I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes

So, etrace and I are back in our respective (for now) homes, after a fantastic 12-day stretch in the same space in the second half of December.

This included some time in Boston, during which we had to balance visiting time with wedding-logistics time and actual downtime... so I apologize to everyone we didn't manage to get over and socialize with. In particular, we missed the NYE party I had meant for us to attend, because after dinner that evening I started feeling pretty wiped out and, even if I had been up to the walk through the 15-degree weather, just not up to facing the Wall of People awaiting us on the other side of it. (etrace: "Er, well, now you know how I feel pretty much All The Time." Me: "Yes, but when I feel that way, it is a sign that I'm physically unwell!") So I will hope we can catch some of you fine folks at Arisia, instead. Maybe in small doses at the MuffinButtons table. :-)

I am overdue for a real entry and will try to get some updates together in the next few-to-several days... but it's been (surprise!) awfully busy with wedding stuff and Blue Hill Troupe stuff and of course actual work stuff eating my life.

Unfortunately for my lurking/reading public, however: it also came to my attention over the break that posting my calendar publicly may be... unwise at this juncture. So one of my 2014 resolutions/changes is that I am going to post the calendaring entries friendslocked going forward. Of course, I encourage all my readers to either create a LiveJournal account or create a Dreamwidth account so I can grant you reading access. But I think once I move in April, anyway, it may be time to phase myself over to the Google calendar system... the end of a long and fruitful era.

Wishing all of us a year of physical health, emotional growth, and spiritual abundance.

For those who wanted to see my complete Hawaii travelogue from last month, it is now up! It's public, but I posted it backdated for archival purposes, so it won't show up in your friendslist; you have to click through to your choice of entries: LJ | DW

But no, I still haven't sat down and started noodling around with the ukulele. :-)

It struck me last night that one of my problems these days with doing any writing (including posting to LJ), or art, or even the freelance (book production) job I've committed to doing, is that I work fairly intensely on the computer all day... so that when I get home, the LAST thing I want to do is sit back down at the computer. Or at least, I can sit there, but all I end up doing is dicking around on the Internets, because I am tired. And all my creative modalities rely heavily on the computer as a tool. (Just like my day job, with its fairly heavy creative component, does.)

The other half of that dynamic is that, although I get up in time to allow for about an hour of computer time in the morning (i.e., right now), that is historically the time I have allotted to dicking around on the Internets. By which term I mean "catch up on everyone's lives on LJ and Facebook and follow a bunch of the fascinating links you people have posted," "answer some emails", and occasionally "get through any banking/financial stuff that needs doing".

Moving that taskspace to the evening slot, when I am more in consumption mode, might free up my creative energy in the morning (and, unlike some, I am enough of a morning person that "getting my brain to wake up" is not the problem; once I'm up, I'm up). The problem is that if I don't clear those particular decks in the morning, it becomes too easy/tempting to dabble in it DURING the workday, which is Not OK. (I've already turned on Chrome Nanny to keep me from accessing Facebook and LJ during most hours of the workday. Unrelatedly, I also have a separate Facebook account that I now use -- in a separate browser -- for work purposes, which, as the in-house Professional Facebook User, I really, truly do have.)

It does occur to me though that walking home from work and cooking dinner (the actual process, not just the nuking of leftovers) are likely to be a more refreshing/relaxing combination than going out to dinner (a frequent post-work social outlet) and taking the train home. Maybe I can work on planning in more of that for this summer. -- That is, when I'm not away on trips or busy running around at auditions/rehearsals, which haven't been much of an issue lately, but are about to ramp up, possibly covering over half of June at this point. Huh.

P.S., speaking of creative work: gilana, you know about this, right? Deadline of Thursday, June 7!
http://www.jewishboston.com/17793-area-events/blogs/3603-project-bread-the-walk-for-hunger-2012-holiday-cards-contest

Oh LJ, I am so behind on you. (Writing, that is. I do manage to stay reasonably current on reading, or at least skimming.)

I have so much that I've been thinking of writing about, and I haven't even gotten as far as finishing my Arisia recap from mid-January. When I do finish it, I will post it backdated, because this is just getting ridiculous, but I'll post a pointer for anyone who cares.

I did finally manage to post a friendslocked (filtered, sorry) entry yesterday morning, and have more forthcoming, hopefully.

I had off work today (in addition to the coming Monday holiday), which I must say was delightful. Got my hair cut, had a marvelous breakfast date with justom at Community Food & Juice (where I'd never yet been), puttered around a little in the Columbia neighborhood. Came home, reorganized the linen closet (!), and puttered around online. Didn't quite get the work done I meant to, but there's always Sunday. And I did accomplish a bunch of self-management meta-work (financial and otherwise).

Oh, and baked pareve brownies to take to Shabbat dinner very shortly. :-) Shabbat shalom, y'all.

For several years there has been a little-known private utility known as LJToys (see also ljtoys), which I think I learned about from chaiya initially? Like any site counter, it plants a little bug in the mood icons of your posts and then reports the hits to you -- but specially calibrating the results in LJ-specific ways, to produce a ballpark estimate of which LJ user was reading that post, display the hit record from a given IP address so you could make educated guesses from patterns (regardless of whether it appeared to be an actual LJ user), and let you apply labels that were public within the system so that all LJToys users could see who you thought mapped to a particular IP address.

It's quite a slick little toy in its way. And I have been totally addicted to it -- I don't think a day's gone by in years that I haven't checked my reader stats page.

Unfortunately, about a year ago, the guy who wrote and hosted it, Alex (mock2), decided he'd had enough and would be phasing out the service over 2011.

This past Monday, I tried logging in from work, and it told me "free accounts no longer exist" (I'd had a paid account, of course, but apparently it ran out this week, and there is no more option to renew). Amazingly, though, since my home browser still had an authenticated login session open, it was still letting me view there when I got home. Oh please oh please stay open. But no, of course, last night my computer rebooted itself, and my last session is dead. Dead. Forever. SIGH.

Yes, I know LJ now lets you participate in tracking your readership with its My Guests feature, but it's really just not the same. Not least because it's opt-in -- which not only means you have to consent to being trackable yourself in order to track, but that the majority of users (at least among my crowd!) are nohow going to do it. And LJToys let you view and analyze hits from any IP address, not just logged-in LJ users. And, and... I know it was indulging my own stalkerish tendencies in the first place, you guys, but I just really will miss it arrrrgh. It's made me happy much more often than it's made me sad. Because it's nice to know that people are reading, even when they're not commenting.

Someone here recommends StatCounter as an alternative (citing its improvements over Google Analytics):
http://ljtoys.livejournal.com/68047.html?thread=376015#t376015

But I think someone should buy off the code from mock2 and start hosting their own subscription service. cos, I nominate you. :-D There's a small but determined audience who would definitely continue to pay for it. (And it can't be that small, because part of the unsustainability he complains about is the sheer bandwidth required.)

In the meantime... waaaaah!