Content of Michael Kaplan's personal blog not approved by Microsoft (see disclaimer)!
Warning: This particular blog consists mostly of self-indulgent meta-blogging crap and is thus almost entirely ignorable.
Note: You know those times when almost anything you would say is going to be the wrong thing? This is one of those times. Thus, while comments are not disabled in this post, they are strongly discouraged....
Apologies for the X-Files allusion in the title, as softened by the accompanying eroteme.
The question about blogging about matters so closely tied to my work when my employer (or at least my management) wants it to be made crystal clear that this is a personal blog has become an interesting one, to me.
Yet if I only posted about personal stuff, then people might find hosting it on blogs.msdn.com might be inappropriate.
So clearly by some metric this blog is about my work and my job, even though the people who manage my job are denying me three times and all that.
Which is not to suggest that I am anyone's Jesus or anything; you know what I mean.
But in the aftermath of what happened and what is, I am left wondering what this blog really should be.
Or even whether it should be anything, while it sits on this server and while I sit where I do, job wise.
I have been largely coasting for the last few months on existing items I said I'd talk about and such, but without a real sense of direction.
Avoiding the question.
I could just say I miss Liz and leave it at that, but this isn't about her.
Well, not really about her, at least.
But once upon a time she did provide something of a passive compass for me that I only sometimes consulted but always knew was there, and I admit I'm having trouble figuring out where North is at the moment, without that compass.
Though I can't truthfully claim to be unhappy. In fact, I am not unhappy.
Professionally speaking I have been rather pleased and happy to find that even though my management (in a burst of wankitude/wingnuttery that I could calculate if my slide rule was not in storage in a box in Philadelphia) doesn't appreciate me, that a lot of other people and groups do -- it keeps me feeling good about Microsoft, at least. And of a lot of the people and groups in it. And I do believe on the work that happens in the group and in the building.
And I believe in a lot of other things too.
I could likely keep coasting with the blog posting for a while, as that huge mound-o-things on my To-Do list is still there. With probably a dozen written posts and twice as many half written, and then with three or four times as many that are almost fully composed in my head and all I have to do is dictate them and thereby insert the expected typos/speechos.
Though there is no rule that says that all of them, or even any of them, have to be posted.
When I think about how the Blog is aimlessly wandering without a theme, while each blog continues to have some point, I wonder. Do people notice that lack of overall direction as opposed to the original slowly changing overall direction, all in a see of for the most part directed slices of time?
The quote that pops into my mind: The assassin's gun may believe it is the surgeon's scalpel, but the assassin must know the task.
At the moment I am unsure. Not discontent with life, but perhaps a bit discontent with all of this. At the moment.
So I am left wondering -- what if I stopped blogging?
The 20 people who read regularly read would notice right away (adjusted for the fact that this is posted on a weekend), the regular but busy folk/the in-love ones/others more casual would notice within a week or three, and it might make for a great WEHT blog that someone else could write in a year or so, after looking into whatever did happen. Nothing would actually "happen" though, in the end.
That persona would be gone, and people who missed it would have to seek out me and a less passive type of connection than the blog enables for them. A terrible loss, for some.
And I might miss it, too. My soapbox and my pronouncements from on low. I could imagine missing that, some at least.
If the existing other unpublished posts never went live? Not that much of a difference, really -- perhaps the difference between the Blog being hit by a bus and the Blog passing on after a long illness.
I am reminded of how I miss Suzanne E. McCarthy's Abecedaria, which is now approaching its second anniversary of not being posted to. We miss them when they disappear, whether with bang or whimper, knowing the people might still be alive, just no longer in our lives, right? With the blog just sitting, dormant -- a testament to the disappearance without corresponding backstory.
What if SiaO just stopped? Like with no warning or indication, perhaps even in mid-
