This January I turned 32. Birthdays, as was tradition in the McRee family, are of little importance to me. This is something I hope to change now that I’m a father. But I have begun not to expect calls from my parents or sibling, and most birthdays in recent memory would have all but slipped by unnoticed if it wasn’t for my wife’s efforts to “make something of the day.” And really, that’s fine with me.
This year was different. I woke up feeling old but I don’t know why. I don’t really think 32 is old, I just feel it. Whatever it was, I still haven’t quite shaken it. Some fundamental shift has occurred that transcends the addition of the role of father or the fact that I have a few more grays.
So naturally these thoughts work their way back to the surface, past the limenal point, as I sit here wondering what to write as my first blog entry in a very long time.
How much easier this has become! I haven’t kept a professional blog since back around 2001/2002. It was an entirely manual process (though even then it didn’t really have to be) of constantly tweaking the css or hacking my way through xml/ActionScript integration.
I had a handful of coworkers then who, like me, re-architected their portfolios and blogs almost weekly. It was more a process of learning the tools we wanted to use more than anything else, and we all know that the online travel site where we worked would never let us use half of the emerging (or fully emerged) technologies that we were excited about. We pushed each other.
And now Wordpress has made it all so simple. Well, at least simple enough that I think the benefit of efficiency will make up for the time I’m going to spend slogging through code to make it my own. We’ll just say there is plenty of room for improvement and that it’s good to be a UX designer these days. I wouldn’t recommend Wordpress to my father – something along the lines of Blogger would work if he was inclined to keep a blog (and he isn’t).
And that’s mostly what I hope to write about in the coming entries. Not my father’s lack of enthusiasm for sharing thoughts with the anonymous masses, but about software and how people shape their lives around it, for it rarely shapes itself around them. We’ll see how it goes. And now I must leave. It’s 9pm Friday night. It’s way past my bedtime.