“Our God given unalienable rights are given to us all as individuals. They tell us what we may do for ourselves, and they are the embodiment of liberty.
The so-called rights that government gives to some of us are parcelled out to select groups as classes. They tell us what one class of people may require another to do for them, and they are the very essence of slavery.”— Perri Nelson, February 9, 2010
A bheil Gàidhlig agaibh?
A new project
Published Sun, Nov 6 2011 1:34 PM
In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t been blogging much lately. It’s not really for lack of interest, but rather a lot of different things.
First of all there’s my job. As you may or may not be aware, I’ve been working for Goldman Sachs for a while now. It’s a great job and a great place to work. It keeps me very busy and gives me lots of challenges that have given me plenty of reasons to keep learning new things. Learning new things takes time – even if you’ve been doing the sort of work I do for 29 years.
Second, I’m living in a different state than my family. Sure, I get to go home from time to time and I love that. But even so, it changes what I do with my time. I make chain maille. I’ve also taken up origami, although mostly I make paper cranes.
Finally, I read a lot, far more than I have in the past. One thing that I’ve noticed about a lot of the stuff I read lately is that the quality of editing has gone downhill. Honestly, if I didn’t know better I’d think that some of the authors I’ve been reading need to take a course in English as a Second Language. It sure doesn’t seem to be their first language.
One author who’s sold quite a few books and tells an almost passable story really irritates me. He can’t seem to get his verb tenses right – is it past or present tense for this sentence/paragraph? And he completely misuses idioms – much the way that Ziva David did for the first several seasons she was a main character in NCIS. Maybe that’s why his publisher is called “Smashwords”. He certainly does smash them.
Sometimes I think I could do better – and so I want to give it a try. But – as is so typical for me other things keep distracting me. Just before Halloween I started playing with the Arduino – and made a robotic claw that, had I finished it on time would have been a part of my costume.
And of course, I have plans to do more with that. I also am looking at building an R/C airplane to fly about. It’s similar to one that my dad built when I was a teenager. I found a kit (minus the motor and other hardware) for under a hundred bucks…
Anyway… as I said, those are distractions.
So… what’s the new project?
Well, it involves the web again. If you recall, I wrote not only the blog here, but also the blogging software behind it. This site runs on ASP.NET 1.1, and that’s a very old technology. I’m considering upgrading – but I don’t want to just write a blog anymore. Oh, I’ll still write the blog from time to time, but I think I’ve found a new use for the web too.
I happen to like e-Reader software and e-Readers. I don’t have a Kindle, but I do have a Nook (1st edition). The e-Pub format used by the Nook is a public standard and it seems fairly easy to implement a program that, once the content has been established, can produce a book in e-Pub format. There are lots of offline tools available for maintaining blogs too (I use Windows Live Writer).
So I got to thinking… what if someone developed a web site that used the standard blogging interfaces to allow its users to post content just as if they were blogging. If the site then allowed them to edit that content, organize it, re-arrange it and so on and then publish it to e-Pub format and download it, would that be cool or what?
Well, whether it’s cool or not, it still seems like a fun challenge. Even more fun than writing the software for this blog was…
I wonder how far I’ll get with it.
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