Cheers and thank you to our friends and families on the flip side of our little blue orb for your sacrifice and devotion so long ago.
ANZAC Day reminds us of those intrepid souls who did what they were asked, and plunged headlong into the chaos of war. Faded photos and the handwritten script of a different age tell parts of their stories, but we must be mindful of the lens of history. They – along with hundreds of thousands of others from around the globe – believed that they fought and died not for war but for peace.
In our post-modern age it’s too easy to condemn the notions of a “last war,” or a lasting peace as quaint and antiquated. We can never allow that to happen. But first we need to agree that peace is real, achievable, and worthy of pursuit.
Then – for those that went before us, and for those who will follow – we need to stop killing each other once and for all.
Some folks blog everyday. Back when this little thing of mine started, I was churning out several posts a day, so I get it. But life gets in the way of even the most powerful addictions. Even the sweet, sweet nectar of news and information can’t last long under the pressing weight of real world responsibilities.
So work has gotten the better of part of my time lately. The bills are paid, but the blog has suffered. Sort of. While I haven’t been consuming, digesting, and regurgitating nearly as much information as I’m used to, I have been busy with a hammer so to speak. I’ve reconfigured the navigation slightly with some shiny jQuery, and I’ve jumped head first into Google Code.
I’m pretty happy with the results so far, which is of course a very rough work in progress…as always. Now, after a few Sundays worth of reading and tagging my old posts and manipulating Google’s Ajax Feed API to work nicely with Blogger labels, I’ve managed to cobble together a real live tag cloud; color-coded and sorted even.
Sure it’s a nifty bit of code, but what I’m really happy about is the hard earned functionality of it all. Having to go back to re-read and tag all my posts from the past few years was an experience in itself, but to have all of those posts parsed and sorted in the cloud is like holding a funhouse mirror up to rapid dissent for the first time. I haven’t quite wrapped my brain around what that collection of topics and labels say about this blog, but my first impression is to feel disappointment at the limited scope of this space so far.
It’s a little late in the year for resolutions, and I was never good at keeping those anyway, so I’ll just call it a day and do my best to start letting this blog be a little bit more reflective of what I believe it is. Until then, rock out with the Flobots, and fight with tools!