(Preliminary grumble: WordPress 1.2.1 for iPhone ate a nearly-done draft of this post when I tried to go from local draft to online draft. It also didn’t update to 2.x through the standard App Store update process despite both being free. WTF, WordPress?!?)

Sigh. Another long stretch without posting. It’s not like I have nothing to say. One look at my Twitter feed will tell you that. And I have posts cooking in my brain about favorite topics like Lost and The Best Bands You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of and a bunch of other things as well. (I mean, I saw MUSE live, ferchrissakes! MUSE!!)

So why no blog posts from me? I’ve been feeling really frozen up inside, my guts knotted by anxiety, for months.

You ever get the feeling that you’re standing at a Rubicon in your life? What’s more, have you ever felt terrified, even though you know that crossing over is The Right Thing To Do™?

I’ve been there for a while now…almost a year, really, since I started the current job. In other respects, I’ve been there a lot longer. Depending on how you prefer to look at it, it could be since I had surgery, since I left home en route to college, or even going back to murky childhood. I’ve definitely written on the subject before, though.

And I’m feeling kind of “reinvented out” after the number of times I’ve done it in my life, so I really want to get this one right in order to not have to do it agin anytime soon. It’s hard work, don’tchaknow!

A few things have me brooding on this topic again:

1. Getting ready to move out of the apartment I moved into shortly after starting at my old job, thereby shedding the very last vestige of the life I led during the Tale of Woe™
2. Watching other friends being or becoming all self-actualized ‘n’ stuff. (There are six links in there, folks!)
3. Feeling like I’m finally about ready to start expressing myself in the world now that I’ve finished the process of creating the “release version” of me.

The hardest things I’m going to have to learn are self-motivation and discipline, my twin bugaboos. Need to turn those dreams into action and all that. Like I’ve said before, inspiration is never my problem. It’s that “perspiration” part that always gets me.

Universe, help me channel the Spirit of Nike®…

It’s just that taking that step and really committing to not procrastinate ad infinitum, to not constantly sedate myself with the modern opiate of the masses, and to stop fearing the risk of failure is just pants-wetting terrifying after a lifetime of the bad patterns.

My rational mind knows that doing is a skill like any other, one that anyone can learn regardless of initial talent for it (which is good because my initial talent level is roughly that of a rhinoceros with a neurological disorder taking up skateboarding). My irrational, software-virus-ridden mind tells me something quite again in the voice of my parents, every teacher I ever let down by not fully realizing my Awesome Potential™, and every friend or lover I ever offended in a moment of thoughtlessness. Unfortunately, that voice has always been so much louder than the voice of reason inside my dense cranium. (‘Sides, nowadays, even the voice of reason is starting to sound a bit suspect…)

So, the emotional pressure has built up inside of me and I feel like something’s gonna give. EIther I’m going to become Super Self-Actuated Sonya™ or I’ll just give in to my couch-tuber tendencies forevermore. Ye gods, that sounds emo! >.<

I just hope that, much like Lane Meyer, all I need is a taste of success, and I’ll find it suits me.

In the meantime I stand, tremulant*.

*10 Scooby Snacks™ to the first commenter to correctly identify the source of this title. And yes, I know it’s not a real word!

If I’ve inspired you to buy any of the stuff I gush about on my blog, please do so using my links. I’m an Amazon and iTunes affiliate and get a bounty on all referred sales. I may be employed again, but every little bit helps. (BTW: Mouse over my links and images for happy happy easter egg fun time yay!) Thanks!
—The Management

I actually have a meditative, revelatory, and hopefully interesting post brewing…but first, some kvetching. In the midst of a perfectly lovely experience, I was given an answer to a question that’s been bugging me since I first launched this blog: Why the hell am I not getting more comments? It was a deeply annoying answer, though not so much annoying about the person providing it as it was in a more general sense.

Here’s some context: I had put a Porcupine Tree album on the stereo as sonic accompaniment to the beginning of an otherwise rewarding experience and, when asked about the band, I was a bit surprised. I had expected that the person asking the question would have read my recent post regarding that band, so I commented to that effect, only to be told, “Oh…TLDR.”

“TLDR?” I replied.

“Too Long, Didn’t Read.”

