On feeling and serenity
I have to write this right now before the armour comes back. When I speak to someone, however much I feel I can trust them, about things that I would otherwise only write on here, the armour chokes off my words before I can get them out and it sanitises them and it detachs me in a dishonest and inaccurate way. It’s here too, only lessar: it wanted me to put ‘feel I’ after the first word of this post. Wherever I try to form sentences, be it for writing/typing or speaking, it comes up around me and messes them up. Well, right now I’m not wearing it and I am going to take advantage of this brief interlude. This afternoon I read the better part of my favourite book again and I listened to some songs. I linked some thoughts from a couple of days together. And then I was just very very sad for longer than I’ve ever been sad for for as long as I can remember. Not a worried, panicky sadness from the crushing burden of my academic issues at the moment, which has been so frequently a companion for me recently, but a real and undirected sadness. At least that’s what it became after the direction the book gave it originally (below) faded. Then there was hope. My tutor-come-psychotherapist says I have some sadness to feel. So maybe I’m getting somewhere. I’m going to write about this afternoon’s sadness, and I’m going to write a bit about the earlier thoughts.
The book was more beautiful than I ever remembered it to be. Not anything about the book itself, or perhaps even the story much. The prose is pretty straightforward. There’s a good poem about halfway through, and some of the conversations made me smile but it’s generally quite average and there are even facets of the story that I don’t think contribute very much at all, as I’ve said before, such as the stuff about Bill and Charlie’s intelligence. The characters themselves, aside from Charlie, aren’t especially endearing, and they’re not hugely inspirational – or, not in a way that stands out compared to the significant thing I’m about to mention. It’s nice how they live their youths out in the early nineties and how much better off they seem to be without our apathy and our technology, but again, I take in all this stuff in a different way to how I take in what made this book more beautiful for me this afternoon than it has ever been before. The upcoming sentence takes more resolve to type than anything else that takes resolve that I could do at the moment. I’d sooner ask out a hypothetical ‘perfect’ girl than write this (hope that makes my point but it doesn’t sound right to me). What makes the book so beautiful is the relationships between the characters and the network of experience-sharing they form; heck, let’s go all out: their love for each other. Maybe that’s not specific enough. Their closeness, perhaps. I feel like I haven’t used enough words for something as big as this but perhaps ‘love’ is sufficient after all.
The elements (the characters) don’t matter up to isomorphism and you find that Maths is more about the maps/functions between the objects rather than the objects themselves. A nice Maths joke to relieve the tension I just amassed in myself with that. I appreciate that it’s going to be hard for your average reader to get why what I just wrote was such a big deal for me. It won’t be for certain others. I might be the type to be conceited but any family member reading this will have the biggest ever ‘I told you so’ ready to serve up to me. Well, I’ll figure that bit out later because I don’t think my conception is quite in line with yours just yet; I’ve not given in entirely. But this is not relevant right now and I need to go on and keep writing.
As I was realising the above account of why I was getting so much from the book this afternoon, I was also getting pretty close to the end. Which makes sense, given what happens towards (but not at) the end. I started moving around the room. I sat in the two chairs. I kneeled on the window seat. I read the epilogue leaning against the wardrobe, but nowhere was right. After I closed the book I went and kneeled on the edge of the bed and covered my eyes up and got angry at people in the street and the rest of the flat breaking into my solitude with their everyday noises. For some reason I was okay like that. So then I did my usual thing and started writing this post in my head, as I went through my thoughts. Here’s the specific sadness. I do not feel like I am or have ever been close to anyone in the way that Charlie, Patrick and Sam are close. And (ulp — here comes another deeply difficult to write sentence) I want it so much whence I felt so sad. Again, this is not the crushing weight of circumstance but the melancholy of some strange kind of solipsism. This needs some explaining. I do not want to hurt anyone. I have a few very close friends, but I don’t have what Charlie has. I don’t know. I feel the need to excuse myself because of what I just wrote because I don’t see how it is true but it feels like it is. In Oxford it’s a worse situation perhaps. I know an awful lot of people and am well-liked, but manage to somehow keep myself from ever getting anywhere near any of them. And while my respect for my family members grows more and more as time goes on, and I love them and appreciate their support with things, we are not and don’t see how we could ever be close.
Maybe I’m completely unable to put things into perspective because I’ve not had the right experiences to match up with the amount of growing up I’ve done so far. Maybe I’m feeling lonely in a way that only romantic/whatever-you-want-to-call-it-to-distinguish-from-friendship relationships can fulfill. I have no idea; these are just possibilities that occur to me.
