I know, it’s been too long since my last blog entry. Part of the problem is finding something “worthwhile” about which to blog.
For instance, I’ve spent a lot of my working time troubleshooting issues with CKEditor and certain third-party plugins, and although I felt satisfaction when it was finally resolved– writing about “allowedContent” strings is a boring snooze-fest for ~97% of the population. Plus, when you blog about such topics, the typical engagement tends to be other web professionals negatively criticizing the approach you took to solve the problem– so that’s not worth my time, either.
I’ve been working my way through William Ury’s The Power Of A Positive No for my non-fiction read of the month. Some of Ury’s language choices are more “touchy-feely” than my usual reading, so it’s a bit of a stretch for me. I’m also trying to read it at a more deliberate pace because I believe I’m less likely to internalize lessons from the material if I rush right through it.
In retrospect, 2017 was about reading as many fiction books as I could during my free time, because I felt like I was behind on so many popular culture topics. I’m trying to be more deliberate in my reading choices, approach and time in 2018 . . . although I still can’t bring myself to write notes in the margins.
Another change for 2018 was to have been doing more drawing/sketching, but that was derailed by computer issues for a little bit. For reasons unknown to me, GIMP suddenly stopped working properly with the Huion H420 graphics tablet around version 2.8.20. Rather than rolling back to a previous version of GIMP, this past week I opted to make the jump to FireAlpaca. It’s been a learning curve, but also an interesting transition. I suspect you’ll be seeing blog posts about FireAlpaca in the future.
Now it’s your turn– what have you been up to in the first six weeks of 2018?