Comments on: One year of Cyde Weys Musings

By: Cyde Weys

Cyde Weys — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:04:32 +0000

And I should point out that the single greatest addition in Firefox 2.0, in my opinion, was the integrated spell checker. Nothing else even comes close. You wouldn’t believe how much that one change has improved the quality of Wikipedia.

As for the moment in time thing – sure, I’ll give it another go. I haven’t actually finished my NaNoWriMo novel yet; I just got it to the 50k word mark and I’ve been dragging my feet ever since. Soon as I finish that, though, I’ll write some shorter fiction.

By: Cyde Weys

Cyde Weys — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 18:52:17 +0000

William: Absolutely I proofread my blog posts! (And I did for SupComTalk too.) I generally write in three passes. The first pass is just to get everything from my mind onto the paper (as it were). The second pass focuses on reordering things to make them fit in a natural order, as they don’t always come out of my brain in the order that would be most logical if you were starting to read it without knowing it all from the outset. I also finesse paragraphs to be a reasonable length, work on flow, and correct any spelling, punctuation, grammatical, etc., errors that I may find. The third pass is very brief, and I’m primarily just looking for simple errors in sections that I didn’t examine too closely in the second pass. Then I hit “Publish”.

I can’t fathom publishing anything without proofreading it. It doesn’t take a lot of time, and considering hundreds of people may end up reading it, it’s really worth my time to excise all of the distractions like sentences that don’t flow, spelling errors, etc. I’m a very quick reader, so even this comment right here got a second pass before being submitted just to check for any errors (I didn’t find any).

By: William

William — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 07:46:13 +0000

And you seem less prone to mistakes likes “you’re writing has”, but maybe you just proofread.
Do you proofread your blog posts?

By: William

William — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 07:36:26 +0000

I agree entirely with snaked here. I found SupComTalk from this blog and returned here when SupComTalk petered out. In both places, you’re writing has been above-par and your topics interesting.
I have to admit that I was hoping for more from the small-moment-in-time writing style you were playing around with. Have you thought of giving it another shot?

By: snaked

snaked — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 02:47:48 +0000

Congratulations, Cyde. Like I’ve sort of said before, since you first linked me to it, I’ve always looked at your blog as one of the best examples of what a personal blog should be. Your writing always manages to extract and illustrate the interesting and important things from daily life.

Now I just have to read through the backlog…

Good luck with your scope.

-snaked

By: Cyde Weys

Cyde Weys — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 07:19:27 +0000

K.T.: Yeah, the time was off by a timezone (and incidentally this website is hosted in a data center that runs on Mountain Standard Time). And if changing a timezone setting ever required a code change or a recompile, someone needs to be fired. No, all you have to do, in WordPress at least, is go into the options page on the web admin interface and adjust the offset, which I’ve just done.

By: K.T.

K.T. — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 13:38:07 +0000

I note that the commenting timestamps aren’t synchronized with Eastern Standard Time Daylight Savings (at least, mine is not). As a developer true, I ask you (as I often do for my code-related inquiries), is this a setting that needs to be adjusted client-side, or a code change you have to effectuate on your end?

By: K.T.

K.T. — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 13:35:25 +0000

Cyde,

Congratulations! If only you could have celebrated this occasion with a salad, a luscious butter-drenched steak, mashed potatoes, broccoli, creamed spinach, either chocolate cake or cheesecake for dessert, and a lot of embarrassingly inebriated co-workers.

I’ve always held that life is not made meaningful by the grandiose gestures, but rather the small, repeated gestures. You could buy someone a car, or you could give them a ride every day for five years. That ride, simple as it sounds, will (should?) mean more in the long run, as each has a little value, but the cumulative value exceeds that of owning the car. Same thing with blogs, you’ve given your audience a bit of your time and effort each day, and in turn, it’s given all of us something to read and ponder for a bit each day. That really adds up over a year. Thank you, and color me impressed.