A few years ago, when I was still getting the idea of this blogging thing, I made a serious effort to stay “in the know”. I read most of the Mac websites, I had 390+ feeds in my news reader, I posted links to interesting blogs, I tried to comment on the hot issues of the day. No idea how successful that was (depending on your definition of “successful”), but one side-effect became apparent after a year or so: no useful work on my applications got done. There are just so many nanoseconds in a day.

Perhaps the main cause of that was my overly-zealous polishing of each sentence – writing in what is, after all, my fourth language isn’t that easy – but if there’s any obsessive-compulsive polishing that must be done it would be better applied to my code than to my text. Right? On the other hand, there are people who tell me they like reading what I post here, if only to keep up-to-date with my trips. And the whole thing was, after all, just a sideshow to my support forums… no sense in closing it down.

So, I’ll probably not comment after the fact on most of the various issues du jour here… there have been an awful lot of them lately. I won’t even take the trouble to find links to them now. Let’s see, there was the AirPort security thing, the HIG-is-dead/Disco thing, the MacHeist controversy, the iPhone came-out-but-not-really flap, the options scandal is still going on, I still can’t comment on Leopard, yadda yadda.

My late father worked at a large company and he used to tell with some relish a story about how he used to sort the requests that crossed his desk into “not urgent”, “normal” and “extremely urgent” piles. His usual mode of operation was to ignore the “extremely urgent” stuff until someone asked after a particular item at least twice; it turned out that most of them were never followed up at all! The lesson has served me well. Many of those hot issues have a short half-life, emitting lots of sparks but decaying very soon into plain, dull lead. Nothing like letting a few weeks or months pass to get the proper perspective…

In the meantime, yes, suddenly I’ve been able to get lots of polishing done on XRay II. Keep tuned.