You might have wondered ...

A few weeks ago, some of my wife's co-workers remarked that I'd been cranking out a lot of commentary on Facebook. By way of explanation, things that I post in this blog and commentary that I send via Twitter are also posted on my Facebook page. So, it's not as though I sit in Facebook all day and night, writing stuff. That would be creepy.
Any way, that stream has slowed considerably during the past couple of weeks for a number of reasons.

• I picked up some contract work. Although the amount of work that I've needed to do has been modest, I've had to invest some time in infrastructure:
• selecting and installing a source code control system (settling on Mercurial).
• getting virtual images of various other operating systems, including Windows 7, running on my laptop.
• writing a few scripts to handle routine tasks. I'm not a programmer, so progress is slow.
• tripping over an annoying bug in the latest version of Ubuntu (the Linux operating system that I use on my laptop). The mouse will stop responding to left-clicks at seemingly random times. There's some evidence that there's a problem with Flash, but there's been no definitive diagnosis, let alone a fix or workarond.
  
• We've been sick. We didn't go in for tests, but we're pretty sure it's the thing that everyone's talking about. Last night, I heard a Massachusetts public health official state that they hadn't found any cases of any strain of flu other than h1n1.
• I'm taking a course on business law. We had our mid-term exam a little while ago and the pace of assignments has picked up. We have a quiz this morning. Note that I'm writing instead of studying. Easily distracted? Me?
• Adding to the distraction, we've pulled a couple more boxes of our old stuff, stuff from my mother, and stuff from my father. It's interesting to dig through those old pictures and papers, to see the world from that perch again, to try to look forward at what might happen, instead of looking back at what the heck happened.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Those are my excuses and I'm sticking to them.