What I've Been Up To
Posted on Sunday, May 23, 2010
Let’s see, it’s almost June and this is just my second blog post of 2010. Can that possibly be right? No. It’s not right. It’s just I’ve mostly been blogging on Tumblr instead of here.
About a year ago I was bored with WordPress and wanted to try something different. I ended up experimenting with two blogging platforms at the same time: Jekyll (this blog) and Tumblr. The two are almost complete opposites of one another:
Jekyll is a static site generator where your entire blog lives on your local machine and the interface is designed with programmers in mind.
Tumblr is a hosted web service designed to be the easiest way for anyone to blog.
After the novelty of Jekyll wore off, I found it was just more fun to post on Tumblr, despite (and perhaps because of) its limitations. And with the Tumlbr gem and my Tumblr backup script, I can pretty have the exact same writing environment as Jekyll (i.e. a text editor and local markdown files) when I want it for longer posts.
So I’m not quite sure what to do with this particular blog. I’ve considered transferring the posts here and the “jon.smajda.com” domain to Tumblr entirely, but I think I’ve decided against that for now. This site will probably continue as just my all-purpose homepage (and pre-2010 blog archive) and I’ll just continue to blog on Tumblr.
Let’s see, while I’m at it, what else has been going on?
After initially being shy about actually appearing on the Contexts Podcast, I’m now a cohost and appear in one role or another on about half of the episodes or so. Turns out I like hearing myself talk after all, and the podcast is more fun than I expected it would be.
So much fun is the Contexts Podcast, in fact, that we’ve actually started a second podcast, Sociology Improv, that is more of an informal, discussion, dare I say “talk radio” kind of thing. The direction is kind of open-ended and we’re just letting it develop as we go, but it’s also a lot of fun. Plus: all of the music on this podcast is original music created by yours truly.
I presented at the Politics of Open Source conference in Amherst, MA a few weeks ago. That was fun because it was the first time I’ve actually presented stuff from my dissertation. It was also cool because of the conference format: one room, one presenter at a time. I’ll also be presenting (on Monday, August 16 at 8:30am) at the ASAs in Atlanta. I’ll be in just one of hundreds of rooms there though.
We finally sold our damn house in Minneapolis. This is a gigantic weight off our shoulders. …Let’s just leave it at that, ok?