Holiday Round-up and the future of this blog
Technically I think we’re smack dab in the middle of the ‘Holidays’ since New Years is still a few days away, but I’ve been unable to see it. I’ve been too busy so far, but I think I’ll be taking a break here over the next few days. There have been a number of things on my mind, and I wanted to throw them out there, for whoever ends up reading.
First, I’m already psyched about the upcoming Watchmen movie. It helps that the trailers are incredible in every way, especially the music. I’ve got the soundtracks off of iTunes, and while the music is now inextricably linked to the movie, I’ve also found them quite enjoyable to listen on their own.
Secondly, If you’re using Firefox, you must check out the Ubiquity plug-in. I’ve been using it for a few months now, and it’s made it’s way into my toolchain. For example, I quickly checked the definition of “inextricably” a few moments ago, just to make sure it means what I thought. Now this was already an easy task: open a new tab and type “define:intextricably” into the google search box, and off you go. This cuts out the new tabs part, which is a small improvement that feels much better. Ubiquity can do much more than dictionary look-ups, though. I’m more than a little biased: Ubiquity is the topic of a teaching conference presentation I’m giving in a few months.
The Future of this Blog
I’ve been working on a post for the last few months at least entitled “Software for Introspection.” Introspection, not in the programming sense, but the psychological. It’s a topic I’ve always been interested in, and along these lines, I’ve developed a personal suite of tools I use for both quantitative and qualitative analysis of internal processes. This suite of tools is really aimed at my personal needs, and I’m not sure just how transferable some of these tools would be to someone else. However, given the new home of the blog, I think that I might begin to aim at a public release.
Just over a month ago, I moved from my old domain, joshuamcharles.com, to the current domain, sudolife.org. I had several reasons for this, the biggest being that I really like the play of “sudo”-”pseudo.” The website isn’t my life, but it is. It is the electronic presence that tells the world who I am, but it isn’t necessarily an accurate representation. Therefore, it’s psuedo-josh.
As I thought about the other side of the wordplay (“sudo life”, as though it’s a unix command), though, something else occured to me. This could be the perfect place to release my introspective tools as a service, once I get them to a point that they would actually be useful to someone else. I’m not sure if this is a good idea or not, but I wanted to throw it out there and see if anyone else has any thoughts on the matter. It could be that there is no demand for this sort of software at all.
Beyond that, I’m looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow, especially considering that it’s too late for me to be blogging. I have noticed a distinct increase in the lack of ability to sleep over the last week or so, as well as an increase in general anxiety, and a fixation on certain topics. The next few days could seem excruciatingly long.
I didn’t even know you could look up definitions on google that way. I guess I’m way behind. Ubiquity? Maybe I’ll catch up in a decade or two.
Ubiquity is really handy and does a lot more than just look up definitions. As I get closer to my conference presentation, I’ll try to post more about it.