Today is my one-year blogging anniversary. I started this blog on Journal/15 Floréal CCXIV, kind of trepidatiously and with ambiguous intentions. Now, a year later, I feel much more confident in the format and clear in my purpose.
I've varied between an almost maniacally consistent one-post-per-day regimen to a more impressionistic, when-I-feel-like-it once-a-week schedule. I'll admit that I'm happier with the more frequent update schedule; I feel like I deliver more to the reader that way.
I think the main thing I've enjoyed from having this blog has been the personal satisfaction in frequent and informal writings on my own schedule and to my own whim. Working with wikis makes a lot of my life about careful collaboration and consensus gathering, and having a place where I can speak out with my own voice on my own thoughts is really refreshing... and addictive.
Most of all, I've enjoyed how having this blog has connected me with new people, and with friends I already had, in new and different ways. This year of blogging has been contemporaneous with a deepening of my connection with the Montreal technology community, and I can't help but think there's some causation involved. I think that my blogging is bringing me into a common medium and a common language with a group of people I want to spend time with.
I've had some side effects I didn't anticipate, either. My family has started reading this blog, which means they know how I'm doing and what I'm up to more often than when I do once-a-week phone calls. And my more extended family -- aunts, uncles, cousins -- also read regularly. I can only wonder what they think about my complaints over various, say, Scheme module formats, but they seem to like it, too. Even Maj's mother reads it (hi Rita!).
I think that m-c's 10 reasons to blog really hold true for me; it's good reading with a year's perspective behind me. I'm looking forward to the next year and what it has in store.
Great day
It was actually a great day for a blogiversary. Last night, Maj went out with her friend Sam for Sam's birthday, so this morning Amita June had a very quiet breakfast and then went out to Best Buy to do some shopping. I just bought a Canon MP600 printer, and toner cartridges weren't included in the package, so I had to go buy more. (Later, while configuring the printer, I found the toner packages in the bottom of the box. D'oh!)
Amita fell asleep on the way home, so I just dropped her in bed. Maj and I walked through a brisk but sunny Montreal weekend afternoon down to the meïdia offices, where Creacamp was already in full swing. There were lots of old friends and new ones, and the offices were light and airy and nicely connected. There was a talk by Guylaine Couture about her painted books, and by Luce Beaulieu about her awesome écodesigner business, POSCH. Both really interesting.
Of course my favourite talk was Anne-Marie's, about her great video series Music Spins the World (or La musique spin le monde). It's an incredible first-person series about her travel adventures with various rockstars to obscure and dangerous parts of the globe. A-M is becoming quite the rock diva, but I'm glad she's staying down-to-earth about it. You can check her work on 33mag.tv.
Tonight I had a great time, too. Alex Roberts and Jon Phillips of Creative Commons are in town for the awesome Libre Graphics Meeting being held at the École Polytechnique this weekend. The event seems great -- bringing together developers from all the great Open Source/Open Content graphics projects together in one room to talk.
Jon and Alex met me and Niko at Concordia to see the Montreal premiere of the Helvetica movie. Helvetica is a great documentary about the history of this ubiquitous, unassuming font that epitomizes the modernist view of typography and design. The movie gives Helvetica a personality all its own, and in the process explicates the history of graphic design over the last fifty year. It also introduces us to a rogue's gallery of design and typography legends, all of whom are amusingly and passionately opinionated about design in general and Helvetica in particular. It has that characteristic of great documentaries: it illuminates the camera obscura of global culture through the pinhole of its narrow subject, a single font. Incredible.
After the movie the four of us went to La Banquise, the landmark 24-hour poutine parlour right near my house. Alex and Jon indulged deeply in the local specialty -- they each got poutines with lots of bacon and ground beef -- and we all chatted about San Francisco, Web culture, Creative Commons and the cast of characters that surround it. A great, fun time.
tags: montreal creacamp helvetica banquise jon phillips alex roberts