Blogging is hard

About two months ago, on the day I returned from Australia, we got a phone call a really terrible person who happened to be a realtor representing our landlords. She informed us that the landlords intended to sell the apartment, and that they’d like to give us the first crack, before it went on the market. I had several discussions while I was down in Australia about property, buying a house and what not, so it was on my mind when I got the call. It seemed like destiny. We didn’t get it, mostly because of the evil, devil-lady realtor.

In retrospect, I’m glad the realtor was such a terrible, terrible person, because the property wasn’t so good, and it wasn’t going to get any better. (We don’t live in the best of neighbourhoods in Victoria.) Nevertheless, the real estate market being what it is here, the place sold in a day; so we had to move, again. This has been the fifth move in as many years. We were lucky to get a place that was literally down the street from our last place, and it’s nicer, so it’s not that bad a deal. I’m now absolutely sure that moving is the positively the worst thing ever. This time, we decided to spend a modest sum on cleaners: that was the best money I ever spent. I might “outsource” more of the work next time I move, like packing. One conclusion I came to while moving: I can’t pack irregularly shaped things. Books, putting little boxes into bigger boxes, placing my computers and their parts in their original packaging: all of this I’m fine with. But as soon as I’m confronted with knick-knacks or the can opener, I tilt my head, try the irregular shape in a few places in the box and remind myself to do it later, ’cause the box isn’t going to be filled properly and I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT…

Anyway, as soon as I found out we had to move, my blogging frequency and my interest in writing entries took a steep decline. We’ve been moved in for a month this Friday, and I’m only just thinking of things that I want to post. I’ve thought about why I don’t blog as much as I want. Here’s some of the reasons:

• I want this to be a largely technical blog; this means XML in the content or code samples. .Text is not setup very well for XML content, especially if it’s formatted. It’s mostly the shitty text box that it comes with, but upgrading to Community Server Blogs is not going to happen. It’s supposed to be easier and more powerful, but I couldn’t get the damn thing working at all. So I’m not happy with my blogging software. I haven’t had the time to investigate any others, but I might just take the opportunity to actually learn ASP.NET and write my own.
• There are things I want to say, but I’m either too lazy or too busy or I think no one would possibly care about what I want to post, so I don’t do it. Part of it is because I censor myself: there are things that I’ve kept off-limits. Having those limits makes it harder to post about things that I didn’t restrict. So I’m going to try to not impose those limits.
• This site is butt fucking ugly. I don’t like that. I’m not inclined to make posts ’cause I don’t want to look at the site. This has to a lot to do with the first point; it’s another limitation with .Text. The style I picked was one of the only ones that works in Firefox, my browser of choice.