A Geek Under Pressure
I am forced to ponder many things as my life slowly passes by. Chiefly at the moment, I am tortured by the pressure that comes about when I don’t blog. So here I am.
To be honest, I am quite often here and this does seem to generate a lot of pressure in my life. As I now enter year 8 of posting stuff online, I find myself at a crossroads of sorts. You see, around the time I began doing this thing that I do, the only way to have anything online was to have a website.
Mine began like this…
Such was my techy pride, I knew I had to get a domain name. neilargue.com was picked, paid for and later squatted on by an Australian company I am not that fond of. Last time I checked, it pointed to some pretty un-work-friendly, un-family-friendly photos of persons of consensual age passing the time in energetic fashion. You go there at your peril these days.
So, I had a domain name pointing at my free web space, but most people would never know. Instead they would be impressed by my flashy domain name. Microsoft had one and now Neil Argue had one. I still had to learn shitloads of new things, mostly by using a search engine in a fairly hit and miss fashion. I had a long way to go before my website looked anything like presentable. It was bloody hard work and I am a little ashamed to admit I did a fair amount of it at work, under the pretense of learning how to design websites for the company I worked for. Actually, on reflection, I am not ashamed. I did design and code the work websites to begin with at least. When made redundant a year or so later, all I had to show for it was a cheque for £5000. I felt little guilt at taking some slyly-gotten skills with me.
After a few false starts, there it all was – HTML code, photos and witty text. All in one place, sitting inside one folder call “public_html” on a server somewhere. I spread my wings eventually and linked to a guestbook and very basic discussion forum but for about 3 years, it was all me.
Then one day it hit me. I was actually in the middle of incorporating a gallery using a damn fine piece of software called Coppermine, when the enormity of what I was doing slapped me in the face. I was adding captions to my photos. Nothing strange in that you may think except that I had almost 2000 or them. If I hadn’t come to my senses then, I would have managed to have captioned about 1500 by now, with plenty more to go.
This road-to-Damascus-like revelation had never occurred before. Earlier on, even when typing 1000s and 1000s of words into the site, I was always motivated by the fact that I was first and spurred on by the encouragement of the occasional Email from fellow school chums I hadn’t seen in 15 years.
That Saturday afternoon in Coppermine, it finally started to unravel. Of course the website is still here. It is a splash page where you can get here or go to my forum. It links to my Flickr photos and a few other things, several of which may or may not ever be completed – the Dukopedia for instance. I posted in this blog many months ago about a long awaited project regarding something close to my heart and for once, nothing to do with my school. It still sits there in a state of suspended animation, hiding from the Google searchbots, waiting for the day I suddenly fired with enthusiasm.
If I have a point to make in all this, it’s this – I am going to stop worrying about what I don’t finish. It is right and proper that I feel a little pressure to blog at least once a week. My friends are right to expect that I check the forum every day or so. It is pretty likely that I will still stun and amaze you with my online wizardry now and again, after all, I am a complete geek and it’s what I love but I have decided to draw a little line in the sand.
The fact is that anyone can have an online presence these days and indeed almost everyone does. Facebook for one, provides endless functionality and cleverness far in excess of anything I am capable of coding (I even worked out how to blog on there last week). I do maintain a certain smugness that nothing I have seen on there comes close to wisdom, wit and cleverness of my contributors. The Facebook DYRMS Groups are like SMS graffiti and show little for anyone to be proud of. The forums, although open to 1000s, seem to be a shouting board for mostly the annoyed, the disgruntled and the semi-literate. Actually, use of the word prefix “semi” might be a little over-kind.
So, here I will stay. Here I will type and in the forum I will chat. That might be it for a while. I have carrots to grow, weight to lose and blood pressure to lower.
Who’s for Swingball?
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