Rui CarmoWhile searching this site’s archives for notes on a project of mine, I’m constantly being reminded about how much better (and more often) I used to write a couple of years or so ago. It isn’t the first time I mentioned this, and truth be told that a lot has changed in only two years, but the realization that I am now more prone to posting links and the odd cryptic jab at whatever the crazies out on the Web are currently raving about than a solid lump of decent prose is starting to get to me.
As such, and in glorious defiance of Real Life, I am now endeavoring to put aside a bit more each day for writing and a lot less (still) for news grazing of every sort, for not only do “news” leave a lingering aftertaste these days, I also find it rather pointless to be mentioning stuff you can go out and find yourself by dint of following the crowd of “domino bloggers” (so called because they re-post the “news du jour” without adding any real value to it).
Real Life, however, had other plans, and promptly proceeded to turn my calendar into a major league Tetris game, festooned with meetings, next-day presentations1, training sessions (I now present two sessions a week to an exalted audience of managers and directors) and a very fun, but time-consuming telco management simulation that spans the entire company (I get to play CEO, and as luck would have it the team I got are pretty damn good).
Add a prodigious gamut of personal errands to run (what with some renovation work being done), random family events, a couple of colds and an almost legendary strife against clutter on my desk, and stuff like studying for my Mandarin classes, writing or coding anything whatsoever of consequence sort of fade into the background.
Which is, all things considered, a right shame. Nevertheless, the random bits of resolve I am able to muster throughout the week to do some writing and judicious tweaking of site entries here and there have resulted in a new appraisal of the value of something like the Asus Eee PC, although I would realistically prefer something like the AlphaSmart Dana or even the Foleo for the simple reason that I’d rather have a device that has a practically infinite battery life, doesn’t suck me into all the messy aspects of “computing”, wakes up instantly and just lets me type away and forget about all the noise outside my head, be it physical or web-based…
1 I try to stick to the 10/20/30 rule, but you wouldn’t believe the cultural bias towards long-winded and microscopically-typed presentations here on my neck of the woods.