For the Recovering Pr0n Users , a Lighter Look at the Habit

For those of us who may have struggled with compulsive pr0n consumption at one time or another, the comic strip xkcd offers up a dose of laughter.

When Bereft of Blog Post Ideas...

... blog about why other people gave up blogging.

But seriously, the New York Times ran an article a few days ago about why people give up blogging. It's definitely worth the peek if you're looking for some good reading material.

The story mentions the following as possible reasons that blogs go quiet or die:

• Disappointment over the failure to build a large, loyal audience.


• Increasing difficulty in maintaining anonymity with the rise of social networks.


• Decreasing availability of free time.


• Migration to other forms/media, like Twitter.


• Depletion of ideas.

This topic is of interest to me on two fronts.

First of all, the decline of activity in my own blog has been rehashed over the past year. For me, free time and ideas shortages have been the biggest drains on blogging output. While I still take a peek at the Sitemeter and Google Analytics stats for this blog, I've never had the illusion that I'd build up a huge audience. I don't think this site ever saw more than 100 visits a day, even when the storyline was at its peak level of tension.

Comments always have been welcome. Accumulating a large quantity of them never was a hope, but along the way I accumulated a blogroll and network of friends with whom I could share the parts of my life that I wasn't ready to discuss with others. These days I look upon this blog not so much part of a real-time conversation as an archive of one person's experiences with a series of trying times at the end of the 30s. It's a story far too obscure to be worth a movie, but it's also worth sharing.

And then there's the other front... I've noticed over the past year that activity of most of the blogs on my RSS reader waned. Some have moved on because their blogs outlived their usefulness. Others have disappeared with vague references to anonymity breaches. A few others have gone private, with invitation-only.

A couple of years ago, if I didn't make an effort to read new content on my feeds, after a few days, the backlog would get so large that I would have to "declare bankruptcy" and hit "mark all as read". Now I can go a full week without touching the feed reader, and I can still keep reasonable pace.

I've blogged about the notion of a social graph before. It's the representation of relationships between people, expressed as a mathematical abstraction that's used extensively in computer science. The blogosphere, both via blogrolls and RSS feed subscriptions, give evidence to pieces of the social graph. Some are hubs, with lots of incoming and outbound links. Others are less connected.

Visualized, the set of nodes to which my blog belongs is looking very much like a the seed head of a dandelion. With the passage of time, the seeds drift away from the flower. And so, the nodes fade on this cluster of the graph. For now, I am reluctant to let loose into the free and open blue that is the sky... not while there are still other posts to read and conversations to be had.

So now I'm goin' back again,
I got to get to her somehow.
All the people we used to know
They're an illusion to me now.
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenter's wives.
Don't know how it all got started,
I don't know what they're doin' with their lives.
But me, I'm still on the road
Headin' for another joint
We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from a different point of view,
Tangled up in blue.

-- Bob Dylan, "Tangled up in Blue", Blood on the Tracks

Cue that harmonica coda.

All Kids, All the Time

(sitting down on the couch with a glass of Fünf Riesling, listening to the grown up radio station's Saturday night mix of funk, reggae, and jam bands)

Work commitments haven't been as insane of late, but they have kept me busy nonetheless. Lately, the big thing has been kid commitments. Not that there's anything wrong with that. :-)

For both of my kids, the school year wrapped up just before Memorial Day weekend. I took off the Friday morning prior to that weekend so that I could see the end-of-the year presentation put on by my older daughter's kindergarten class.

I had them for the full holiday weekend, from Friday afternoon all the way through Monday evening. We did quite a bit, playing miniature golf (older daughter loved it, younger daughter was good for nine holes), grilling out, and going to see the (cringe) Hannah Montana movie.

Our younger daughter has been having a more difficult time doing without me of late. A lot of evenings, STBX says, the daughter will say that she wants to go stay with me for the night. A couple of times, she has put the younger daughter on the phone as she cries about missing me. According to STBX, the crying doesn't happen after she's gotten into trouble with STBX, so she didn't think it was manipulation of any kind.

Normally, last weekend would have been kid-free, but the fates had other plans. The grown up radio station in town has contests. I sign up for them on their website. Usually, the contests are for free tickets, ranging from private concerts locally to big events like Bonnaroo.

I wound up winning a prize in early May, but it was for the two free tickets to the not-so-far-away theme park where the soft drinks and sunscreen are in abundance and free of cost. The catch was that they were good only up through the end of May, so I made plans with STBX to take her and them on the final Saturday.

We wound up changing plans when the day's forecast showed showers. In light of my younger daughter's desire to see more of me, I picked them up for a few hours that day and took them out to lunch and miniature golf. Although my younger daughter said she wouldn't give up this time around, she lost interest around the ninth hole again.

