The unexamined life is not worth living. – Socrates

As I resurrected this blog, I was forced to look back through much of what I’ve written over the past nine years. A few things hit me:

• Writing well is hard work
• I really used to work at it, and in some cases, it shows
• The process of writing makes me more thoughtful about myself, my experiences with friends and family, and the world

It’s the last point that struck me the most, especially after I had a conversation with my friend Tony about it. He told me his blog is a way of recording his thoughts, and in many ways, of generating them. The same is true for me, I realized. It’s one thing to tell someone you thought a movie was pretty good; it’s another thing entirely to be able to sit down and write something about it that’s actually worth reading. The writing process requires concentration and focus, honing ideas to the point where they can be articulated.

Without the writing process, most “ideas” are really just partially formed impressions, misshapen lumps of clay that hint at something deeper. Writing provides shape and form and structure; it clarifies and enlightens both the writer and the reader. I think the anticipation of writing can also encourage looking at the world with more open eyes. If I’m thinking in the back of my head that I want to write about my experiences, I’m suddenly more present in them.

As I looked through those old entries, I realized just how much introspection and curiosity I had lost when I stopped writing over a year ago. I realized that, on some level, I’d really stopped thinking about my own life experiences in a meaningful way. My professional blog kick-started thinking about my working life, but my personal life remained largely unexamined. It was just a sea of impressions without any land in sight.

Now that this blog has risen from the ashes, I feel like I’ve shined light into the dusty attic of my brain, brushed away the cobwebs, and started the gears turning again. They’re a little rusty, and it will probably take another year of writing before they run smoothly, but it’s all about the journey, right?

I’m not exactly sure in what direction I’m heading right now, or where I’ll wind up, but at least I know I’m leaving the unexamined life behind.

How many times in our lives do we have the opportunity to reinvent ourselves, either in our careers or otherwise? Or perhaps an even better question: How many of those opportunities do we take? Well, I’ve just been handed one in the form of a mostly-mutual pink slip, and I’m going to take it.

I’m not exactly sure what my next step will be, but as part of my transition, I completely retooled my professional presence online:

• Shiny new resume
• Updated professional blog (bitstrategist.com)
• Expanded and integrated online portfolio
• Uploaded a bunch of professional presentations
• Turned my LinkedIn profile upside down
• Started re-engaging with old friends and colleagues, fertilizing that soil of opportunity with good meals, Skype chats overseas, and anything else life brings

Once all those boxes had been checked, as luck would have it, my neighbor Chad over at Blurb.com offered m access to the Beta of their new online book creation product called Bookify, complete with a huge discount on my next book. I can’t say exactly what the book was (since it’s a top-secret gift), but it involved a major trip down memory lane. It reminded me how much I love to capture and reflect on my life, not just in pictures, but with words, too. It also reminded me how amazing my life has been to date. And that’s where we come to this poor, neglected blog.

I started blogging on May 21, 2001. Since that day, I’ve penned 368 posts and dropped out more than a few times, always returning sheepishly, full of excuses. So let’s try again and see how far we can go before I drop out again…Welcome to docrpm.com Version 3.0, retooled and streamlined onto WordPress 3.0.1. I enjoyed all those years publishing with Movable Type, but the time had come to break up. It wasn’t me, Movable Type, it was you.

Onwards and sideways. Thanks for taking the journey with me.

Image credit: Simply Gorgeous

it’s been a little under six months since i’ve written anything. how lame is that? it’s time to bring it back to life. flickr and twitter only get you so far.

comments have been fixed. order has been restored to all that is holy and good.

for you MT geeks out there, i think the problem was a bloated mt_comments table (9500+ junk comments) which could not be deleted from the MT admin interface (kept getting an error). i manually deleted all those rows and then OPTIMIZED the table in phpMyAdmin. whereas the table was previously 135MB, it dropped to 200K after optimization and deletion of rows. nice and spiffy without the spam.

phew. saved me the hassle of upgrading to MT4.0 (which may be easy for all i know, but usually involves a few migration headaches after the fact).

there appears to be a problem with comments in my MT installation. i can’t approve them when they are up for moderation, which means they don’t show up at the moment. my apologies to the thousands who are desperately trying to give me their feedback, share their hopes, pour out their dreams. or something like that.

anyway, i’ll do my best to fix it, thus restoring balance to the universe. this may involve me upgrading to MT4, which will likely be a weeklong undertaking. maybe it’s time for me to bite the bullet and shift to WordPress.

it’s been a long time coming, but i have finally moved all of my photos to flickr. my rationale for not doing it before is a little murky, i admit…maybe i just felt like it was going to be a lot of work (it was and continues to be) and that my web site was good enough (it wasn’t – flickr is way better).

so, visit docrpm at flickr…enjoy the past like you’ve never seen it before! get the latest and greatest as photos go up in real time, as opposed to months after something happens! now bookmarkable and easily browseable! and, if you act now, you might win a free pony!

ladies and gentlemen, your captain has turned on the fasten seat belt sign. the software for this blog has just been updated, and we’re expecting some turbulence. please let the captain know if you hit any particularly rough pockets of air. we thank you for your patience and for occasionally flying with docrpm.

i have posted a photo gallery for thanksgiving 2006. you can almost smell the turkey. enjoy.

some of you have commented over the years that the layout of this blog was wacked, specifically that vertical height of the page went to infinity and beyond. there were technical reasons for that lame behavior. really. i swear.

i think it’s fixed. if anything looks wacky or more stupid than it did before, please let me know. as always, your patience is appreciated.

after upgrading my blog software last night, i decided to take a look through my traffic logs to see how docrpm.com had been faring over the past few months. pure vanity, it’s true, but anyone who blogs and claims to lack at least some sliver of vanity is a liar, IMNSHO.

at first, things were looking pretty good—about 300 visitors a day. plenty of hits (although it’s all relative; i’m not going to be the next Yahoo or anything). and then i started looking at the traffic in a little more depth, and realized that the bulk of the visitors to my site did not appear to be human.

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