andthennothing.net

The weather has been really, really nice the last few weeks. Summer, for sure. But I have unfortunately not spent that much time outdoors during the days, you know work and all that. So I try to get out on my bike at least a few times a week. Today I was out for a good three and a half hours and enjoyed every minute of it.

I live in a really small town so there’s just a 15 minute bike ride until I reach the Baltic Sea and the country side. I usually just ride along and explore a bunch of small roads. I have taken the car a few times but it doesn’t have AC, you miss out a lot of the experience, and you can’t stop that easily wherever you want. And taking short stops all over the place, to check them out and perhaps shoot some photos, is a major part. (Oh, and I must have my MP3-player with me with some good music and podcasts, but that’s besides the point.)

I just noticed that I’ve taken over thousand photos in about two months. There are of course a lot of crappy photos, but that’s a good thing. Most is nature photography which makes them somewhat boring perhaps, but I don’t feel comfortable putting photos of friends and stuff online, just as I don’t feel comfortable blogging about those kind of things.

There are other ways in which photography relates to writing (or at least blogging). When I started blogging I sometimes did things in order to have something to write about. It can be a good thing using blogging/writing as an excuse to do things, but I didn’t like it too much so I unlearned that urge rather quickly. Photography can also be a driving force to do stuff. But at least for now I’m perfectly fine with that. I’m not quite sure why, but perhaps since when I’m photographing it enhances the experience and it’s done as soon as the button is pushed, whereas when I’m about to blog/write something I get somewhat disconnected since I’m formulating sentences in the back of my head and the actual writing takes place later on. I’m not sure if this makes any sense to anyone else, but I think that’s how I work.

Anyhow, I do think I understand a bit of how it is to be a journalist or a photographer. For a journalist every situation is a story, and for a photographer every situation is a photo. Or at least, that’s how I think it works, but I’m just rambling well past bedtime.

Ron Jeffries has started a new series of articles in the same vein as Adventures in C#. The new series is called “Designing Better Code”, and is (at least in the beginning?) dealing with Smalltalk. I linkblogged the two first articles yesterday, and the third will be linkblogged soonish. However, in the last article Ron asks the following question:

[I]f you’re reading and enjoying these articles, please drop me a note and let me know, since I’m concerned that there aren’t that many people interested in what programming looks like in this language. If you’re not reading them, or not enjoying them, please keep it to yourself.

First I must say I like the way Ron writes. Even though he really knows the (craft|art|what have you) of programming, he can describe things in a newbie friendly way, that also attract people like me that know some about programming. I like all the stuff he has written (at least all the stuff I’ve read). The “Adventures in C#” series was really great (although I didn’t read the book) and I look forward to more articles like those. It’s interesting to read about TestDrivenDevelopment (because I do it so rarely myself) and it’s interesting to read about a new programming language—Smalltalk. I like learning new languages, but I find it hard to take the time that’s needed (even though Pragmatic Programmer tells me to learn a new language each year). So these kind of articles are a perfect fit for me! Keep ‘em coming!