Monday, January 18, 2016

2016 update

No, I don't live in Nevada County anymore.  Yes, many of the posts in this blog are crap.  (Whether they were equally so when I posted them, I don't know.)  And yes, it's a very effing strange world.

Live and learn.

Some lessons learned from doing this blog:
1. Don't chase the laser pointer, and especially have the minimal sense not to do so when it's headed toward picayune-ity.
2. It's hard to make progress w/o teamwork, or knowing more clearly than I did, where you want to go.
3. There be culture clashes.
4. Think about where you really want to be devoting your time&effort, constructively.
5. You have no clue how (or if) your blog will be used, or toward what end.

Lesson learned from doing the ncvoices.us aggregator:
Actually the jury's still out on this.  I used to think the lesson was "don't roll your own", but today Google Reader is kaput and Twitter doesn't have a handy RSS based API, so if I hadn't dunnit myself, it probably wouldn't still be running.  If I'd made it more turnkey, the effort I put in would have had more payback, but on the other hand it would have taken up a ton more time, and the potential for screwups would have been vastly higher.

Lesson from observing from afar:
There are peeps for whom all this stuff is material for a political or sadistic chess game.  Fun. (not)

If I had it to do over again?
From a local perspective, I'd probably put more effort into making a place for where-do-we-go-from-here meta-conversation.
From a citizen-of-the-world perspective, well, I'm still trying to figure that out.
(I have not been to the mountaintop)


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