Alieniloquent

It’s been a long time since I last posted. A lot has happened since then, and I haven’t given much thought at all to blogging. I missed 2012 entirely. I even considered shutting the site down. But, I have found a renewed interest.

The biggest thing that’s happened in the last 18 months is that we had another son. On Liam’s first birthday, we found out Erica was pregnant, and on November 4th, 2012, Elijah Rowan Tesla came into this world. He is just like his brother in most of the ways we expected (e.g. he’s huge), and not like his brother at all in ways we didn’t expect. He’s wonderful, and I love him. Needless to say, I haven’t had a lot of brain for blogging.

I spent most of my free time over the last year roleplaying. I enjoy playing table-top roleplaying games online on MUSHes. I know, it’s very 1980s of me. One of the nice things about this hobby is I can do it from both my laptop and my phone, so I can do it when I’m stuck in a bedroom with a boy. Of course, this hobby expanded to fill all of my available time and brainspace. That’s another reason I haven’t been blogging much.

So why the sudden inspiration to start blogging again? Well, for one, I’d like to work on developing a writing habit that’s a bit longer than 140 characters. I was also reminded that sometimes I have good things to say. Back in February, I was reading my news when I came across an article that had a quote attributed to me right across the top.

“Go is not meant to innovate programming theory. It’s meant to innovate programming practice.” — Samuel Tesla

It was a bit surreal to see my own words quoted on somebody else’s blog. Especially when I didn’t remember when exactly I’d said them. I dug around and finally unearthed the rant here on my blog where I’d said that. Kudos to Carl for extracting the best two sentences of that entire post. Since then, I’ve seen it crop up in a few places. I even had a coworker ask me if I was the same Samuel Tesla that has the quote about Go.

Aside from stroking my ego, seeing that quote out there made me want to keep the site up and start posting again. But, the final barrier to my blogging was that I was unhappy with my tools. I have fallen out of love with Ruby over the last few years, and besides, Jekyll is just slow on my site. Cue the inevitable migration, because setting up my blog is way more fun than actually blogging, and here I am. My site is now powered by Hakyll, which is very similar, and yet much more suited to my needs.

Let’s see if I can at least put as much work into writing new content for the site as I did porting it over to a new tool.