So we decided to go the next day, which turned out to be a good move because the weather was perfect. Although the park had a good size attendance, lines on the rides subsided after the first couple of hours as people made their way over to the water park.

We went over to the park after eating lunch as well, and the kids seemed to have a better time with sliding down the water slides ad infinitum than they did with the rides, so I'm glad we packed our swim suits.

This trip was the longest I had been around STBX since I had to stay over at her place on Christmas Eve. We managed to stay civil, although at times she seemed edgy with me. I drove us down and back in the same day, so we were able to sidestep the expense and thorny issue of overnight accommodations.

This weekend is the girls' dance school recital, so they are not staying with me. STBX booked them in a lot of classes this year, so both kids will be making a lot of appearances. The younger daughter had two routines, one tumbling and one dance act. The older daugther has three performances -- a tap routine, her competition act, and another hip hop routine that all of the competition team members are performing. Both of them have parts in the finale.

The school is celebrating its 15th anniversary, and it's doing so by making its already grueling recital even longer. Normally the number of acts is somewhere in the low-to-mid 40s. This year, they have 52 of them.

This will be the third year that I will be working one of the follow spotlights they use on solo and duet acts, so I had to be there for the dress rehearsal today. I was there just before 9 am and didn't get out until 5:30 pm. We'll have to be there around 1 pm on Sunday, and between routines and the post show presentation of awards, we probably will be there past 5 again.

Come Monday, evening, I'll have to take off work and get the kids from STBX because she has a preschool co-op meeting around 5:30 pm, so the kids will get some more daddy time. I have the kids next weekend, too.

Although I enjoy being a daddy, I don't feel like I've had much in the way of time to myself away from either work or kids, so I'll be glad to get some quiet time in a couple of weeks. I think the motivation to finish off the divorce paper work will be pretty high by then.

Have I Mentioned that I love xkcd?

My wild speculation is that a good chunk of my readership have at one time had a conversation that resembles the first panel of this strip.



If you've got a spare few moments, click on the comic to view some of the other fine creations of this cartoonist.

The Word from the Salt Mine

It's been a week and a half since we wrapped up the project that has consumed so much of my mental energy, and my mind still doesn't feel like it's fully recovered from the experience. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of the work that my coworkers and I put in to make things ready for prime time. We just operated on a level that is not long-term sustainable.

So, what were we working on? We were busy replacing two user interfaces that were used to approve and decline content. These were old-style web pages that were state of the art, say 10 years ago.

One interface was a confusing list of pending content items that employed radio buttons, and the other was a slow-loading form of checkboxes that showed all content, both pending and moderated.

We ripped both of them out and put into place a design that was modeled more after a web-based e-mail application, where you have a folder list, a message list, and a preview pane.

The new page was AJAX-style, so changes to the page did not require navigation from the page or wholesale refreshes. The problem was that we hand to build a big chunk of server side-support for these AJAX calls from the ground up.

On the front end, we built the user interface using some new approaches that made it possible for us to partition the labor of creating the components, meaning much of it could be done in parallel. While getting some of the interface behaviors to work in a way that people would be most familiar, getting the pieces to talk to one another worked way better than all of us could have imagined.

Emerging from this development cycle, I can certainly say that I am way better at programming in JavaScript than I was a year ago. This project pushed me to my limits in that area and then some.

As far as the rest of my life is concerned, there isn't a whole lot new to report. STBX is still job hunting, at least as much as she needs to to qualify for her unemployment benefits. I know that she actually took a skills test for a temporary agency a couple weeks ago.

My older daughter finished her first year of kindergarten last week and will be heading off to first grade. We're still waiting on the final report card, but I'm pretty sure it will show that she made good progress.

She's become a lot more self-disciplined over the year. When we first would sit down to work with her homework, it was very hard for her to focus on the task. By the end of the year, she was really enjoying it. She's getting more confident in sounding out words, and she's been interested in doing arithmetic.

We've also had some chances to break out my Schoolhouse Rock DVD to learn about things like adjectives and verbs because those things have been brought up in her homeworks. Her favorite of the SR canon is "Interjection."

My younger daughter wrapped up her second-to-last year of preschool and has taken an intense interest in art. She loves coloring, both in coloring books and creating new pictures. I keep an ample stockpile of both crayons and paper so that she can keep occupied.

She did have one bad moment about a month ago. One Monday night, I got a call from STBX shortly after 9 pm, telling me that I needed to come over and speak to my daughter right away because she was running out of patience with her.

