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Phew

Well, another year had ended and a new one has started (in case you hadn’t noticed). As you’ve seen in the past few months I haven’t exactly been active on my blog; the core reason is that I was completely stressed out after my Spanish workshop at the end of October and have done little to no web development since then.

In December 2007 I became overworked for the first time; I wrote an incoherent entry at that time. Basically I took too little rest back then; by February I was back at work, although at a snail’s pace, and I visited no less than 12 conferences, speaking at six and organising one. Great fun, but also wearing. (And yes, I know that my grand total is paltry when compared to, for instance, Chris Heilmann, but so be it.)

Thus it was no wonder I faltered again, and fortunately I recognised the symptoms when they returned in October and decided to take a true rest. That rest isn’t wholly finished yet, but I have started working half-time by now.

Not that I have been completely inactive. I resurrected an old plan and continued on my introduction of Dutch politics for foreigners. Apart from writing lots of text and doing a bit of historical research, I also created a script that draws nice political graphs and maps. That taught me a lot about script structuring, just-in-time initialisation and other interesting subjects.

I had hoped to start publishing this article series by now, but unfortunately I’m not ready yet. Six out of nine parts now exist in draft form, and I’m currently writing the seventh. It’s clear that I have to rewrite my draft (especially part IV), and the script isn’t quite finished yet either: I still have to solve an IE problem and sanitise my 2,000 lines of code somewhat. The 2% of my readership that’s interested in Dutch politics will have to have some more patience, I’m afraid.

Just after Christmas the father of friends of mine died, and earlier this week my brother-in-law broke his back while skiing — literally. Fortunately he has not become a paraplegic and is doing relatively well, but this is not the ideal way to start a new year with fresh courage.

Finally, I haven’t read my RSS feeds in months, so I have no idea what’s currently going on in web development land. Frankly I don’t have the courage to start reading the 1,000 or so articles I still have to study, and that means I can’t really participate in web development discussions right now; people would only point out I missed some facts and arguments that have been published in the last four months or so.

So in theory my silence will continue for a while more. In practice, however, I know that once I write an entry to tell the world at large that I won’t be writing any entries any time soon, my need for publishing is slowly returning.

So I’m not promising anything, but it could be that I’ll restart publishing stuff. And of course I will continue my work on the Compatibility Tables; people still need them.

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