Then: January 23rd, 2010.

Now: August 17th, 2011.

The Plan: Write more.
The Plan Extended: Write more, especially on this site.

If you can’t find me here, I’ll probably be over at Recipe Finder.

Photo Credit: Photo by Kaptain Kobold.

As life moves on and the years start adding up, people tend to sit down and reflect more. This is probably still my weakest point, I like moving forward too much to really sit down. Nevertheless I have learned to not always immediately react on things anymore, sometimes I even know when to shut up. Occasionally I still fail at the latter.

Generally though, I tend to live a quiet background life all while being the dynamic me people know. While trying to still be prolific I really enjoy living in the shadows. It is nice there, not too hot nor too bright.

Believe me when I say that I do know how it feels to live in the spotlights and the three people who have followed this blog since years do know that I do not shun these spotlights either. But I’m getting old and people change.

Suffice to say that I was very surprised today to find myself in the crossfire or rather the line of fire from someone I do not know. In the middle of a very hostile and spiteful attack.

An anonymous ‘ex-member’ spit his/her gal on the latest 9rules blog entry, going fully frontal. After several personal and/or inside details on the former 9rules Triad (and my publisher) were revealed it was the turn of my colleague Andy, my boss Mark and myself.

Being under SplashPress is supposed to make members feel better? Didn’t the crappy sites get added when Andy was running 9rules? You said you didn’t like the direction of 9rules, but you gave Andy a promotion. Frank is managing editor? He’s too busy looking up to you to be qualified. The descriptions on the team page are all lies. You aren’t fooling anyone. You’re still messing up and Mark is letting you by not getting you a qualified team. You might be running things but Mark owns 9rules and I hold him completely responsible. His network is trash and he’s ruining a quality site.

It would be easy to rebut this and go into detail how Andy wasn’t involved with the latest Round, I had left SPM all while being a long term participant to Splashpress Media. Or even by saying that I probably stopped following 9rules long before ‘Ex-member’, but I won’t. This entry isn’t about hitting back or defending myself. Nor is it about admiration.

Life’s Too Nice To Be Spiteful

Life’s too short and the future belongs to those who look forward

I am nowhere near perfect and hate to admit this. But as the years move by I have learned many things and I continue to learn daily. I have examples in life, people who motivate me to continuously improve and keep an eye on the real world. Understand what really does matter. Remind me how lucky we are.

There is more to life than look back at errors people made and hit out at them for those. Nature is lovely but cruel at the same time. Over the last 12 months several thousand people lost their life due to earthquakes, landslides and typhoons. Others were killed at war and people just around the corner of your and my doorstep live in poverty, some even die on the streets.

In our Western society, especially those of us who live mainly online, we barely know what it means to suffer but instead we get sucked up in meaningless disputes on ‘tinternet. Laugh at the best fails of 2009, no matter how harsh and painful several are. We do not respect our roots anymore and forget that what really matters. That what only seems to move people when disaster strikes. The spirit of community and siding together. Hate’s more important to many of us.

Love Each Other. Grow Up and Improve

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it

I love admiring people. Each and everyone daily reminds me that I have to improve, work at everything I do. Probably I even have gathered lots of inspiration from ‘Ex-member’, maybe I still read Ex-members site on a regular basis. Who knows, I don’t know who ‘Ex-member’ is. What I do know though is that every single day I get up and want to improve not only this site, the sites I write on but also, and most of all, my own tolerance levels. Days like today prove that I am doing damn fine and believe me, life’s really nice if that’s your motto and that’s how you live. My idols help me reach out to what initially seem unreachable situations.

Life’s too short and we only get one shot at it. Face the truth, there is too much misery on this planet to get stuck in disputes.

Be your own worst critic and the worst critic of your idols and you’ll do fine. I know I am.

Photo credit: Talia Twilight Photography.

I am tempted to entitle Michael Lopp (Rands In Repose) ‘Best Blogger All Times’.

But probably only for nerds and Las Vegas fans. If you’ve never read Las Vegas Guide, start here. It’s an absolute must to read this. Even if you think knowing Vegas.

Rands had already earned the respect of every nerd years ago, with his Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder essay.

Folks, I’m a nerd. I need rapid fire content delivery in short, clever, punch phrases. Give me Coupland, give me Calvin’n’Hobbes, give me Asimov, give me The Watchmen. I need this type of content because I’m horribly afflicted with NADD.

Folks, this isn’t multi-tasking. This is advanced case of Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder. I am unable to function at my desktop unless I’ve got, at least, five things going on at the same time. If your count came close, you’re probably afflicted, as well. Most excellent.

And his latest essay, The Nerd Handbook, is another winner.

Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.
The reason for this typeface selection is, of course, practicality. Monospace typefaces have a knowable width. Ten letters on one line are same width as ten other letters, which puts the world into a pleasant grid construction where X and Y mean something.

The ability to instantly context switch also comes from a life on the computer. Your nerd’s mental information model for the world is one contained within well-bounded tidy windows where the most important tool is one that allows your nerd to move swiftly from one window to the next. It’s irrelevant that there may be no relationship between these windows. Your nerd is used to making huge contextual leaps where he’s talking to a friend in one window, worrying about his 401k in another, and reading about World War II in yet another.

Oh, go read it yourself! NOW!.

Personally, I am still ignoring the facts: I’m no nerd! And I will never be.

But hardly anyone is as quotable as Rands In Repose. And it’s weirdly annoying to realize, admit, how often I can just hold hands up, reading Rands’s essays. Even though I don’t like toys and gadgets. Well not your typical nerd toys/gadgets. :D

In the meanwhile, until I accept the truth… I’ll just look forward to another truth. One I fondly agree with.

As a side note: People can be relevant. As long as they trip the relevancy flag. When, we’ll engage heart and soul. The right person probably is the relevancy flag impersonated. ;-)

Edit: After re-reading it once more, I luckily am glad that my social skills ARE better than portrayed in the essay. When the other people deserve my attention.
Edit 2: The title of this entry, Someone Just Wrote A Manual Of Me, really disturbed me. Some points in the entry are totally not me, mainly the social skills factor. I edited the title.