It was a good decade (UPDATE)
Update: Actually, I was going to put up a post “10 years in blogging.” But right now I don’t have the time, seriously. 10 years is a LONG time though, so I now feel more comfortable talking about events “offline” which date to over half a decade in the past. One thing to note is that my current style of comment moderation crystallized in the mid-2000s because of various time constraints. The fact that I was going to school full time, or had a 65 hour a week job as my firm was coming up to a software release date, and, was in a long distance relationship, was not anyone’s business (did I mention I had freelance web development projects on the side, and was developing a content management system for a client as well?). But it certainly inculcated in me a lack of patience for bullshit. I was cranking out blog posts on Sundays, and in the hour I had after dinner & and my freelance project and before sleep. I recall in the fall of 2006 amusingly some moron left a comment about how I must have a lot of time, since I was posting on Friday evening. Apparently cron jobs and scheduled posts were strange and exotic concepts to the idiot. If there’s anything that’s become a motto for this weblog that emerged during that period f my life, it’s this: don’t be stupid or lazy. I try not to be stupid, and if I could manage to blog with all the various things that have gone on my life in the past, you can manage to not insult me with idiotic commentary born of lack in forethought or consideration.
In any case, I plan on blogging away. I do have lots of offline responsibilities, with my daughter foremost. But I started talking about “retiring” from blogging in 2004 to my co-bloggers at GNXP classic. It hasn’t happened yet. I have a big mouth. Though expect variance in posting frequency to continue.
Go back to original post:
You may have noticed that I put up a great many posts up over the last 24 hours. There’s a reason for that. In April of 2002 I began a blog. That was a long time ago. I’ve met post-docs at conferences who read me in high school! My blogging ‘career’ started on a lark. I was playing around with designing a content management system to learn Java Servlets. I sent my website link to a few friends to test it for bugs, and Steve Sailer linked to me, which resulted in new traffic. In May of 2002 somehow I got on Glenn Reynolds‘ blogroll. This was back when blogrolls meant something! In June of 2002 I joined the new ‘Gene Expression’ group weblog, though I stipulated that I was not going to be the ‘front person.’ Let’s just say that it didn’t quite work out that way….
And so began my parallel life on the internet. I’ve been at it for 10 years, and lots of things have changed in my ‘real life,’ personally and professionally. I have obligations which I’ve admitted in public (my daughter), because at one point I thought I would blog her personal genomic results. I also made explicit the fact that I’ve been in a serious long term relationship over almost the whole of my time blogging, but I generally did not mention it because I figured it would be best if the weirdo creep virgins who left comments explaining how I could best pick up women did not know that their advice was not needed (interestingly, their null hypothesis always was that everyone else was a weirdo creep virgin, unless otherwise stated). Professionally I worked as a web developer at a firm where we were on a tight deadline for software releases in the mid-2000s, and I also got a second bachelor’s degree, without those aspects of my life ever bleeding into my blogging, or vice versa. But sometimes it was a juggling act. For example, at a presentation at work one of my bosses was playing around with Google, and mistakenly typed my name while talking to me. Blasted onto the conference room screen were results related to my blogging. Awkward! Though we had a major bug to fix, so there was no comment.
But at this point I don’t think I can juggle everything. My obligations outside of blogging are getting bigger and bigger. Sleep was already scarce before my daughter arrived on the scene, and now it’s a memory. The back and forth on this weblog is invigorating. Mentally I’ve gotten sharper due to great readers. And I’ve stumbled upon some great research. But at this point I don’t have the marginal time. And over the last few weeks I thought: wouldn’t it be fitting if I ended blogging on the 10 year anniversary of my blogging career? I always said that I’d turn GNXP into an archive, and retire from this aspect of my life. Why not now? I have a little 13 pound person who is making this really the only option.
So with that, I’m signing off. I will keep following comments for a bit. Perhaps show up on other blogs to offer my quasi-wisdom, and threaten to ban people just for kicks. But as they say, it is done.
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