And I was annoyed. I put it behind me then and went on to have the aforementioned and soon-to-be-cogitated-upon experience, but am still finding that it annoys me now that I’ve had a chance to reflect further.

I get that keeping up with the Internet as a source of information — all the blogs and social networks and news and what-have-you — is very much like the now-clichéd simile of “drinking from a fire hose.” I really do. I know that no one has the time to read every word of every article that clamors for our attention online. But I guess I would have expected better from my friends…especially the ones I’ve known for a long time, as opposed to newer friends like my commenter.

This blog is two things in equal measure…

1. A way to make myself write regularly and develop good habits that will help me in the long term to feel more able to tackle larger writing projects.
2. A way to put myself out there in a way I really hadn’t been outside of my presences on Tribe and Free-Association (which, unfortunately, are vanishingly small corners of the ‘net) so that my existing friends could follow me thanks to the miracles of feed-readers and better-frequented social networks which can be made to re-broadcast these posts.

So, for purposes of reason #1, the lack of feedback isn’t a deal-breaker and I’ll continue doing this regardless. But for reason #2, I find this “TLDR” response somewhat galling. Even in posts that don’t necessarily seem personal on their face, such as my music and politics-related items, I give pieces of myself and do my level best to keep the writing entertaining even when covering heavy subjects. But, hell’s bells, they’re not even all that long!

So, I send my little gripe out over the intertubes in the hopes that my friends will start giving me the feedback that I both need and crave. I need to keep improving my writing, and knowing that I’m worth just a few minutes of time would be rather nice as well. It can be here on the WordPress blog, which is even easier since I set things so that no one needs to have a registered account with me to leave a comment anymore, or for the LJ-inclined among you it can be on the LiveJournal re-broadcast. But it’s better here. If you pop in your Twitter ID and your blog’s RSS feed, you’ll get the returned “back-scratch” of seeing those advertised here on my site for free, perhaps earning your own writings a wider readership. (Thanks, CommentLuv and WP Twitip ID!) Such a deal…

OK, now on to more positive things! Thanks for indulging my wee ‘plaint…if you read this far.

OK, so…I have posts brewing in my cranium about my recent viewing of Milk and another entry into my “The Best Bands You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of” series, but I just wanted to take a moment here to give some props to some perspicacious peeps. (OK, white girl…enough of that unless you’re talking about marshmallow birds!)

I just wanted to thank all the people who’ve written the really neat WordPress plugins, like the über-sweet iWPhone Plugin+Theme from ContentRobot I mentioned in a previous post, that give my site some of its whiz-bang features that I find so useful and neat. Those of you reading this on LiveJournal need to head over to my real blog now so you can see what the hell it is I’m on about.

First, the “broadcasters.” I loves me some “wrote-once, publish everywhere” functionality, let me tell you! And thanks to the makers of Twitpress, Wordbook, and Live+Press, my posts are announced on Twitter and Facebook and re-posted on LiveJournal, respectively. So, to Tom Purnell (Twitpress), Robert Tsai (Wordbook), and Tania Morell (Live+Press…and BTW rock on, sista! ), thank you! You all rock…out loud.

One single geek named Robert Felty is responsible for 3 separate plugins — Collapsing Archives, Collapsing Categories, and Collapsing Links — which enable me to make my archives, categories, and links all collapse (imagine that!) nicely under their headings. Because of him, my sidebar is manageable and silky-smooth, without any split ends or frizzies! Rock on, Robert, and thanks very much indeed.

My blog is also deeply enriched by Google-y goodness thanks to some seriously geekly geeks. Ronald Heft, Jr. is responsible for Google Analyticator, which makes dealing with Google Analytics that much easier. I only have the alias, “linewbie,” to thank for wrangling Google AdSense with All in One Adsense and YPN. Arne Brachhold gives me the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, which ensures that a full sitemap of my blog site is submitted to Google (and some other search engines) periodically. Finally, thanks to Libin Pan and Michael Klein and Google AJAX Translation, my comments can be translated into a whole slew of languages. Unfortunately, that only works on the first 500 characters of blog posts for now, so I have that feature turned off…but I’m hoping to be able to use it for posts in their entirety soon, too! Thanks to all of you.

And, speaking of comments, it’s only thanks to Ronald Huereca that I have the seriously sweet WP Ajax Edit Comments plugin which makes commenting on my posts so swanky and smooth. You all should try it sometime. It isn’t painful, I promise.

