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The trouble I find with projects, particularly daily projects, is that they're bloody hard to keep doing sometimes. Mur Lafferty has had the problem with The News From Poughkeepsie. JR Blackwell, who's doing a 365 days photography project has also encountered it. And now I'm really hitting a wall with my own daily project, 360-odd days of 2008. So far I've posted up to day 156 (June 5th) and I'm struggling to get round to doing day 157 or anything thereafter (for reference, today is day 162).

I have my reasons, to an extent, for not being able to get much done at the moment. For a start, I'm not able to go very far at present, which limits the things of which I can take photos. On top of that I'm not, unlike JR Blackwell or Rebbeka Gudleifsdottir or a dozen other photographers on Flickr, particularly photogenic and I'm not terribly fond of self portraits. I do have some ideas for shots in which I could serve as the subject but having the time to execute them is another matter entirely. Oh, and there's always the matter of what to say when someone sees you taking a self portrait and asks "what are you doing?"

And let's not even talk about writing. Well, okay, let's. But only insofar as to say I'm not doing any at the moment and haven't been for a while. And of course, when you're off the wagon for too long it makes it harder to get back on. Much, much harder. So even now, when I have the time to write, I find myself doing something else entirely whilst thinking "I should be writing."

All of which means I am made of FAIL.

Still, a night's sleep and who knows? I might get up in the morning, full of the joys of... er... Summer, and sit down and write 1000 words before breakfast and then, after breakfast, go out and take some photos.

In an infinite universe anything is possible.

It won't have escaped your notice that I started to write a comment piece on this news story but my blog client (which I really do need to write something about in the not-too-distant future since it's something that I've written and could possibly turn out to be quite useful to a fairly small subset of the Open Source community) fell over. Before it retired to that great stack trace in the sky, however, it managed to vomit up the beginnings of my post onto the internets (a fact about which I have filed a bug) and as a result managed to make me look like both a bit of an idiot and a bit of a bigot. I'm used to the idiot part. I don't like looking like a bigot.

Anyway, since it had made it onto my blog (and I never bothered to check that it hadn't, it also ended up propagating across the interwubs to LiveJournal, where a good friend of mine commented:

Interesting case. If they were only leafleting, though, I can't see the harm, and even if they were preaching in the street, I think asking them to leave was a bit severe. People can quite easily walk past and seal up their ears (as we do every day to resist free newspapers being thrust into our hands) - and Jehova's Witnesses have been door-knocking for years without being asked to leave certain streets. The "Be a winner, not a sinner" man who yells his (Christian) faith down a megaphone in the middle of Oxford Circus every single day is seen as a local landmark, if a slightly irritating one once he starts going on about how buying stuff on a Sunday is a highway to hell.

I don't believe in thrusting religion down people's necks, but we accept the marketing of coffee, newspapers and shampoo samples readily enough on the basis that people can take it or leave it, so why ban people expounding on their religion in the same way, as long as they're not being aggressive or harrassing people?

On a similar theme, I got handed a flyer today about a man who's riding a horse from Texas to Jerusalem (the tricky bit with the ocean wasn't explained) in the name of Jesus, to spread the Gospel. Fair dos, I thought, before turning my thoughts to how he was going to get the horse across continents.

All of which, plus the fact that it was late and I was tired and lacking in the brain power necessary to sling a sentence together, let alone make a point about religion, left me thinking that I should probably re-write the post, or at least some of the post, and actually make clear my thoughts on the matter, which, exploding blog clients aside, I'd hitherto failed to do.

Read more...

Sigh. Apologies for the half baked, never to be finished post that somehow appeared on the site anyway (I blame a blog client that exploded, which is a shame since I wrote the damn client).

Nothing to see here. Move along now.

Edit:

The post was a comment on this story from the BBC. The point I was trying to make wasn't actually valid given the context (that'll teach me for not reading the whole story before I write a post). Nevertheless it seems only fair that I write a full comment on the story so that you know what I actually think, but I'll do that tomorrow.

There are far too many of these these days. I don't know whether it's the fact that I'm working that's done it - as I think I've said before working from home and tracking your own time tends to make you that little bit more honest, which means I don't really want to waste my time writing blog posts when there's work to be done (although to be fair when I'm working I'm so busy as to not be thinking too much about blogging at all, which is a very pleasant change).

Working on Launchpad, and for Canonical in general, is an entirely new experience. Working with a team of people who are spread across the globe, from home, managing your own time and doing really cool stuff at the same time... It doesn't come much better. Add onto that the fact that the team with which your working is crammed full of seriously smart people who really care about their work and as far as I'm concerned you can just about stick it at the top of every job list you can find.

It's hard to switch off, sometimes. I'm spending eight or nine hours a day in front of my PC and then, coming downstairs at night, often find myself picking up my laptop and picking up where I left of with whatever Bazaar branch I happen to have been working on. The only reason I didn't do it tonight was that I was feeling particularly frazzled (and yet the temptation is still there).

Not that this is a bad thing. I used to think that it was. Back when I was working at the Mob the last thing I'd want to be doing is picking up work when I get home. But with Launchpad I want to keep working because I want to squeeze every drop of good code out of my day that I can.

Which only leaves writing, of course. Originally, when I was offered the position with Canonical, I thought that I would write in the mornings, either by getting up early and writing before work or by writing from, say, nine to ten in the morning and working until seven. Instead, I've found that I'm doing the most writing between six and eight in the evening, and though that isn't my ideal - I'd be much happier if I could actually get out of bed in the morning and do the writing when I'm at my freshest but that's a whole different problem - I've been making good progress.

When I started working on novel-the-second I told myself that needed to start small. "Don't try too hard," I told myself, mindful of the lessons of NaNoWriMo back in '05, where I nearly burned myself out after a couple of days and ended up writing a 50,000 word lump with which I'm still not happy. "Don't try to run before you can walk."

So I settled down with the book in which I'm writing the book and told myself that if I wrote five pages a day to start with I'd be well on the way soon enough. I usually fit 100-150 words on a page, so to start with, considering I haven't written a huge amount recently, I figured that ~500 words a day was pretty good going. To keep myself honest and to try and make sure I didn't slack I decided to use the Jerry Seinfeld productivity method, which basically involves a ridiculously large wall chart (nicked from Sarah's stock of it's-the-start-of-a-new-year-let's-give-things-away wall charts, which she's accumulated from the various teacher-related organisations of which she's a member), a felt-tip pen and a cross on the chart for every day that I actually write something. So far it's working. I've missed a few days (I started by writing FAIL in for those days bug gave up when I realised that just leaving them empty carried more weight of guilt), and I'm not happy about it, but the crosses are mounting up, which can only be a good thing.

And now, after a week of 500-odd word days, I'm starting to itch for more. Instead of giving myself five pages to write, I want to write ten. I want to keep writing until my wrist cramps up and my ideas run out and then I want to rest for a while and come back to it as soon as I can. I haven't felt this good about writing in a long time, and it's a beautiful feeling.

And you know what? If I were working for the Mob I don't reckon I'd be getting this much done. 

I have much that I want to blog about but I've had less than eight hours sleep in the last two days and it's making things a bit blurry about now. I will get round to the bit about religion and how it can cause problems in conversation. And now I think I'll shut my eyes and ponder whether or not to integrate Flickr and Twitter and all the other e?rs with the main posts feed on the blog.

Which is probably too much for this time in the morning, but whilst I'm alive I can but think, can't I.

Or I might think about fairy tales. Yes, that seems more likely.