As I mentioned before this faded after a little while and I was just sad, and the hope I mentioned earlier started to rise when previous hypotheses from that tutor reoccured to me. And that’s all there is say because it’s really that simple to me. Or it’s not — because nothing is — and I don’t know myself well enough to explain it any further. And the couple that everyone else thinks are shallow and angry and I think have rather more to them when you get to know them are shouting and complaining about stuff in the kitchen and I’m struggling to concentrate. So I’ll go on. It is about this point that I realised that I needed to write right now before I lost what might just be me losing my grip on something one should not lose one’s grip on, but something that might also be something more significant. So I closed the curtains, turned the light off, locked the door, had a glass of water and started to type.
I haven’t long left before the armour’ll be back and I’ll start making excuses. Some of them will be real or legitimate and not really excuses at all but some of them won’t be like that and the worst thing is that I won’t be able to tell the difference. So as I said I would I’ll do the thoughts I’ve been having, now I’ve done the feelings. Back on familiar territory, you’ll forgive me if I lose the thing I might have had when writing the above if indeed I had something. This stuff is where the title for this post comes from. This messy, disjointed post with long running sentences that I would usually edit to death before hitting ‘Publish’; not today.
The first thing is of the relativity of feeling and of how the people around me in Balliol have an absolute view instead, and how I think this has infected me to the extreme and harmed me and all those others around me. I do not mean to imply that this is something unique to Balliol at all, but this is the first place I’ve personally been in that has made me see it clearly. Towards the end of the book, Charlie tells us how he won’t tell his children that some people are starving when they won’t eat their greens; he tells us how he his sister, about to start university, visits him in hospital to express how foolish she feels for being worried about starting university when his situation is that much worse, and Charlie doesn’t think she should feel foolish at all. Yes, there is a point when we must pull ourselves together and get on with things, and it is good when those around us who care for us are honest, and point out when we need to snap out of it. But the modern world microcosmed in Balliol, takes this from honesty to stony coldness. Excitement or enthusiasm is not only not cool, it has very little worth at all. Not everyone thinks this, but there are elements who do (I do have a particular Balliolite or two in mind; maybe others can guess who), and it infects me. We are not allowed to feel anything but mirth. Seriousness is forbidden, torn down by banal student humour. And I bring it home with me and deride friends who are only a tiny bit younger than me in the same my enthusiasm and seriousness can get derided here. As an aside — I reckon that this probably has a lot to do with fact that people in Balliol are so utterly useless at relationships. They’re so deeply afraid of being honest with each other. It upsets me to watch them make such a mess of things over and over.
I haven’t done a very good job there and this is a subject on which I would like to expand upon and elucidate more clearly in the future. The addition that has come from today’s thinking is that feelings are relative. If we attempt to consider seriousness or other types of feeling out of context in an absolute manner then we’re only going to end up throwing it all out. Maybe, then, there is a place for privacy with one’s thoughts; maybe I am wrong in my policy of being willing to put pretty much anything up on here. We must watch ourselves. It is too easy to forget this. We must consider others and their reactions to things more carefully. Very, very little is worth throwing out or deriding. Perhaps I am too judgemental after all.
One final thought that, as I say, I’ve had recently and have had reinforced and enriched from my reading this afternoon and evening. All Charlie wants is for life to be enough. And I have a new word for this, based on how I was feeling around midday yesterday in the sun: he wants serenity. Yesterday I had serenity when a figure I see as having authority cleared my name of some stuff that has dogged me and I felt that I could be okay with everything. This deserves writing about properly, something I’ve been wanting to do for ages, and I will soon enough. But the trick is to not live off temporary boosts of serenity from external sources. The trick is to get it out of ourselves somehow. I’m starting to really appreciate stock phrases like “be happy with yourself” in this new light, and as I say it’s a series of thoughts that I will come back to.
I think that’s all I’m going to be able to get past the defenses. I’m feeling more and more normal. Better quit while I’m ahead. I’ve just spend roughly six hours in self-indulgent (bwahahaa it’s back, here I go!) reading and writing. Now I have reading and essays and problem sheets that, as per usual, I’m not really in a position to do much with, but that’s the same as ever, so I don’t want this seeming like an overtly negative end to this post. Just reading it all through. Bitty and childish and whatever. But I wrote it so I’m posting it, bah.
