700 Posts

Striking a balance between hit and run posts, and long analytic posts, between different kind of subjects, between local and national, and between largely original posts drawn from personal experience and posts that are largely reactions, is still an issue I'm working on here at post number 700.

The pace of posting has slowed a bit since the manic phase in late October, but not as much as I had expected that it would.

The lack of good subject categorization is still unfortunate. But, I have no time to consider hacks or platform changes.

This blog has also had the beneficial effect of keeping my desk free of mountains of scribbled ideas, my hard drive at work free of endless personal idea files, and my temptation to clip and save newspaper articles (I have four or five bankers boxes worth from my days in Buffalo) to a minimum. It also provides a good reason to keep tabs on all sorts of outside the mainstream media news sources.

Of course, blogging also consumes vast quantities of time. Not as much as when I was a professor, but still an immense amount. It definitely contributes to me not living up to the national average for television watching time. But, it is probably more relaxing than staring at a wall and meditating and much more enlightening.

Curiously, it hasn't made a huge dent in the time I spend on reading and watching movies. I probably average two movies (whether via DVD or in the theater) a month, and at least one book a month. Something has to fuel the muse.

One category of posts that I've stayed away from, for the most part, are utopian pipe dreams. This used to make up quite a bit of my "useless" writing quota, but they don't make very good reading for the general public. When I wrote those for myself, I could implicitly know why those reforms were a good idea. When you write for an audience, even one as meager as the average of about 70 visits a day that we get at this site, you have to spend most of your time explaining what is wrong and far less explaining what we should do as a result, to avoid sounding like a total loony.