroubled sleep.

Work is… interesting, although I’m trying very hard not to bring any of it home (exception made to the growing pile of article clippings and snippets of code I toss into Evernote for later review, and into which I conduct occasional forays with the subtlety of a hippo wading into murky waters).

As to reading, the obligatory hardback copy of Steve Jobs is already sitting on our bookshelf (courtesy of my wife) waiting until I am done with the equally voluminous REAMDE - I only mention it because it seems to be all the rage with both pro- and anti-Apple bloggers to put out copious quotes and pious (or impious) diatribes regarding it, and I would like to allay any fears regarding my doing the same - my readership can rest assured that I will cast my thoughts into a couple of paragraphs at the most and leave you to make your own judgement.

Speaking of which, judging from what I can see from peering rheumy-eyed at my recently reinstated site analytics (I’m messing about with charting and JavaScript, so I decided to use my own data for testing, and in doing so looked at it properly for the first time in a year or so), my readership is increasing somewhat, even though I again have little time for unfettered writing or do more than basic housekeeping around the site.

For instance, the linkblog replacement I came up with in less than 15 minutes when delicious decided to completely break their RSS feeds in favor of their new raison d’étre¹ works but lacks finesse - currently it’s a simple bookmarklet that talks to a rather basic queue with at least one Unicode encoding bug that’s already bitten me a few times but that I’ve put off fixing as a way to force myself to build a permanent solution.

Which, as you may have figured out by yourself by now, hasn’t come about yet (largely due to my needing a decent mobile UI for posting links).

Looking forward, I’ve half a mind to whip up some JavaScripty thingy that will do sane form handling and queue management in mobile and desktop browsers - but only half, since I intend to let the other half of my mind put its metaphorical feet up and indulge in some sorely needed rest for a while yet.