(no subject)

[chipotle]

The weather in Florida's finally broken--at least to the degree it ever does. After a month of low-to-mid 80s, today it'll barely break 70, and the lows will be in the low 50s rather than mid 60s. And the humidity will be low enough that, with breeze, it'll feel cooler rather than warmer.

It's been a frustrating week so far, for no obvious reason. I think the month of sauna didn't help, but I think it's mostly the stress of holiday rush on top of my normal level of 'must find another job' stress. Work yesterday was busy and it'll probably be busy today, but it's mostly busy with stupid things--not solving a new problem but rewriting awful code to make it easier to add functionality the program's supposed to have already but doesn't. (Software guru Joel Spolsky says that it's always bad for new programmers to rewrite old "awful" code. While he makes a good case for it, he makes the assumptions that the old code is not only written correctly enough to be modifiable, but actually functional to start with. Neither of those assumptions are necessarily correct in this case.)

After just a couple of days I'm seeing one problem with LiveJournal, which isn't technical: putting a cute little client in the taskbar or program menu or whatever, so you can just click an icon and spew off whenever you want to, means that you will be tempted to click an icon and spew off whenever you want to. It encourages you to treat LiveJournal more like a diary. But it isn't: a diary is a private journal. (How many stories or sitcom plots have "X found Y's diary" as a plot?) I have no interest in telegraphing vitriolic, miserable rants to anyone who happens to be listening. This doesn't mean I won't rant--it just means I'm aware that, even if only friends (and fans) are likely to be reading this, the web is still a completely public forum.

Sometimes my journal entries are close to essays. When they're not, it's like this: I picture that you, my presumed reader, and I are perhaps sitting in a hotel bar and you've asked, "So, what's up with you?" I'll presume I'm comfortable enough to give you a real, probably too-verbose answer. But a friend, or perhaps friendly acquaintance I've just recently met, is not a psychoanalyst. Things I'm not likely to share over that martini are things I'm not likely to write about here.

Comments

[aureth.livejournal.com]

Greetings, Watts. Haven't heard from you in a while, and was a bit surprised to see you pop up on my list of friends. A good sort of surprised.

I'm still experimenting with what I want to write about in my journal. Sometimes I ramble, sometimes I attack a problem I've been having so that I may deal with it better, sometimes I just talk about what happened during my day. Sometimes it's just a big messageboard for friends. Whatever the case, I've gotten enough satisfying use out of the system to keep at it since late last spring. Guess I've gotten my money's worth.