Mixed organisational success
Splitting this off from the previous post as it’s of a different tone — a much more optimistic one. As I think I mentioned in a previous post I’ve had a tick chart of things to do each day going for most of this term though it came to an end yesterday and I could do with making a new one. My total score is 48% (calculated from 179 of 375 boxes don’t have crosses in them) of things achieved which isn’t that bad really. Most of the ones that aren’t just “do some work around this time of the day” are related to Gnus and Org-mode, and how I keep things organised: something positive and beneficial to work on alongside the very painful process the chart is really for. There are a few problems with my setup right now: I set unrealistic scheduled dates for tasks and I leave maintenance like refiling unsorted captured tasks for a few days at a time which makes things more difficult. Otherwise, though, I’m getting a huge payoff right now for all my efforts to improve my setup. I’ve hinted before in various places at a feeling I’ve been getting that all the time that over the past two years I have poured into perfecting my setup is coming to a head and that I’m approaching computing nirvana where the keyboard and I flick about a text-based world, carrying text around and drawing out the information I might need at any one point. And this feeling, early on in my adventures with Emacs, was not unjustified: as just mentioned, even with a setup I’m not quite using to its full potential I’m already seeing huge payoffs in what the computer can do to improve my life.
The key thing that I’m benefitting from right now is how Emacs allows me to integrate all these things together, so let’s see if I can give a brief description of that. At three set points in the day (after getting up, mid-afternoon and before bed) I empty my inbox. I read things that need to be read and I reply to people’s questions. I add things to my diary. And then for things that I can’t do right then I hit a key combination and add an entry to my various task lists within org-mode, with a hyperlink (of sorts; it’s plain text) back to the e-mail in question. I can then add a deadline so it’ll come up in my agenda view (which pulls in timetabled events from my diary), and that’s it, thanks to Gnus handling e-mail like usenet the e-mail will disappear until I use the hyperlink to get back to it. E-mail is literally an inbox not a todo list like it becomes for most of us which tends to be a pretty unhealthy policy, because you can’t attach dates to things and have them come up ready for the day. So this is how information gets in to the system; how do I get it out again? At the end of each day I refile all my captured tasks from e-mail into sensible places and check the dates on them (e.g. academic work gets transferred under my Maths and Philosophy headings and I make sure that the deadlines are what the work deadlines actually are). Then each morning I sit down with my notebook and agenda and copy down the tasks scheduled for the day and timetabled lectures and classes etc.. This process fixes most of the information I need for the day in my head but I’ve got the notebook if not (which is another place to scribble things in, ofc, which I clear out each day when I clear out my captured tasks from e-mail and the like). If I need some information for a task it’s probably hyperlinked in so I can just pop it all up (I can also hyperlink text files, Office documents, PDFs, web sites and pretty much anything else) and get going, without really having to think very much.
The benefits to all this are obvious. In theory I can’t lose any important information, which is important with a poor memory like mine and useful even if one’s memory is good. With ritualised slots of time for organisation I don’t end up with backlogs and I can knock through this stuff as quickly as organisational stuff can be knocked through. Because I force myself to empty my inbox, and also don’t want a cluttered task list, I end up just reading things there and then rather than letting them build up, keeping me abreast of what’s going on that I should know about; a useful psychological trigger. By writing things into my notebook I’m helping to keep myself on top of things without the need to carry any electronics around with me. And of course everything we’re talking about here is plain text so it’s all synced up almost intervention-free using my pre-existing setup for home directory versioning and syncing.
What’s next? As noted I’m not using the system perfectly and there are changes to be made but I’m getting better every day and often times it’s my frustration with my academic work that stops me from feeling like doing anything at all. Being more successful with Org-mode and Gnus makes me a little more successful at my work and vice-versa. Further, I don’t ever really put myself in a situation where I can’t do work because I’m not organised enough, because now it’s setup this stuff takes so little time. And giving myself as many chances as possible to work is important at the moment, since then hopefully I’ll fulfill at least a few of them. I should note how this extends to the rest of my room here in Oxford: I try to keep it pretty perfectly tidy too, as an oasis of calm to come back to. I’ve got myself an in tray (think I may have mentioned that before, either here or on my tumblelog) and that I treat like my stack of tasks to refile at the end of the day, though I don’t really get round to doing it every day. There’s no paper lying on my desk because it’s all either filed or waiting to be filed, and having a clear desk stops one from losing stuff and obviously makes the desk easier to use.
