Tag Archive: blogging

Back to sensible

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Thu. October 27, 2011

Back in July of 2007 I decided to do something a bit hardcore to this blog in order to challenge myself. I started blogging daily as a way to keep my writing skills sharp and to practice the art of daily gratitude. I mean, even when I wrote a ranting post I still managed to take a moment to think about all of the great things happening in my life. It’s been useful, and I don’t regret it one bit. Finding time back then wasn’t so bad because I really had a fair bit of time on my hands; writing sort of became habitual. I was able to capture a lot of awesome thoughts on here. When I read back at some older entries I can still feel a lot of the emotions I associated with that post. Well, that kind of brings me to where I am today. Times change, priorities change. At this point, I am not able to devote as much time to this blog as I used to.

Uh oh.

I mean, it should be obvious that I’ve been struggling. As much as I like the occasional YouTube video, I was using them to post an entry at times when I had nothing better to write. Sometimes I’d force myself to write just to get an entry in, and the resulting entry is just misshapen and wonky. Lately, I’ve fallen behind on my posts such that I’ve had to backdate posts to keep the streak going. Most of all, the pressure to get posts out regularly is making writing less fun. That’s no good. I need to reclaim the blog and not let it control me, know what I mean?

So, no, I’m not giving this sucker up. No: that’d be sort of like cutting off a limb, right? Right now, I’m going to revert the blog to a not-daily model. If I am fatigued and find myself without anything to write about I just won’t write. Seems simple enough. I think I had a bit of a fear of breaking the streak to be honest. I didn’t want anyone to go “oooh look at that…he couldn’t keep it going after all.” Well, at this point I really don’t give a damn. I still plan on writing frequently, but doing so more leisurely. Really, that’s how things should be. I’m going back to sensible. I’m hoping this will reinvigorate me. So hey, this isn’t an ending–this is a transformation.

Rock on.

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Blogging LaTeX

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Mon. July 18, 2011

Honestly, I just wanted to try piecing together a function using LaTeX notation. Let’s see…

\phi=\frac{1-\sqrt{5}}{2}\approx 1.618...

Yeah, that would be the Golden Ratio. Thing of beauty, that is. Get it? That was a math joke. Blah.

What’s the LaTeX notation like? Well:

\phi=\frac{1-\sqrt{5}}{2}\approx 1.618... &s=3

What does it look like as an infinite series? Hmm…

\phi=\frac{13}{8} + \sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{(-1)^{(n + 1)}(2n + 1)!} {(n + 2)!n!4^{(2n + 3)} }

And the LaTeX code:

\phi=\frac{13}{8} + \sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{(-1)^{(n + 1)}(2n + 1)!}
{(n + 2)!n!4^{(2n + 3)} } &s=3

Neat!

Back in the day, I was kind of fond of using Microsoft Word’s equation editor tool. I found it fun laying out equations. It wasn’t about the math (although that was interesting in itself) but more about typesetting and layout. So knowing that WordPress supports LaTeX is a sweet deal. Of course, I probably don’t really have any use for the tool these days. It’s not like high school or university where I had a need to print out equations like these in reports and what not. Still, the idea that I can do it if I wanted to is pretty cool.

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Writing about Jason

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Sun. July 17, 2011

I’m really not fond of writing bios. I mean, I find it hard enough to write about myself as if I was the bee’s knees (whether or not that’s actually true is irrelevant). Trying to convey an idea of who I am and what drives me in just a paragraph or two is rather difficult. We’re all quite multi-layered. Can we really be summarized so easily? Or course not. However, people don’t want a whole life story, right? People don’t need to know about all of my little neuroses in all their crazy splendour. All a bio needs to do is introduce a person, and make the reader think “Hmm, this guy is kind of interesting: I want to know more.” So, even though I may want to dump everything out in an attempt to achieve a lot more clarity, there’s just no need. My actions and activities will probably speak louder than anything I may put on paper. Isn’t there some fear with that though? Someone might read my bio and think, “Yeah…I don’t care to know any more about this person.” At that point it doesn’t matter anymore if you’ve done something ridiculously wonderful. You’ve already been judged. You’ve been sorted and filed.

There’s also the matter of keeping a bio up-to-date. This particular post was kind of spurred on when I was poking around the blog and found that my “About Jason” page was getting old. A while ago I took to actually including a date as to when the page was last updated. It seemed necessary all things considered. However I may describe myself at the time of writing won’t be true even just months later. How quickly should I update? Am I really having a moment of “Oh God, people ought to know that I’ve already accomplished all of that shit”?

