The Blogger Responds (Part I)

The first entry in Ask the Blogger!
Bill asks:
1) What is it like living in NC?
2) How do you find the time that you do to make all these posts?
3) What's more fun for you, state, local, federal, or international politics?

And as I have just a few minutes we'll start with #2:
Most of the short posts take 5 minutes. Let's face it, the trade-off with Blogger is that you get very little control, but you still have the training wheels, so posting is easy. Other than that, I read fast and I type fast (extra info: I CAN NOT touch-type, but I can hunt and peck about 60 wpm if I spell things right).

Also, FireFox helps. With tabbed browsing I can post about what I'm reading without having to wait for a new window to load. I also use FireFox's Sage RSS reader plugin pretty extensively, and if I see something I like, I can link it without having to ever load the page.

Long posts are a different story. Usually they're inspired by the kind of instant and immediate rage that makes my husband wonder when the flames are going to shoot out of my eyeballs. I get really logical and direct when I'm angry (shoulda been a lawyer, I guess) , so it's a good time to write.

Fun posts, like the CotR or the SoA Star Wars post, generally take a while. The SoA post took the better part of a week and some intense html practice, and help from a great flash animator (thanks, Bob), and the CotR took a couple of hours.

In terms of finding the time, I don't have kids and my husband and dog are both house-trained :-)
Actually, the nature of my science is such that I have short breaks between bursts of activity, and that's a good opportunity to read blogs, check email, and write (15 min to 1 hr). Now I have to go finish cramming some food down my throat (did I mention that there's a Wendy's 5 floors down from me?) and then walk across campus to our collaborators lab and make some slides....

More later!