Technologically, I have a few things to check out but they’re not priorities. My workflow for interesting stuff that I’ve described recently is not yet really coming together so perhaps I need to rethink that. I am also considering dropping my beloved dwm in favour of StumpWM, for two main reasons. StumpWM uses Emacs paradigms, which is what I’m now used to, whereas dwm is by default more like vim. It would be more comfortable not to have to switch to a different way of thinking about windows and splits when I switch outside of Emacs, I reckon. Since it’s in LISP, which I intend to learn at some point to make Emacs perfect, it would also be good to be able to extend this to my window manager. Oh and finally it will allow me to get over my everything-in-Emacs obsession because being under stump feels sufficiently close… there are some things that I don’t really need to integrate but seem to want to, such as music playing.
So yeah: Emacs, Gnus, Org, Conkeror, StumpWM — closing fast on computing, organisation and — dare I say it — productivity nirvana.
Oscillations between quantity and quality
I’ve had three weeks of term now and a series of events and oscillations that I haven’t written about yet. I’m not going to go and read all my notes; I’ll just write a little about them to avoid wasting any reader’s time. If I’d written about this more regularly on here then there’d be a lot more but I’m not sure there’d be much more of much interest. My blood test results came back as in every way normal except for an underactive liver due to the fact that I don’t drink, which is interesting; my mother who is a nurse by background took a look at the other numbers which don’t mean anything to me and tells me that it means I probably have a pretty healthy diet which was good to know. So that’s the medical side over.
Then I’ve had meetings with the tutors on the Maths and Philosophy sides who know me best; one is Italian and wasn’t sure she could get a very good impression of the issue in e-mail form, and the other I bumped into late at night in the quad. Anyone from home who I’ve spoken to about Balliol will probably know who this last one is. On the Maths side my tutor thinks that I am probably over-blowing the issue in terms of holiday work because without the immediate pressure of exams that matter that’s what happens, and she’s given me an idea of what she wants me to focus on this term in order to make Easter revision more doable, which is good. On the Philosophy side, it turns out that this tutor has ten years of psychotherapy training so after discussing things with him for a while he decided to give me a diagnosis of sorts; he reckons that I have some sadness in me that I am trying to block out; I can’t do this blocking out when studying so it pops up (this is the image I have of what he was saying) and just stops me from getting anywhere.
I can explain what he’s trying to get at a bit more I think if I describe how things are actually going from day-to-day. Essentially I am oscillating on a weekly basis (not much of a sample to go on right now I admit) between having problems with quantity and quality of work. One week, I’ll do loads and loads. I’ll monopolise the hours in between lectures and classes well and by the end of each day I’ve had so many hours in the library or in classes that I’m very ready to go to bed. But actually if I then consider what I’ve achieved, it’s pretty tiny. It’s the amount I might have expected to do in a third of the time I’ve actually spent. I am a slow studier, esp. in Philosophy, and this is fine and probably a good thing in fact but this extreme is not. So the next week I’ll have no motivation to go and sit in the library as it just looks like I won’t achieve anything; I’ll go to all my lectures and perhaps have a few library sessions but it’s half-hearted. Then suddenly I have deadlines and I switch back to the other week. Oscillations between quantity and quality.
The next step recommended by this tutor, the Dean/Chaplain and my GP after the blood test results came back (oh yeah — I’m not depressed either, as expected; got those results back too) is the University Counselling Service, so that’s where I went on Friday morning for an appointment with a psyhotherapist. Yup: I can now refer to “my therapist” in that cliched fashion. We’re meeting weekly. Her school of thought is different to my tutor’s but she asked me about what he’d said and we’re actually running with that. So our meeting on Friday consisted of her getting me to give her masses and masses of information about my home life; we didn’t even have time to get onto Oxford. This immediately seems weird to me because after the first week or so I don’t think about home at all; parents and siblings get annoyed with me not contacting them because they are clearly thinking about me, yet I am just busying away in the Oxford bubble. And of course I’m sceptical of all this. But I’m trying to keep an open mind and since the meta-ethics lecture I am missing each Friday for this is not by a particularly good lecturer I don’t really mind. At the end of our meeting on Friday she asked me how I was feeling after all that, and I just felt like I’d given a sociological (sociologists, forgive me) account or analysis of a group of people that I’m not part of and that have little relevance to me, because that’s how I felt, but we’ll see. I’m quite willing to be wrong. If there are some answers here then they’ll be very welcome.
