When I started the new-look blog, I was aiming to update at least once per week. A cursory glance at the timeline will tell you that, for the last few weeks, I haven’t managed it. I do have an excuse, however - the hard drive in my laptop died a sudden and inexplicable death. I’ve actually been quite lucky in this respect - in the twelve or so years that I’ve had a computer with a hard drive, I’ve only had one other fail on me, which I believe works out at well below the failure rate you’d expect for consumer hard disks - but it’s still a bit inconvenient. While I do have other devices that I could in theory use, you really need a proper, decent-sized keyboard if you’re composing text of any length. That eliminates everything but the desktop PC, which would’ve meant sequestering myself away upstairs instead of being sat on the sofa, still connected to other people. Well, at least it gave me a chance to read more, and get marginally less bad at the guitar.

In any case, I’ve now got and installed a new hard drive (at 320GB and 7200rpm, it’s substantially better than the 80GB/5400rpm one it replaces). Fortunately, I finally caved in and upgraded to OS X 10.5 a few months ago, so relatively recent Time Machine backups meant bringing everything back was a piece of cake.

Now I just need to think of something to write. Damn.

I recently read a talk by the founder of GitHub saying that I (and everyone else) should start a side project. I’ve been thinking that I should do this for ages now, and the author made some good points that provide me with even more reasons to do so. One of thing things that he points out is that you need to allocate a chunk of your free time to working on your project. Fine; that isn’t the problem.

The problem I encountered was when I tried to implement one of his time-freeing suggestions, which was to stop reading RSS, and instead keep up with things on Twitter. This sounded like a good idea, and I’m already on Twitter, so I decided to give it a go. I started to follow John Gruber, author of the excellent Daring Fireball, and ran into the problem of the title. John lives in Philladelphia, which is on the east coast of the US (I admit I had to check this on Google Maps). This means that he’s five hours behind GMT. Given that Twitter is a more-or-less real-time service, the difference is immediately apparent. He doesn’t get up and start twittering until fairly late in the day where I am, and he carries on way past my bedtime. The upshot is that I get up and have a bunch of unread tweets, which isn’t all that different to my usual habit of reading RSS over breakfast. I’ll give it another few days, but I suspect I’ll be back on RSS before too long.