I am a world-class procrastinator, an expert in “gunnadoo” and nowhere near as proficient with “git ‘er done” as I should be. Partly it’s simply that I get lost in something and the next thing I know several hours have vanished and some Very Important Thing I should have done hasn’t been done.
The rest is that if I don’t want to do something, I’m very good at finding – and justifying – other things to do instead. Although I admit I’ve never gone quite so far as to try to vacuum one of the cats. I likely wouldn’t survive the experience.
Which of course is why I usually end up typing up my posts at some point Wednesday night when I’m half asleep (unless I space them completely), sometimes fending off curious felines while I’m at it.
And cursing WordPress because I can no longer find the old editor and the new one hates me. I’ll get half a dozen words typed into the blasted thing and then it starts swearing at me and claiming I don’t have permission to edit. I suspect there’s a caching issue involved, but I do enough tracking down and fixing things with flaky websites at work to want to do the same thing on my own time.
I’d ask if it was too much to want things to just work but I know far too well that the answer to that question is “yes”. I think it’s one of those never-stated Rules of the Universe, along with “nothing is ever easy”, “nothing works the way you expect it to”, and “power corrupts” (Why am I thinking about the corrupting effect of electricity? Honestly. Back before there was electricity and the Internets and massively connected everything it was a lot easier for little tyrants to set up their bailiwicks and play at being dictator for as long as they could make it last. Electric power and the connections it makes possible helped to reduce corruption, sort of. Or at least, helped to make it easier to communicate that corruption is happening, which in turn makes it easier to get rid of. If people want to. And if I keep on this tangent I’m going to drive myself insane.)
Anyway, ritual cursing of WordPress aside, I should probably invest in goats blood… ahem… try to remember to write posts over the weekend and schedule them well in advance. I’d invite folks to take bets on this except that I know full well that next Wednesday, I’ll be typing when I should be going to bed – if I don’t space the whole thing again because the blasted interface brings me so much Do Not Want I’m fighting the urge to break into LOLCat.
Oh, and have an old (and very cute) picture of a very young Buttercup with the much missed Bugger Cat (they’re sharing kitty beds) and a nearby Baby Cat.
Mad Genius Club 
My favorite local steak place has a sign saying “I never finish projects – have a black-belt in the partial-arts.” I heartily agree with that. [looks at to be graded stack, to be read pile, five stories to be written . . . SIGH]
Alas, yes. I have so many partial projects waiting for that mythical creature “enough time”.
In the first Song of the Lioness book, Tamora Pierce has a character (Alanna) informed by her instructor that “Free time is what the gods give you after you die.” After telling her to get a huge amount of homework – and weapons’ practice – done in her free time. Which is almost non-existent.
I tend to add the codicil ” . . . what the gods give you after you die – if you’ve been good.”
Knowing my luck, I’d just get another pile of responsibilities.
Of course electricity is corrupted; real transmission media are not truly distortion free.
grins, ducks, and runs away
(Yeah, yeah, I bet I’m wrong about that somehow…)
I have _got_ to stop handing out easy straight lines around this crowd.
I would joke about that idiom, but I’m much too frightened of seeming homophobic.
akshully, I’m just not familiar enough with the stereotypes to think of anything funny.
What happens when a black-hearted murderer’s soul is washed away by a tide of electrons?
Random data points:
The Spiritualism movement started in NY during 1848. (The movement faltered when one of the founders publicly confessed to fraud, and it declined in influence until 1905, at which point it started another upward trend, which became darn near vertical during WWI.)
Maxwell was at least woo-curious, Hertz was not, but the “luminiferous aether” of electromagnetism attracted flakes like a cat in a styrofoam box. Tait, Lord Raleigh, and Lodge were all deeply into spiritualism and how it connected to electromagnetism. A lot of the experiments that resulted in practical uses were grounded in (ahem) extremely dubious hypothesies. (Not to mention how many of the early experimenters came to bad ends. It was right up there with “you have to teach students, professor” in probability.)
Thomas Edison was a bit of a black-hearted bastard himself. He was playing with his “spirit phone” to communicate with the dead in 1870. He was active in the NY 1886 commission finalizing the design of, and approving the use of, the electric chair. There were any number of blasphemous rumors about him. Which were not at all helped by his 1890 “talking doll”, which exposed hundreds of well-off little girls to high-octane nightmare fuel.
1905 was Einstein’s annus mirabillis, when he forced a paradigm shift that changed the conversation from luminous aether to the ether of space-time. (More materialist, if equally abstract, and conducive to different types of woo—like time travel.)
Houdini launched his campaign against spiritualism in the 1920s, but it lingered on in decreasing influence until the very end of the 1950s. (Then it was absorbed by the human potential movement, the counter-culture, and synthesized into the new age movement.)
Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. (In NY, naturally. Edison joined, because of course he did.)
Is that why the Democrats are trying to destroy electrical generation and use? To save us from corruption? How can they do that, when they’re so corrupt themselves?
I would never trust an online editor for anything more than comments like this. The world won’t end if a comment gets mangled, or vanishes into the Twilight Zone. I do most of my writing in Mac TextEdit, in RTF mode. Primitive, I know, but I’m used to it. UGH! Me Cave-man!
There are a lot of text editors available, from LibreOffice and Pluma to EMACS. I just think it’s better to keep both the editor, and your data, on your own computer until you’re ready to post it. After it’s posted, you’ve still got an independent copy.
I shall have to go back to writing my posts in an editor. I’d stopped because the last iteration of the WordPress editor was pretty reliable, and I kept it as my default for as long as I could, but alas…
I might be a techie, but that does not mean I’m for “progress uber alles”. And I think at least some of those trying to destroy electrical generation and use are just jealous that something shines brighter than they do. But then, pitch black would shine brighter than those specimens and they know it, so maybe they’re just in “If I can’t have it nobody does” mode.
I’ve just heard today about U Minn getting banned from kernel contributions because their IRB was apparently letting some researchers intentionally submit harmful or useless patches.
Given that I started out crazy from paranoia…
(remainder of comment deleted by author for an excess of off-topic, and sarcastic applause)
Just because some things are called progress or improvements do not actually make them improvements.
I’m still running my ancient DOS text editor. It’s running in a DOS emulator on Linux, but it’s still rocking like it’s 1988. (and, at that, it was only a minor upgrade from the 1985 version)
Yes, there are ‘better’ editors out there. But after more than 30 years, this one is a direct brain-to-screen interface. There’s no benefit to a ‘better’ editor that will recoup the time lost learning it, and the continual lost time and hassle of endless upgrades, loss of features I’ve grown to depend on, file format changes, and eventually, being ‘desupported’ by its creators. As long as I’m on some platform with a DOS emulator, my editor will always be at my fingertips, unchanged.
I’ve always had trouble jumping from project to project. (At least I jump back.)
This year it’s been worse.
In Gonadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree –
But he never got a round tuit.