Wide awake and feeling like writing, but not a hell of a lot of interest to put down here. So I thought I'd dump a few random odds and ends that have occurred to me at various points.

I am amused to discover that I tend naturally towards adjusting my car radio's volume in increments that result in an even number. It feels odd to leave the volume on 17, for example. I'll either push it up to 18, or down to 16. Often I'll find myself thinking about something else, bouncing between two volume settings because neither is quite right. Eventually I'll snap out of it and mentally slap myself because the volume setting I want is the odd number between the two settings I'm unhappy with.

I think I make trouble for myself because I struggle with anything that seems like stasis. It's fine for a period and then there's an inflection point and change, any change, develops a certain allure. I have a good friend who, I suspect, struggles even more with this. Unfortunately, there's always that "Oh, fu..." moment when your feet leave the diving board.

I bounce between being narrowly focused on tiny meaningless (in the grand scheme of things) trivialities (like putting together a pure Ruby HMAC-SHA1 implementation for a set of tools I want to give to some customers) and wondering what the hell it's all about. I'm not religious, not by any stretch. I wouldn't call myself spiritual, I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean. I believe we're all made up of the stuff of stars, and that in due course we return to that state, and that when that time comes that's it. Finito. The end. No "next". This used to bother me. A lot. But it doesn't really any more. There are things in Life that just are, and you either accept them or you grind to a halt. It does, however, make explaining things like "moral imperatives" tricky. I don't have a good one for that. But just because you can't explain everything (yet) doesn't make your position unsound. So don't, at this point, try to step in and tell me some ethereal being of light and pixie dust is the force behind that imperative. Frankly, evolution and societal dynamics are a lot more compelling even if they are fuzzy as hell.

Bit of a tangent there. I'll close that lid and open another box. What else is in here ...

I've become a little more wary of what I post here. I just don't have the knack of the "next generation" for total transparency. Or perhaps I fear that the people around me don't have the coping mechanisms. It's almost certainly a combination of the two. These things are never that simple. But it would be quite liberating to be able to just dump here without any concern about who might be reading it, or what they might think. I know a bunch of people who read this, people I work with, people I share a significant fraction of my genetic code with, people who's genetic lineage recently intersected with mine, and a smattering of random people I've collected along the way. I suspect the last group has grown ever so slightly too, given that I recently caved and added this site to my Facebook profile. At least, Google Analytics tells me there's been a bit of a "surge" in traffic recently. Yes, you're reading me, I'm watching you.

A couple of times I've given serious thought to starting a completely anonymous blog. Kinda like a "secret diary" so I can get in touch with my inner thirteen year old girl. An ex-colleague and I even discussed doing something like this just so we could discuss all the taboo topics that invariably come up between guys over a pool table in the wee hours of the morning. Maybe one day I'll get around to it.

This has dragged on for longer than I expected, and I should probably wrap it up before it gets any more out of hand.

To quote another good friend of mine, "Just ignore me. I'm rambling."