Over the prior week, the younger daughter had become increasingly resistant to going to bed, and she had gone over the top in her defiance. She was crying, hitting her mother and throwing toys around. STBX had collected most of her toys and put them in a tote. I had a talk with our daughter and sent her off to bed. I then agreed to take the totes so that the younger daughter would be without toys for a week. It suffices to say that she started going to bed without any more hassle.

Both daughters are also wrapping up their third year at dance school. The recital will be next Sunday. The older daughter was on the competition team this year, and they've participated in four meets locally. They have gotten a lot of recognition for the routine, and in the last week of June, they will be going up a national competition up in Wisconsin.

Moving on to a reader comment, John over at Dad's Life writes:

As a long time follower, I'm becoming a bit puzzled/disappointed. After doing so much hard work in your marriage and leaving, after doing all the Schnarch work, now what? Is this really consistent with Schnarch's principle's? I don't mean to be harsh; as someone who used Schnarch himself, I often wondered what he would have us do if our marriage is not salvageable. I seem to have salvaged mine, and I'm thankful for that. But I could just have easily taken your path and so I follow and wonder: what now

It's a question worth pondering and it's one I don't have a complete answer to it. One of Schnarch's key concepts is the notion of development cycles, where one moves from comfort to growth and back. Over the course of this blog, I believe that I have been through five separate cycles.

1. Self confrontation over my intimate relationship.


2. Self confrontation over the direction of my career.


3. Self confrontation over my technical skills.


4. Self confrontation over my leadership skills.


5. Self confrontation over my spiritual foundation.

This blog started at a time in my life where the first cycle was just about to begin. I knew that something was not right in my marriage, but I couldn't quite bring myself to destabilize it.

After about three or four months of blogging, the second growth cycle began to shift into motion. I was facing the possibility of losing a job and fearful that I might not be able to find one.

Once I found a new job, a new challenge lay before me -- thoroughly retooling my skills. I knew I had a lot to learn coming into the job, and I rose to the challenge, but I still had a lot of moments where I didn't trust my judgment because I didn't feel like I had adequate experience to make the call.

My boss, who is 10 years younger than me but very much a confident leader, picked up on this and made it a priority for us to work on me becoming more of a leader within the group. These two crucibles have been a big part of why I have sunk so many hours into my labors. While it's true that I've had a lot on my plate, that sheer volume and the stress it's put me under is part and parcel the "pain for growth" that Schnarch talks about.

I can say one thing for certain from all of this. Had I had half as much motivation as I do now some 18 years ago, I would not have lost my way in graduate school. By that yardstick, I have grown immensely in this job.

Finally, there is the spiritual crucible, and it's one I haven't put a much energy into as I probably should. The changes I have been through over the past three years have been disorienting, causing me to call into question a lot of core beliefs. Every once in a while I go there, and I wind up writing something like "Fall on Me[1]", but I don't stay there too long.

Over time, I have come to realize that some of the central issues brought up in Schnarch tie into Existentialism. How do we deal with the realization that it's up to ourselves to perform the ultimate act of self-validation and give our lives meaning in a universe where we are at a distance seemingly insignificant.

Indeed, in his larger treatise, Constructing the Sexual Crucible, Schnarch draws upon Kierkegaard, one of the pillars of Existentialism, and his concept of Teleological Suspension of the Ethical to take on the poorly differentiated approach to sexual recovery.

I'm still trying to sift out where my beliefs lie. I have moved past loneliness anxiety for the most part, but I am vexed by fears of the future and the loss of autonomy. My father's accident and hospitalization a couple months ago have weighed heavily on me. I don't want to be in that situation in my latter years, for to me the loss is worse than that of death. Life is a gift, to be sure. Yet, I don't want the cost of a prolonged subexistence to be carried by my family.

In the meantime, I plunge myself into the act of creation, be that in writing code or the raising of my daughters. For when I am creating, I feel less aware of these fears, and I feel integrated with the pulse of the universe. Things may be quiet, but I am by no means adrift.

What Have I Been Up To?

Well, this isn't the only thing, but it is a big chunk of it...



The graph you see above depict the lines of source code attributed to each developer within the company. The dark blue line is my boss. The light blue line is me. That red line that has an abrupt halt in mid-March is the co-worker that got the axe a couple months ago. This graph doesn't tell the full story, because I have another 14,935 lines checked in on a separate web service source repository. The bulk of that code was written in the first half of 2008.

For the month of April, my code count was 8,163. That marked a new record for me. Prior to that, my highest throughput was 3,815, recorded March of this year. If things don't slow down, I will be on pace to shatter the April's total because I've checked in a net of 3,740 lines.

While it feels good to be productive, I am pretty sure this rate is not sustainable.

46,664

For those of you keeping track, that's a total of 17,616 lines of source code and documentation committed thus far this year. That doesn't include a hefty amount of wiki documentation and research writing as well.