My other blogs

I have had many blogs, some now defunct, some alive and kicking. I was especially susceptible to this genre of writing, because a favorite English teacher of mine, at age 13, started me journaling. She believed that, whether the writing was grammatically correct or not, keeping a journal was a good way for ESL students to get more exposure to the language. So she made each and every one of us keep a journal, which she collected once a week and read without correcting. I kept up the journaling until 19 or 20 years old, at which point I was on my third or so physical journal. Then I increasingly lapsed until I started grad school, and my first blog.

The first one was a free LiveJournal blog, and its purpose was to directly replace my paper-and-pen journal. It went through various phases of privacy settings, and was largely not read by other people, as should be the case for this type of blog, in my opinion. I recently downloaded the whole thing, and shut it down.

My second blog was about logging my research goals, literature searches etc. It was private, ran on some PHP-based blogging software on geeknix.com, and I kept it roughly between 2003 and 2005. The files still live on eu-zein, the server for geeknix.com, somewhere.

I started my third blog when we bought Shadow Line, my sailboat, in 2004. That first incarnation of the Shadow Line blog again ran on geeknix.com, probably until early 2007. The blogging software and the PHP gallery software I was using didn't play together especially well, so at some point I decided to switch my picture hosting to flickr and my blog to Shadow Line's blogspot blog. In December 2008 I sold the boat, and I suggested to the new owner that he take over the blog, but he wasn't interested. Even though I've picked out the name for my next boat (and have the blogspot subdomain parked!), I can't bear to take the Shadow Line blog offline. So there it sits...

My next blogging project was If pressed.... This is a blog of reviews, based on the manifesto whose short version appears on the sidebar, and whose long version is going to appear in this blog soon. It's reasonably active, with two more contributors who are former colleagues of mine from UChicago techstaff, and bloggers themselves.

When I moved into the Winthrop house and started thinking about writing my dissertation, defending, selling the boat and moving away from SB, I decided I was going to need something else to obsess about (besides those things) to get through it. So I started climbing. Six months later I was in it for real, and the day after I defended, I started lead climbing. I knew I'd be taking lots of interesting trips to cool places during fall 2008, so I started Little did I know, my climbing blog. Climbers are really really stoked people, so many of us have blogs about our adventures, big and small, and it's a fun community to be part of.

Which brings us to this: the point of starting this particular blog was to have a place to muse about geeky, work-related or otherwise tech-related matters. This sort of thing used to go into my first personal journal type blog, or my private research blog, but at this stage in my life I'm clued-in enough, and have enough to say that's worth sharing, that I don't feel bad about putting it out there.