Blogging year(s) in review
We’ve been tossing around this query on the Habari mailing list that will extract some basic statistics from the blog.
I’ve run this query and published the output here:
We’ve been tossing around this query on the Habari mailing list that will extract some basic statistics from the blog.
I’ve run this query and published the output here:
Not completely unrelated to the new year, I’ve been thinking about what I can do to improve my hindsight impression on 2008 over 2007. There are a few things I’d like to simply list out and see if I can make them happen. Some are kind of mundane, and others are more big-picture, but they’re all something I think I can work on if I keep them in mind over the coming year.
Do more stuff with the kids - I want to create a separate list of things I can do with the kids that we’ll both enjoy. Most of the time I think I am not as close to them as I could be, and as much as I desperately want them to like me, I don’t know what to do to make that happen. A concerted effort is necessary. Begin today.
I would like to offer my comparison between the games Rock Band and Guitar Hero, but first I will mention something about my broken Rock Band drum set.
I bought Rock Band for myself before Christmas, having had a great time with Guitar Hero 2, and wanting to try out the crazy drum setup. I’ve been playing for a while, and my snare drum (the red one on the far left) has gradually stopped working well. It’s at the point now that I have to bang on the drum really hard just to get it to register.
I’ve seen videos on the web about other people having trouble with their drum sets. Apparently, there were some issues with the early models (which I’m sure is what I have considering I pre-paid for mine) that are fixed in later revisions. EA is being awesome about replacing the broken drum kits. I’ve visited their site and ordered my free drum kit replacement. Hopefully I’ll be swapping out the drums early next week.
That said, let me get into my comparison between the games, and what I think they should do with the next version of Rock Band and/or Guitar Hero.
It’s frequent over the last few years that between early November and mid-January I enter a kind of soul-numbing melancholy. I’d managed to avoid it last year with the new job, and I was doing so well this year, not really thinking too much about it, but I think it’s sneaking up on me. I can kind of feel its approach.
Interestingly, I think that it’s nothing to do with the holidays, which maybe it used to be. And it doesn’t have anything to do with my birthday, which I will once again not be celebrating on the actual day. I guess it’s that I’m bothered by work stuff more these days, which is shocking considering what an influence it was last year to staying out of the funk. Now it’s most of the cause. If I think about it too much, I just want to crawl into a hole somewhere.
It’s a weird mix of feeling underutilized while also feeling ineffectual; overburdened while simultaneously not doing much. For things that I’m supposed to be expert at I frequently feel like that expertise is being eschewed. Things that I’ve volunteered to learn more about - things I don’t already know much about - to help out in areas that we’re weak seem to be things that I’m already expected to know, and when I don’t, I feel worthless and like I’m not doing my job well.
I’m missing opportunities to work on things that might have a finite scope because I have other work that is consuming me - things I know I’m not great at, don’t like to do, and have no end that I can see. It might be nice to start, finish, and be praised for something to have some simple success. My schedule seems to not allow this, I guess. Or I just suck too much to actually be given tasks like that.
I keep wondering if I’m telling myself that I am good at this, but really I’m mediocre. Or worse than mediocre. I’m questioning a year’s worth of thinking that I’ve ever been good at this. Again.
I just realized something interesting about rolling dice online. Forgive my geek side for showing for a moment.
I’ve been messing with modules for JibbyBot (a phenny bot for IRC), trying to pick up a little Python here and there, and something I thought to possibly implement is a dice-rolling module that would let you specify die-rolls in D&D format. I suppose a brief tutorial is in order.