Why not work?
Stockholm is cold: -10 Celsius today. Sometimes we see the sun. I keep working, reading and thinking, but haven’t had any energy for weblogging in a while. I keep reading and enjoying my favorite weblogs - soon I’ll start writing again.
Reading this Newsweek story about webloggers, I felt a powerful revulsion. Yes, in principle I think it’s great when people push the limits of self-disclosure - but not when it becomes the expected behavior. There is something to be said for secrets and privacy.
I keep thinking about the authors of some very bad novels: there is nothing wrong with using your life to create art (or entertainment, or whatever)… but using all of it is ultimately very limiting. And I think that is true even for those exceptional few who can do it well.
Of course, I’m talking about myself here: I have just spent some days thinking hard about things I’m not ready to talk about. Maybe I will eventually, maybe not - but that doesn’t really matter to anyone else. Whatever I do write here is for you.
Brent notices that Kerouac and the other Beats are overrated on the Web, too. He concludes: “where’s William S. Burroughs, the one who was actually good?” Brent has good taste again - just like mine 
Today I was prototyping an XML-editor (using XMetal) for a large model-driven framework.
Yesterday me and my business partner started working on a new project. Old customer, fun technology (Python, XML, DB + webserver) and a mininal and comfortable development process (we can choose it, maybe even teach it, as we go along).
The day before yesterday me and my friend Mikael Kindborg started a little website for a course at the University of Linkoping. I’ll be a guest lecturer there next week: basically I can say whatever I want. Right now it looks like a quick remix of “User-driven development processes - who really wants them?” and “How to have fun and keep your customers,too” - and then some live reviews of student projects.
Life is good!
I’m installing Suse 7.1 right now (using VMWare, on a workstation that already has W2K). We’ll see. I don’t really need it today, but I want to try out some Python stuff on the Linux side - and any day now I’ll buy Kylix.