About twice a year, a clock ticks over; the calendar comes to an end and the new year begins, and my birthday marks a new year of my life. As my birthday is in August, both of these tend to coincide with a bit of time off work, and inevitably lead to some self-reflection.

This summer's holidays were marked by a lack of internet; a week in Suffolk where mobile signal was virtually non-existent — the company of friends and family meant that while I did spend a little bit of time with my laptop, it was only really while I was sitting in the dark quietly waiting for my kids to go to sleep before I could happily start an evening in adult company. And the Green Man festival where I was surprised to discover that while "GPRS" on my first 3 smartphones meant "mobile internet signal", in a post-3G world now actually means "no mobile internet signal." Seriously - no emails, no Facebook, no weather forecasts (no Maps until about 15 minutes after we had left the festival site, hoping we were driving in vaguely the right direction.)

Anyway, a couple of thoughts that collided in my head;

I don't like the way that the ability to share status updates, photos, check-ins and so on thanks to Facebook seems to have turned into an obligation.
I've been playing with my own websites since before "social networks" were even a thing, with the idea that I share my stuff the way I want to share it.
Connecting these two makes me think I should be paying more attention to SomeRandomNerd.net and less attention to Facebook.

So — not for the first time — I'm making some kind of pledge/commitment/goal of writing for my website more often. But because this is something kind of new, I'm putting it in a new section of the site called "scribbles", to let it find its own shape. (I find it useful to have a notepad to scribble things into, separate from notepads that I write things in that I want to keep/refer back to etc.)

So, no tagging, no categories, no goals. (I've got a feeling that the Title field is going to turn out to be an unnecessary distraction. But figuring out how to get rid of it might be even more so...) Just a virtual scribble pad. Lets see where it goes.

Some Random Nerd