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All right, this has gone far enough. It may have taken a while to bring the ISDN router to life, and it may take a while yet to bring the new hard drive into service, and I may have been on a frenetic vacation which had me in a different bed every second day, but when the journal (damn you, Dave!) which I used to point to when I felt insecure about my low update frequency posts not one but two new entries while I've been vacillating over what to work on next, there's no excuse, no excuse, no way nohow nowhere. To the few remaining souls who still check the index, no doubt merely out of habit, I say unto you:
Sorry. This little lapse stands as yet another sign that despite any marginal improvement in my ability to get on with things, a fair description of the situation would still be that
I know quite well how I got myself into this little block (if that's the correct term; I believe it describes the condition when one is able but not willing to write); I piled up a stack of topics for future entries until they became a monolith that blotted out the Sun, and I, sitting in its shadow, despaired of ever climbing to see the light again, never thinking that I might catch as many rays as I pleased, simply by stepping sideways.
Trouble is, though, I did step sideways, and just left the monolith standing, when what I really ought to have done was to push it over, let gravity and shear stresses take their course, and pick what I liked out of the rubble. Perhaps someday I'll learn that the whole reason for having a plan is to allow one to tackle a task longer than one session, day, or week, that a mountain which defies scaling in a single leap may nontheless be climbed over a few days, that what I call my emergency prioritizing facility need not be reserved for emergencies, and that I need not be such a hopeless idiot on every day that dawns on this green Earth.
Well, I can dream. Just to get the preliminary pebbles out of the way before taking a swing at one of the big slabs:
I really ought to get over my compulsion to back up to the starting page before embarking on a new session of web navigation (it's true; I hardly ever surf any more.) I think that in some corner of my mind I'm still keeping track of all the pages I've visited, and after a certain point I feel that I ought to erase the slate and start over again, lest I become hopelessly lost.
Actually, I think I know whence this habit arose. For some unexplored reason I never made much use of bookmarks in any of the browsers I used, preferring to enter some well-known (to me) URL by hand and navigate my way by memory to the pages I wanted. I tended to try to explore all the pages linked to by a document one at a time, going more or less breadth-first, staying close to home to avoid getting lost down some by-way with no way back, due to Mosaic's (I think it was, at the time) limited history capacity.
Incidentally, the lack of a detailed history mechanism is one of the primary faults I've found with Netscape's navigation aids for the user, since many times I have charged through a page and then wondered the next day where that page about Korean economincs was, or the one with all the links to online comics, and so on. Netscape's global history is a start, but something more organized but no less thorough would be very handy.
Old habits die hard, is all, I suppose. Chimera holds on to any number of previously visited pages, with the practical limitation of how long it can go without crashing. I've never learned to trust it, and so I tend to scurry back after advancing a few steps, for fear of losing my base camp in the snow.
And that, I think, is enough for one day, backlog or no. After crossing three time zones to get back home (or to my apartment anyway, according to the people at US Immigration I'm not a resident until I have a green card, sniff) and catching up with things in general, I am finally ready to keel over. Gute nacht.