The tag cloud in my sidebar is pretty gratuitous, but the effort that went into designing that particular piece of Flashified goodness wasn’t. So I give many, many thanks indeed to Roy Tanck for WP-Cumulus.

The good people at ShareThis make it easy for all of my readers (all four of you) to share my posts with an uncaring world on innumerable social bookmarking sites and via several other means as well. You guys and gals kick much booty! Now, if only my readers would actually use it and get me some deeply undeserved internet fame and more eyeballs to get me that mad AdSense money. (I could be a hundredaire by next quarter. Money…power…friends…influence!)

cformsII is one seriously big and bad-ass plugin of whose functionality I’m currently using only a shameful fraction to power my “contact me” page. But I’m glad it’s there and it’s so capable, ’cause I just know I’m going to find more uses for it sooner or later. My hat is off to you both, Nicki and Oliver at delicious:days.

And, finally (well, for now…), to all the fine people who keep WordPress blogs as spam-free as humanly and algorithmically possible, my deep, abiding, and eternal gratitude! Matt Mullenweg’s Akismet plug-in comes with every single copy of WordPress for a damned good reason, and Joe Tan’s TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter is no slouch either. May they both keep the trolls and errant Nigerians with cash-flow problems away from me for a long, long time.

Thanks to ingenious WordPress Plugin developers, my posts on this blog from now on will be automatically tweeted on Twitter and re-posted to my previously-useless LiveJournal account I maintained only to view my friends’ friends-only posts. Facebook is already importing my posts as “Notes” items via RSS without any need to install anything into my WordPress setup. Now, if I can only get my post re-posted on my Tribe blog and my Free-Association blog so I can truly “write once, publish everywhere”, I’ll be in techno-nirvana. Of course, being an admin on Free-Ass and having the lead developer as a personal friend kinda helps there.

Well, well, well…

I have to actually take back a bit of my earlier vitriol toward Microsoft. I re-did the layout in a much more “standards-compliant” way, applying what I learned from my first stab at it, and suddenly the site renders dandily in IE7 along with Safari 3.x (and other Webkit-based browsers) and Firefox 3.x (and other Gecko-based browsers). Hurray!

IE6 is still a mess, though, and that’s not getting fixed. Update your browsers, people!

And Opera people, I know the Twitter box is positioning itself up at the top, but I really just don’t have the time to track that one down for a browser that idiosyncratic. Please, for the love of all that’s holy, go with one of the many other fine Webkit or Gecko browsers available if you don’t want to use Firefox or Safari. 

Here’s a partial list:

• Chrome (Windows-only for now, Webkit-based)
• Flock (Windows & Mac, Gecko-based)
• Camino (Mac, Gecko-based)
• SeaMonkey (Windows & Mac, Gecko-based)
• OmniWeb (Mac, Webkit-based)
• Shiira (Mac, Webkit-based)
• Cruz (Mac, Webkit-based)

If you can’t find something on that list that’s better than Opera in every conceivable respect, I’ll eat my hat. Flock, in particular, is probably of interest to all you social browsers out there, what with its very clever integration with many commonly-used web services. If I used more of them than I do, I’d probably switch.

OK. Now, on to more writing of content!

OK. Safari 3.1.2 and Firefox 3.0.3 are both rendering the site nicely. It took some doing, but I managed to eliminate the “seams” and fix a few other visual glitches as well. My site should now be positively beeyooteefull on the two major standards-compliant browsers. That just leaves the evil that is IE7. I have a feeling that one’s just plain not going to be easy and I’m going to have to consult with CSS gurus on making that one work anything resembling the way I want it to.

Oh yeah…I added some nice sidebar widgets to enable collapsing of various groupings and the gratuitous Flash-enhanced tag-cloud. Yay.

I sleep now!

I have things working really well in Safari/WebKit, pretty well in Firefox/Gecko, and not so much in IE. I’m going to work on getting an IE7-specific stylesheet going, though. I’m just not bothering with the CSS-rendering nightmare that is IE6. If you have IE6, why haven’t you upgraded? Or, better yet, switch to Firefox already. (Have I mentioned I hate IE? Standards, M$…you’re doing it wrong!)