justin-shepard.net

On a lark, I set up a twitter account a few days ago. Feel free to follow my tweets. I may or may not stick with it, as I’m not really sure I “get” twitter. But I do like fiddling with new things. I probably won’t add the twitter box you might see on other sites to my main page, mostly because I figure the bulk of my readers follow the RSS feed. If you’d like to see the box though, let me know in the comments.

My trip to Costa Rica began twelve hours before my flight left. In order to make the airport trip a little easier (and to give my car a free place to stay) I spent the night at a friend’s house, which happens to be much closer to the airport than my apartment. From there it was a quick drive to the airport. Once checked in I had some time to relax and read before boarding the first leg of my trip.

(more…)

So for the past month or so, I’ve been noodling about this blog in my spare time. That noodling brings you this post, which marks a change in the nature of this blog. But first, some boring expository text.

The basic line of my thinking started with the following: I like the idea of a blog, I just haven’t been very good at the execution of a blog. As I thought about it from there, the reasons why I wasn’t very good at writing the blog became apparent.

One reason is best illustrated with an example. I have been sitting on a post about my Costa Rica trip for over a week now. I haven’t published it because I’ve been waiting to get the pictures developed and uploaded to Flickr. My original plan was to make this post after the Costa Rica post was published. But because the Costa Rica post was basically stuck in the unpublished state, this post wasn’t happening either. Normally, the post that’s blocking me from writing anything is all in my head and so nothing ever gets written. This sort of behavior has sentenced many previous post ideas to death.

But the biggest reason is that what I want this blog to be has changed. I’m not really interested in trying to document the things that go on in my life, which is basically what I’d thought of as this blog’s purpose. After thinking things through, I decided it was better to do something else with this blog, something I’d be more interested in writing about. After all, I still like the idea of a blog, and the blog software and domain were already set up, so it seemed a shame to let it languish or to remove it.

And so, I’m making this post to announce that this blog is now going to be a place for me to talk about technology. A pretty open-ended topic, to be sure. But with this change I can cover a lot of ground that I’m actually interested in writing about. For example, there are interesting technological decisions and happenings going on at my job, which are cool and I’d love to share (though obviously there’s some detail that must be omitted). And I can talk about gadgets and such, because I really dig that sort of stuff.

That’s not to say that I will never make non-technology related posts. There’s still cool stuff I occasionally do that I do want to share, like my Costa Rican adventure. And it will likely be better and more interesting than what I was trying to do anyway, because it will be fun and cool stuff that I’ll want to spend time writing about. If you really want to skip out on the tech blather, feel free to point your browsers to this page or your RSS readers to this feed.

Oh, if anyone has a better category name than “Non-Tech”, I’m all ears.