(why) I suck at blogging

OK, I'll admit it. Well, I'll admit multiple things, but there's two I'm getting at right now:

1. I suck at blogging.
2. I've become (a twaddict / twobsessive-compulsive).

I'll look at the blogging suckage now, and try to take a look at the need to be connected next week.

(why) I suck at blogging.

Let's see... I'm articulate ("Verisimilitude; Xenophobe; Regurgitation"). I've even got some things to talk about (C# Custom Attributes vs. Marker Interfaces? Eventually. HP's award-winning technical support? Eventually.) So why then have I not written anything in 5 months?

As I feared, I got distracted by something shiny. Note to self -- the start of the busy holiday season (Halloween, Child2.Birthday, Thanksgiving, Child1.Birthday, Christmas, New Year's Eve) is not the time to try to start any new endeavor, let alone two blogs. Then came January, full of promise...

...and we dropped one addiction for another.

I'm not going to say it's a bad thing -- it's just that The Lovely Bride and I quit smoking on January 12. For those of you who've never been down this road, there's a couple of issues -- the physical and the psychological.

The physical addiction was actually the easier side for us to handle. Working for a company that says "We want you to quit smoking so much that we'll cover not just your meds, but meds for any dependents as well" made it really easy to get the prescription for Chantix, which did wonders in that regard.

The psychological addiction was more difficult -- most smokers have events that get raised, and smoking is one of the handlers subscribed to those events. So driving, post-eating, lunch time and breaks at work -- all of these had to be handled differently. Some, like the breaks at work, just stopped completely -- I pretty much go to lunch, but that's it. Others were more difficult, with after-dinner being the worst of the bunch. We needed something to do with our hands, something to answer the question "OK, we're done with dinner -- what now?"

The answer was already in our house

Stupid Guitar Hero.

The Fat Man in the Red Suit brought Child1 the PS2 game Sing Star at Christmas. If you're not familiar with it, think of it as PS2-Karaoke. Child1 loved it.

Nobody wants to hear me sing. Trust me.

So we picked up Guitar Hero III on a lark, as something I could do -- and found in mid-January that it answered the question perfectly. It was engrossing, kept the hands busy, and was something we both enjoyed.

Guitar Hero III led to GH World Tour and Rock Band, then Rock Band 2 and GH Aerosmith on the Wii. Free time has now officially been filled.

There's good news, though -- neither of us has slipped, so we're now 3 months nicotine free. We've stopped playing GH / RB quite so much, so we're able to get to other things we want to do (I'm setting up a Virtual PC image w/Windows Server 2008 as I type this. The Web Platform Installer is made of 99.44% pure awesome, and i'm pretty sure the other .56% has something to do with Mr. Rogers) I finally caught up on some things on the DVR (we'd maxed out the drive), and now...

I'm going to try this again. Hopefully it'll stick this time. Next up: not sure, but it should be interesting to see when...

(dual posting between personal and tech blogs -- that way they're all at the same reset point.)

Episode I: The Phantom Blogger

OK, so...

Well, I went ahead and did it -- I set up not one but two blogs. The first, mcclimentaz.blogspot.com is where I'm going to post personal stuff, freeing this up (mostly) for all sorts of (hopefully) geeky informative goodness.

First, a little about me:
I never thought I'd blog at all

Yep. I never really saw the need, felt the itch, had the desire. Most of the blogs I'd happened across were the result of the proverbial monkeys and keyboards -- you know, the ones who didn't end up writing Shakespeare?

What happened, you ask?

Easy. I got an MP3 player (yeah, I know -- I'm a bit behind the times). After listening to a bit o' music and the Audiobook of Ringworld, I thought about the other things it would be useful for:

• Enabling ReadyBoost on my laptop? Nah, that'd be a waste. I only reboot when there's a Vista update that requires it, if the battery dies, or if something gets so cluged that it's running like a dog -- much less often since I repaved a few months back. Don't miss the WAMP stack at all.


• Download more audio books? Eventually, but the rental program known as Audible left me unimpressed -- so unimpressed that I'm not going to link to it. If you want to rent a book, type the bloody URI yourself. As for me, if I use credits or cash for a book, I'd like to know that I can cancel my subscription and not forfeit the ability to listen to it ever again. In short, if I buy a book, I want to buy it.
  [NOTE: Before anyone tells me about how you can continue to access the content you paid for after canceling (if you can -- I never did feel the need to look), that's not the point. I want to explicitly know that I can. Not having it in big, bold frakking(nsfw) letters when it says something to the effect of "Verifying your account information" when loading it on to my MP3 player seems to imply that they don't want me to know -- they sure made a point to let me know that they were checking to make sure I hadn't "borrowed" it from my Aunt Millie, didn't they?]


• Listen to Podcasts about stuff that interests me.

So, listening to podcasts it was...

...and I was hooked. Really, REALLY hooked. There's some really smart folks out there, and they know a heck of a lot more about .NET than I do. They're articulate and loud, dangerous and brilliantly responsible for the technology that allows me to draw a paycheck, not to mention spend a lot of time learning about in my allegedly free time.

Which leads me here...

So, now that the obligatory intro is over, what's next? Do I do what my past history would indicate and The Lovely Bride expects, and drop this like a hot potato because I get distracted by something shiny? Hopefully not, since I'd like to at least discuss some issues, get a few things off my chest, and have someone other than family read it.

In the mean time, if you made it this far without getting a bad case of QWERTY face, here's what I'm reading / listening to currently:

• Scott Guthrie -- Great resource for any .NET developer. If you don't read this every time there's a new entry, then doom on you. [NOTE: In finding a link for this, I found out that it's got a hidden meaning(nsfw), if you can believe the information Urban Dictionary has to offer. Of course, I linked to Wikipedia about a brazillion times, so veracity isn't necessarily necessary.


• Scott Hanselman -- Great content, and really seems to enjoy what he does. Listening to his podcast archive has me sold on convincing my dev team at work to try out scrum for our next project.


• Ajaxian -- your resource for all things JavaScript, plus a whole lot more. Who knew?


• Slashdot -- one of the constants in the universe: Death, Taxes, and Linux folks not having the letter 's' on their keyboard -- they always replace it with a dollar sign when typing Microsoft. A problem with the Linux keyboard drivers, perhaps?


• Craig Shoemaker -- the Frosted Mini-Wheats of podcasting. He's got the whole-grain OOP goodness on one side, and the sweet UX frosting on the other. Good stuff, makes you re-think a lot of preconceived notions.

Next up, I'll try to blog twice in a row without hurting myself.