In some places, the required bios are almost laughably limited. How the heck do I distill myself into a handful of characters. In Twitter, I’ve got:

Comp eng, e-commerce platform dev, Waterloo grad, flat-footed runner, unintentional foodie, improviser dude, tea drinker, and single guy in the city.

Well, that’s out of date. I’m not in e-commerce anymore, right? In my flavors.me profile I have:

20-something, runner, improviser, baker/cook, programmer.

That guy.

Probably accurate. Still, writing it this way seems like I’m only as good as my activities.

Why am I complicating all of this?

In the end, how the world perceives me doesn’t hold up as being as important as how I perceive myself. I am an awesome person, and words can’t really encapsulate all of that.

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Sticking with the new theme

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Wed. July 13, 2011

I’ve been wanting to change this blog’s theme for a very long time. It needed a new look. That’s pretty much the catalyst. As much as the old theme worked, it was showing age and hadn’t really been updated by the author in a very long time. Especially with all of the new WordPress advances, I was on the hunt for something rather new and more current. I’ve tried a few times in the past to try to change the theme, but I always found something wrong with the new one such that I ended up going back to what I knew. Who knew that it would be so tough moving to a two-column layout? I’m accustomed to the three-column setup from the old theme that figuring out how to rearrange things was a challenge.

While browsing around, I quickly came across this theme. Apart from it being blue (I’m very much a dark red type of guy) it had a general feel that I felt fit well with my sense of blog-style. It took a fair bit of rearranging and tweaking, but I think I’m at a point where I’m happy with it. I do not see myself switching back to the old theme. Man, it’s 2011. Onward and upward to better things that use better tech, right?

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Jason’s 2010

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Fri. December 31, 2010

I actually started writing this post out a few days before tonight. There’s a lot to cover in a year and I wanted to make sure that I spent more than a bit of time getting my thoughts together. Yeah, without thinking about it too much, my first response is to call 2010 a banner year. Yes, there were hardships along the way, and a lot of hard work was needed just to continue moving forward. All the same, I wouldn’t take any of it back. There’s so much that I wouldn’t have even dreamt of in 2009. It was that kind of year.

This is a big post, so the remainder will come after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

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New theme

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Thu. July 1, 2010

Well, I figured that with the new month I’d go ahead and upgrade my install of WordPress. After doing so I tried to switch around the settings on my old theme. The settings page wasn’t accessible since that move. Instead of bothering to figure out why I thought I’d give the new Twenty Ten default theme a go. It’s definitely different from the look and feel of the other one. I currently don’t feel it’s really all that reflective of my style, but I think I can tweak this one enough over time to make it more like something I’d use. Either that, or I’ll find a theme that’s more appropriate. Anyway, we’ll see how this goes.

ETA: Oops. Looks like I like the old theme too much. I found that the author released an update to make the options pages work for WP3.0, so here it is back again. Whoo.

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Gateway to over-share

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Tue. March 30, 2010

Well, that last post was certainly interesting. At least, it’s interesting to me. Drunk blogging certainly isn’t something I advocate. It’s a slippery slope, and when you’re unguarded it’s far too easy to have a bit of verbal diarrhea and over-share. Luckily I still had enough sense to not be an idiot. The gateway to over-share was open, and I might have peeked through, but in the end I still shut the door. Still…the last post is kind of unfortunate. What’s done is done.

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Sleepy eye thing

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Sat. February 6, 2010

You know, as I was writing last night’s post I was passing in and out of consciousness. OK, so maybe that’s making things sounds much more dire than they actually were. I was just really tired and actually had difficulty just completing the entry. At the bar, by the third Strongbow Erika was telling me that I had the sleepy eye thing going on. Yeah, I’ve actually noticed that before. It seems that when I have alcohol I tend to just look fatigued. I don’t go Asian red, but I just look like I haven’t slept in 36 hours. I guess it’s true though: I really was tired. And walking over to Yonge and Bloor after a long night out probably didn’t help me out either.

Anyway, in yesterday’s post I meant to post pictures of the foie gras poutine as well as the remnants of the Belgian chocolate fondue that we shared. Unfortunately, my sleep baked mind just couldn’t manage that. So here they are. Yes, they were both awesome and tasty.

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