Blog Ground Rules

Now that I'm overseas, I'm going to try posting to my blog twice a week. I wrote up some expectations of myself and the purpose of this blog. I started it a while ago, but as you can see it didn't take off when I was in CT.

(wrote on my laptop):

There are several purposes for this blog:

- practice my writing
- centralize my thoughts about differences between living in Iowa, the Northeast, and the Netherlands
- keep everyone else informed of how life is going

Point 1: Practice my writing.

I am a poor communicator, but a particularly poor writer. I think an anecdote is in order here:

On the first day of a pottery class, the teacher split the class in two - every on the left side of the class would be judged on the quantity of pottery produced, whereas the right side of the class would be judged on the quality of their best design. When grading time came, the highest quality of work came not from the group graded on quality, but rather the group graded on quantity.

Is this anecdote true? I have no idea, but this matches a large portion of my experience with both software and math. I think writing falls under the same "design-centric" group of crafts, and thus I'll be practicing writing by (surprise) writing at least half an hour every week.

Point 2: Centralize thoughts about differences between living different places.

I've now lived a lot of different places. There are big differences in the values people have, and how people live in these places. I would like to centralize my thoughts on these differences.

Point 3: Keep everyone else informed

I have a lot of friends spread across the globe, which is awesome. Unfortunately for them, I have a poor memory and I constantly repeat events to them. This blog will centralize events so I don't have to inflict the same story on people multiple times.


In order to practice the above points, I think I'm going to need to post a sizable chunk at least once a week. That should give me sufficient time for something sizable to talk about. I expect to post on Friday mornings, and already have an annoying reminder set up in my calendar.