The most interesting thing that has arisen so far is not directly related to this. I was on her in a shot when she started by referring to ‘my file’ and I was continually second-guessing her “reading into things” by reading into them myself on her behalf, often when she had no intention of commenting at all. Why am I so paranoid here when the only things I’m not willing to write up on here are those relating to individuals, for obvious reasons? I have one possible answer which is something I’ve been meaning to write about on here for a long time so I’ll present that to her next week. One explanation I was able to offer this week was that I think about everything to the nth degree and I didn’t want her thinking that there was any significance in my comments on subject x being quite developed and complex, because there are a huge number of banal things on which I have a lot to say. See blog archives.
Just one further comment about Oxford’s support network, if you like: the number of people in this or similar situations is sufficiently large that you’ll find sympathy and understanding from almost anyone here which one doesn’t get at home, because everyone either has had milder problems themselves or knows someone who has. My mother, for example, is supportive but finds it very hard to understand how I can like my subjects, want to do well yet not do it; not so here. For example a former Balliol Maths/Phil who heard part of the conversation I had with my Philosophy tutor, who I barely know, e-mailed me a set of remarks that evening after finding out my name. At least one other person who I don’t spend a great deal of time with has found my blog and written to me too. Which is nice.
140 characters isn’t really enough
When I first used Twitter, and when the main use of Twitter was the now-marginalised “keep up with what your friends are doing” rather than “just type whatever springs to mind” combined with “big up consumerism in a whole manner of ways not limited to communicating with your favourite celebrities in a banal and barely literate fashion”, I was a big supporter of the simplistic and limited functionality of Twitter, and I was a big fan of the 140 character limit to messages as something valuable for more than just its compatability with Twitter’s connection to SMS (something I was also a strong supporter of, despite owning an iPhone at the time). To avoid me using lots of past tense, let’s stick to the community of people I follow on Twitter, that is, people I know IRL who tweet about things they’re up to and thinking about; in this case, then, the 140 character limit forces you into a position where updating Twitter takes seconds, and reading it is also swift, so it can fit around those activities that you’re tweeting about rather than becoming an activity in itself which takes up time and thus becomes impractical to update with much frequency. 140 characters makes Twitter take up less time, so you use it all the time, and its function as a way of keeping up with activities and thoughts is best served.
At least, this is what I used to think, in one form or another. I’ve been thinking lately that the 140 character limit isn’t enough to be able to express interesting things, and expressing non-interesting things is just being unhelpful to your friends by using up their limited brainpower on things that aren’t, well, interesting, and I think that a good starting point for friendships, excluding times of emotional distress, might be to share interesting things rather than non-interesting things. But writing this is opening a questions about the words I’m using like bamboo shoots in my head and so I’m going to back away slowly from this particular point and leave it as assumed.
What I really want to talk about is whether or not Twitter is actually much good at expressing interesting things, and over the past few weeks I’ve been coming over to the opinion that it isn’t. I’ve got an example from this afternoon that got me writing this post. After five and a half hours of clearing my RSS reader’s backlog, and then transferring the feeds semi-manually (learning how to use Emacs regexps being the automation) into a new reader, I was headachey and feeling a bit burnt out so I went to my window and threw open both sides of it. My window here in Oxford is a small rectangular cushioned seat, set into the corner of the room, with three glass sides and one open to the room, and the two shorter sides (neither of which face the room – I’m hoping I’ve given sufficient information here to allow you to imagine the scene) can be opened. Breaking my usual habit of only opening the left window, as I say, I opened both and given the rain and wind this got everything blowing about and was a good way to refresh myself a little. But then I had this strange compulsion (reminds me, tangentially, of this) to go tweet about the fact that I felt really good to have the cool air wash over me after many hours of tedium and distress (because I was having to skip over lots of interesting-looking stuff). And then I thought, how can 140 possibly get that in? Someone reading that miles away as just another tweet in his or her stream is not going to get much of an idea of the scene, and unless it was a bit of an in-joke among my social circles that Sean likes to stand in the rain (and I’m pretty sure it’s not atm), it’s not really going to have any impact on them; there’s no way that I’m going to be able to transfer my experience to them via the 140 characters and thus I’m not only wasting my time by trying, but also I’m missing an opportunity to try to a better job of transferring that experience, if it’s worth transferring.
This last point is the key issue, because we all know that social networking is, so much of the time, all about time-wasting 
I don’t think that there was anything epiphanic about my experience at the window this afternoon, but suppose now that there was and I really did want to share it. By tweeting it, and not instead sitting down to write about it on something such as this blog or in a more limited form over on my tumblelog, I feel like I’m putting to bed any responsibility I might have had to myself or others to share it properly: Twitter is almost an excuse to be lazy about something that could actually be turned into a valuable expression of ourselves and our lives and the fact that we might want to share these with others in order to enrich our own lives and those of our friends. If we drop down to another level of cynicism and (anti)-buzzwords, it’s more consumerism, quick fixes and instant gratification that, ultimately, isn’t as good as doing things properly and taking our time.
