To The Cloud

It's about time I had some sort of official spot to write down my thoughts. So, here it is. I meant to post this on April 1, but better late than never. I've had quite a few thoughts queued up for, oh, a decade now. In fact, many of them are actually written and just were never published. Why you may ask? Being a serious tech nerd I have had plans to write my own software to be a wiki + weblog + gallery + etc etc with great indexing, viewing, mobile interface, and other cool stuff. Surprise, surprise... never happened. I've got primordial prototypes but they are not at all suitable for live use. Or rather, they could be, but are embarrassingly lame. I guess a decade or so is long enough that I should now punt and start posting. Perhaps in the future I'll import this content back into my masterpiece.

Speaking of a gallery: I've got an absurdly huge backlog of photographs. It's a running joke with just about everyone I hang out with that I'm always taking pics at events and never post them online. Actually, about 99% of my cycling related pics are online in a custom gallery website prototype. Some other events are too, by special request, but all at public web locations even the mighty Google hasn't found. Alas, I punted on improving that software too and recently started hosting on a SmugMug account: davidlehn. I found a rather silly perfectionist problem with file timestamps and EXIF data that has delayed my uploading a ton of pics.

Guess what? I also have a Twitter account: @davidlehn. And a Facebook account: david.lehn. And lots of other nearly empty accounts. Time to start using all that jazz. The world has kept on spinning and it's rather silly that I've been so slow to start interacting with it with all these fancy new tools. My single tweet from over 2 years ago, "The Owl Tweet", has been the source of much amusement due to it being my only tweet, but I think it's time for some more.

So, if things go as planned, and they never do, I'll be posting more online starting... now. There may be some oddly backdated posts here. The advantage of waiting (years) to post my thoughts: revisionist history. I can now omit things for any number of reasons, update as needed, make stuff up for fun, post things that never should have been written just to laugh at it, and so on. Good times.

Wondering why it's taken so long for me to start using online tools? I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to some of this stuff. I can't stand it when I see a cool site, that does 80% of what I want, and I know that 10-15% of what remains is clearly possible, just not done. Some stuff is hard, but most of my desired features are reasonable and often implemented on other sites. Just not all in one place. So I go crazy and think I'll do it myself. Bad plan. I end up with the same attitude towards software I write, never get to that 95% point where I'm satisfied, and never ship anything. It's a sad story really. Good intentions but results in total failure due to lack of time and interest. Time to change that and accept the "good enough" solutions. But also it's prudent to be wary of how temporary all these "cloud" resources are. Backup your content and don't assume someone else will rescue your shit for you. (No doubt someone will quote me on this when I lose all my shit stored in the cloud one day.)

What kind of things bother me with current tools? Take for instance this post. The generated HTML is some sort of horror show. It could be much prettier. And my text has auto-inserted non-breaking spaces everywhere, looks arbitrary and crazy, so I tried to fix it by hand. I'm old school and tried use double spaces after a period in the editor and this thing adds a space and a   in the HTML. I understand why, but damnit, why?!   added around links sometimes, sometimes not? Why? Forced <div> + <br> instead of <p>... say what? Madness! But, hey, you can read this right? So does it matter? It's awful technically, but I guess good enough. I would have been writing raw HTML or XML with my custom tools anyway. I'm having to push through some inner pain to pretend this is all ok with me. Perhaps I should write a tool to fix these issues before I start posting... See? That's my problem! I'll try to ignore my pain for a while and see how this goes. And don't even get me started on how I think Twitter is crap... I can go on for a while. Buzz is so much more interesting to me, but no fun unless everyone is using it. Update: I published this post and the first thing Blogger does is piss me off. The permalink path is /2011/04/to-cloud.html? Why can I not set this to /2011/04/12/to-the-cloud.html? After some research I find people have been complaining about this for years for aesthetic and SEO reasons and Google (the SE) has no response. This is not a good sign. Argh.

Where to post? It used to be easy and you just use a weblog. Now you have a ton of places you can put updates and statuses and articles and pictures and videos and music and anything else you want. For now, follow me here, Twitter (or Buzz), and Facebook and you'll probably catch anything I have to say or appropriate links. I apologize for everything in advance!

You know what? I might even be so bold as to setup an avatar. I've been using the default image on most sites. The exception being my Gravatar since certain folks in my office insisted I absolutely positively really must have one so my GitHub commits look better. I resisted but gave in with a flame generated with fr0st. But maybe a real pic might be more useful elsewhere? We shall see.

To summarize with some colorful language: fuck it, to the cloud!