Category Archives: Personal

24/02
2020

This ‘back to blogging’ exercise is something which I had planned, on and off, for 8 years. Better late than never, I suppose. It has been on my to-do list, and coupled with a need to get all of the sites that I look after under SSL (the increasingly ubiquitous padlock that we see in our browser address bars – secure browsing), I spent this weekend setting up new web hosting from scratch and moving my sites to that, instead of doing any of the other – arguably more important – things that I should have been doing.

I call this constructive procrastination, where as a displacement activity, I get something else done instead of what I should have been doing; the energy is not wasted, and someone, somewhere gets something out of it.

I can’t say that it went smoothly, but I am pleased to say that while there are a great number of things that I’m terrible at, including a number things that are probably important to being a functioning member of society, setting up and fine-tuning a web server isn’t one of them. Nginx, PHP, and WordPress (and I really, truly hate PHP), from a standing start. I even impressed myself; I should do this for a living.

23/02
2020

I’m at it again. I’ve moved my long-suffering blog to a new server in a weekend project I’ve called ‘Longform’, so that I can basically write longer Twitter posts on my own blog, which is where I should really be doing that kind of thing anyway. I enjoy the brevity of writing tweets, the challenge and the thrill of throwing something out to the world (not that anyone particularly reads what I write) in 280 characters or less, or building a narrative over a number of tweets. The thing is, it really is an open forum, and my tweets can individually land in someone’s timeline, shorn of all context, and what might be a running joke in my mind will take on a different intent for someone else. I’m not saying that I’ll avoid it here, but maybe I’ll take a little more time and craft something a little more considered when I’m doing it here.

And I’ll be able to edit. I hope that I’ll avoid that and get it mostly right first time. We’ll see. If nothing else, it’ll keep me off Twitter more, creating my own stories and outlining ideas and venting in my own space.

On not having Asperger’s

13/01
2015

I get stressed about dealing with people, sometimes. Very stressed. I mean, a lot of the day-to-day stuff I can deal with, it’s usually fairly predictable and routine and it’s fine, but when it falls outside of that, or if there’s some conflict which I’m not mentally prepared for, or if I say the wrong thing to someone or misjudge a social interaction, then things can get stressful, and I can get weird (to say the least). I mean, a small social interaction where I think that maybe I misjudged it or did the wrong thing, can leave me breaking out in a sweat with rising panic. I’m more aware of the grimacing and knuckle-chewing these days and flapping my arms about, so I can catch that and hide it from the world, and I have to watch out for the defensive flash of rage (and the terrible adventures that could be started as a result). Now, all of this is not nearly so bad when I have the energy and focus to intercept all of this, because then I can catch it, handle it, fix it, leave everyone happy; but what happens when I don’t? What if I’m distracted […]

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10/01
2012

So, here we are, January 2012 and I’ve decided to have another stab at writing on a regular basis again. I liked putting stuff on Facebook, but it’s not really the place for longer notes, it has it’s own audience and after all it is Facebook, the mighty walled garden of the new Web. I want to work at the discipline to go at it regularly, to get my ideas out there, and even if I don’t reach Tadhg-like output levels of yesteryear, it would be good to post once or twice a week.

And since I’ve decided that coding in PHP is truly a degrading experience, I’ll hopefully spend more time writing on it than fiddling with it (which is pretty much what I did before). A not entirely unrelated issue is still, and probably will be for a long time, what to do with the old andcurve site. It’s an archive, even if I now dislike a lot of what is there, it’s nice to keep it about in some form.

Here’s to a new start.