Am I Getting Lazy?

It has been too long since my last post. What’s going on? Well, for one thing, I’ve done a couple of articles for work.com (a bit of shameless self-promotion here) , on “recovering data from a dead computer“  and another on “natural language processing” - text-to-speech and speech-to-text software.  I’m actually getting paid for my writing; and though I’m getting paid less than minimum wage (on an hourly basis) for doing it, it really is neat for your writing ability to be recognized.

But I haven’t really been all that busy writing those things. It’s kind of hard to explain. I think the problem is that I have convinced myself that everything I write must be a work of art, with detailed logic, clever phrases, and quotations. After the first flush of enthusiasm for the blog wore off, I found it not so easy to write through the brain fog that envelops your mind when you are tired at the end of the day. I have the energy to read my e-mail, surf my favorite web sites, but not enough to sustain several hours of determined composition.

But I should know better. Over and over again through the years I have read that the best way to write is to just sit down and do it. If you don’t feel like two hours of writing, do 15 minutes. That’s why this program I work with has a draft mode- what I write doesn’t immediately have to go to the Web. Just do it.

So I will try to do better. Just getting a new computer at work generates some enthusiasm. Things that took prohibitively long before now can be done so quickly. As a result, I have been enhancing and cleaning up the program and file cross-reference program I have written at work. I can track, in a nested fashion, what programs call what programs; and within a program I can click on a file name and get a file description or even display the file itself, scan the text for strings, and other neat stuff.  When it took well over an hour to generate the files necessary for the program, and now the files can be generated in under two minutes- that just gives you more of a feeling of power.

I was receiving the Web statistics on my various posts, and I found it very interesting that the articles that seemed to generate the most interest involved, in some fashion, freeform RPG. Even though I myself am not a big fan of it, it may be interesting to pursue that topic further in future posts, perhaps in a less dismissive way. I still believe in the validity of my arguments, but it may be worthwhile to analyze it to see why people are intrigued by it.

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