DBActive

Just a quick note for those who might care–I haven’t given up blogging just yet, even though January was the first time in the history of this blog that I went without saying anything for a month. My wife, kids and I went on a big vacation to the Dominican Republic in January, with a swing by the East Coast for a baptism for good measure, and that took up most of the month! Then, just as I was starting to dig myself out of the hole from that trip, I was off for another week. So needless to say, I’ve got a good sized backlog of stuff to get out on the blog. I’ll apologize in advance for any old news…

It’s amazing how many viruses babies manage to bring into the house. I think we’ve been down with something pretty much continuously since we got back. Fortunately, we haven’t been all sick at once, but this is starting to get a bit old…

Things have also been extremely busy around work. I’ve been working on something that I’m hoping we’ll have at least a mention of at MIX07 and will probably have more to say about later in the year. I realize there are some threads that have been left hanging, so I’m going to try and tie them up in the coming weeks.

And, finally, the mail on my webserver is now working again, so if you’ve wanted to send me feedback on the Contact form and haven’t been able, you’re back in business. Sorry about that!

Just for fun, as I was starting at the “Archives” in the left pane started working out what my “post per month” average was per year. It comes out to:

2003: 19.6 PPM (only 6 months of the year, though)
2004: 12.3 PPM
2005: 9.3 PPM
2006: 4.9 PPM (only 11 months so far)

As you can see, my average has dropped precipitously this year and I’m in danger of getting awfully close to zero next year if things continue as they have been. The real question is: why has my posting average gone down so much? I mean, I’m not surprised that my average dropped off after the first year or so–sooner or later the bloom has got to come off the rose–but why so anemic this year? Why was last year not particularly good either? Is there just nothing interesting left to talk about?

Well, no, for that last question. There’s lots of interesting stuff going on in VB. LINQ and Orcas is bubbling along. Lots of interesting thinking is happening.

I think I’ve been experiencing extended transition-induced writer’s block. By “transition-induced,” I mean that the 2005-2006 has been a period of a lot of various transitions for me. Obviously, I’m about to become a father, and that’s just a huge, major, massive transition in anyone’s life. And professionally, my role has shifted a lot over the past two years into something that I still feel like is a work-in-progress. (I think my next entry should be “What the Hell I Do,” since I’m not sure that’s clear anymore, least of all to myself at times.) And, even bigger than that at work, the product as a whole has been making a major transition into maturity. We’re not so far behind the design eight ball anymore that we can actually ponder a bit more where we’re going rather than just react to the next major thing that the .NET Framework is throwing at us. And .NET as a whole has been out there long enough to start to get a feel for what’s been working well and what hasn’t.

I’m hoping we’re far enough through the transition now for the writing mojo to return a bit. It feels like the writer’s block may be starting to loosen up, but I guess only time will really tell…

…it turns out the Live search box I tried to put on my blog broke comment submission. It’s fixed now (by removing the search box) and you should be able to spam away!