In this post and in a recent one about my volte-face wrt the editor wars, I’m actually writing from a position of experience and knowledge. I’ve experienced the Vim way of doing things throughly and knew enough about Emacs to make an informed decision; in this case, I know enough about Twitter and about blogging to have come to the view that what I want to get out of being social on the Internet is better served by cutting most of the stuff from the former, pulling out the valuable and under-expressed things and then expanding them out into the latter. So I’m going to try to defeat the compulsion mentioned earlier to post things on Twitter in order to get them out of my head and use that as the way I stop worrying about them. If it’s interesting I’ll try to find the time to write about it, or if I haven’t got that time or inclination yet it really is something worth sharing, I’ll tumblelog it, and if not and yet I really want to type it out somewhere, I can always just slap it into my diary/journal, a huge text file which I add reams to each week. Because actually most things in my life are boring, and those things that aren’t boring are far more complicated than the English language will let me (attempt to) express in 140 characters.
Just a quick note about my Twitter account – I’m not going to get rid of it for two reasons. Firstly, purely as a protocol for chat it’s often very useful for certain individuals who don’t know how to use e-mail or instant messenging, so it’s useful to have around. Further, for a lot of friends, inter-personal communication has been replaced in this day and age by broadcasting snippets. They’re not going to write to me or ring me up or have a conversation over IRC or IM or something, so if I want to see the interesting stuff they’re doing I’m going to need Twitter to have some sort of glimpse. I really, really do not blame anyone for the Facebook broadcast culture being how they go about their social lives because it’s had me too at various points and of course there are arguments in its favour, and I’m not just going to isolate myself from people just because this is how they express themselves – but I’m trying to move away from it myself, to see what results.
While I’m here I should write about something else that’s been brewing for a little while. For most of my first year of university I was avoiding updating this blog about my first year/terms at university and so I ended up posting writings to my tumblelog instead. Ambiguity over the purpose of these two WordPress installations has been growing and I would like to make the distinction clearer. One should be able to decide what sort of Sean-stuff one wants and pick the appropriate blog, and finally in the past fortnight or so I’ve come to a conclusion on what I want each of them to be, supported and extended by the considerations advanced in this post. I’ve got a number of technical changes, which will involve moving some posts tumblelog -> blog, in the pipeline, but these will be time-consuming and they’re not happening any time soon. In the meantime, I want to establish as habits the following changes to where I put stuff, as these are more important than any restructuring and it would be nice to have things being used properly from day one when I eventually find the time to make those changes. An additional factor motivating all this is that del.icio.us is going, and I need a replacement (why did I trust my data to the cloud? why? grr).
The essential distinction between the two blogs can be described crudely as one of length, but I say that only because length is in the case of my writing a direct consequence of making a decision to meta-write, that is, to think about what I’m writing with the suggestion that it might be read, rather than just hammering keys. That doesn’t mean that this blog has to be perfect, but it is supposed to be my extended writing: selecting a title and then trying to lay out some thoughts and/or information in order to convey myself to someone else. But while posting on this blog will have a very narrow remit, I’ve got a lot of things that I want to put on my tumblelog. I’ve got the “expanded tweets” that I discussed above (This remind me of an issue that I haven’t looked at: the instantaneous nature of Twitter, and what value this might have, or otherwise – I’m not sure what I think on this atm so I’ll blog about it some other time.), and I’ve still got interesting little things found throughout the day – videos and pictures, and links of particular note that stand out from the usual stuff that I might slap into del.icio.us. Then I want to have two types of posts that group together links, in bullet-point form, that I’ve found interesting: one called something like “Today’s Bookmarks” which is things that I would otherwise post to del.icio.us, and another called “Today’s Articles” which is stuff that’s come to me through RSS that I found interesting. I dunno though; it might turn out to be better to combine these two into one daily set of links; I’ll think about this.
I’ll probably start this tomorrow, depending on how much time I get to read web stuff, for I have a busy day planned. In writing the latter half of this post I’m really seeing the value of my extensive notes on anything and everything that’s come to mind. I planned most of this on the 8th, and wrote a huge list of bullet points, and being able to dig it out to make sure I don’t miss stuff is useful because I was basically having the same thoughts as I had today without realising it, and it’s good to be more aware of how your thoughts flow.