Introduction¶
This is not easy for me, so I'll just go ahead and say it.
For the same reason I cannot guarantee how long, short; coherent or not it will be. So please bear with me.
The thing is I'm a geek.
I've been using, reading, learning and studying about free software, free culture, open standards, privacy, net neutrality and other geeky stuff for ages! In fact, to such length and breadth that lately it grew over my head and started getting counter-productive. I'm talking being on at least a dozen or two mailing lists (even after unsubscribing from dozen or two last year!), following 40+ news feeds, a few pod-casts, StatusNet/identi.ca and other sources.
The thing is I'm also a law student, soon aged 27, with 14 exams and a diploma/master's thesis planned for the next two years.
The thing is I also have a life; a family, a girlfriend, a dog; and would like to enjoy sailing, go dancing, get a job …you get the idea.
And as absurd as this may sound, I have to start doing less in order to get more done.
Reading and following¶
In order to achieve that, I'll have to limit myself to following less themes and select only a few which therefore I'll follow more in depth.
It was very hard for me to chose, since I care for many themes almost equally as much – from diverse FOSS projects, free software in general, open standards, net neutrality and privacy all over to free culture!
So my consideration was such: I am not much of a coder, so right now burrowing even deeper into coding is not a good idea. But with a decade or so experience of trying to be one and following all these topics, I hope I am at least a good lawyer with decent insight in coding. Therefore, I won't follow so much the technical bits anymore and concentrate a bit more on legal stuff.
This still leaves a great deal of legal themes though, so I had to limit myself there as well. Again, I pondered for a while and decided that for now I will try to brush up on my license skills and be active on net neutrality and privacy.
For all other fields I followed so far, (at least for now) I'll have to depend on others.
If it's of use to anyone I'm attaching the list of the feeds I've been following so far. [update: file got lost in the migration]
Advocating, Fellowship FSFE etc.¶
The same as above applies here as well. I reasoned that I'll be able to help the most with Gentoo, FSFE, its FTF and ELN, Fellowship and so on with licensing and net neutrality (especially ACTA, since that's my diploma/masters' thesis). Especially in our Fellowship group, in order for our group to flourish, I'll have to concentrate on those topics and on coordinating itself.
This means in order to make our Fellowship group even better, members who care deeply about certain themes, will have to be more active and take over those themes in the group. This by far doesn't mean I'm withdrawing myself from the Fellowship and FSFE – quite the contrary! My plan is to burden myself less with too many topics, so I can better concentrate on a few, better direct the group and as soon as possible start a Slovenian FSFE team. I hope my fellow Fellows understand what I mean and will take the initiative.
I'm a suit.
Yes, I'm a suit. Recently on a mailing list someone pretty much called me as such in a slightly sneering way and that triggered the thought. I'm a geeky lawyer, steadily sailing towards my 30's. If I start waving transparents, singing protest songs and throwing eggs, it'd just look silly. I'm better at words and legal texts then coding. So, I think the best thing I can do is help with legal and abstract matters.
So, yes, I'm a suit. I'm a suit so you don't have to be. I'm a suit so those who are dream in source code can safely code and so that the younger generation has something to fight about and is able to…
Coding¶
For my whole adolescent life, I've been helping with small things with all sorts of projects – be it just reporting bugs, occasionally translating something, giving ideas, finding solutions or meeting up different projects in order for better cooperation. This is also something I will sadly have to stop doing for the most part.
But being a hacker by heart, of course this means, I won't be able to sustain myself from scratching an occasional itch, hacking it up, publishing or reporting it ;)
Website¶
If anyone has been following me online for the past decade, I've been posting news, tips and curiosities from the FOSS world for quite some time – ranging from my (in theory) weekly news about FOSS and Linux games on Cyberpipe's old website to my humble homepage, which in current form has been in existence since 2005 (and as a static page since 2003).
I've already hinted before I plan some major visual and organisational changes of my web-page. Maybe now is the time to explain a bit what I had in mind and put to rest any misconceptions of my untimely web demise.
Layout-wise, so far I've come up with the idea to slice the front page into three sections (possibly columns):
| articles | blog entries | micro-blog posts |
|---|---|---|
| usually very long, | short or long, | very short, |
| thoroughly written, and | relatively quickly written, and | very quick to write, |
| least often updated | more often updated | very often updated |
Of course there would be sub-pages for each section to make it more manageable and RSS and/or Atom feeds.
Content-wise I will probably write more law-related articles, yet still blog and micro-blog about both law and small cool geeky tips I find.
Most importantly though, less time wasted reading means more time for thinking and writing – so I hope to actually write more in the future. Also, since micro-blogging will be present on the website as well, it should get the best of both worlds.
(Maybe Acquia Slate is not the best theme either …I'll have to find a new one someday soon :P)
Update: With two migrations of this blog since this post, my website might deviate a bit from the original plan (e.g. articles and blogs are now the same type). What is staying though is the aim for quality entries as well as keeping the blog W3C compliant.
Finishing thoughts¶
I've planning on doing that for days, writing this post for two days now and it's been a painful ordeal.
It feels almost a bit like abandoning someone you care for greatly, because you know it's for their own good. So I sincerely hope you understand my plight and more importantly my aims on doing this.
Thank you for taking the time to fight through these lines. I hope it wasn't as hard to read them as it was to write them down.
hook out → in hope I will soon have time to actually enjoy drinking tea again…