This post intentionally left blank

Blank pages in a book
Image via Wikimedia CommonsSo Risker pinged me on my talk page, and like these sorts of low semantic content conversations do, it veered off into other topics, notably how posts sometimes have little content... and whether "no comment" really is "no comment" or actually more like "almost no comment"... this led to "This page intentionally left blank" ... and well... I'll repeat what I said there.

IBM is famous for making a great deal of use of these pages (back when IBM published all its manuals in hardcopy form). They would carry a footer with the manual name and the page number of the manual where they belonged. I can recall inserting them into manuals on my desk, many a time. (Periodically one would receive packets of pages in the post containing fixes to manuals, which one duly inserted into the manual binders, hopefully in the right places. Sometimes some of the new pages would be blank, to replace a page that described something that had been obsoleted, and sometimes some of the new pages would be non blank, but would replace a page that had previously been blank, as they described something new which space had been reserved for in the organization of the manual) There is an apocryphal story that there was an APAR opened against the entire publication group, requesting that all pages which said "THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK" be replaced with pages which said "THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT ALMOST BLANK" on the grounds that was a more accurate statement... Needless to say if there was such an APAR, it must have been rejected, as the cost of the PTF to identify, produce and print all those (thousands of different) pages (properly numbered and with proper footers, since that is how things were done), mail them out to every manual receipient, and so forth, would have been enormous. Even for IBM.

(this is not the only apocryphal story about APARs and PTFs, remind me sometime to tell the one about the APAR against IEFBR14)

Oh, and by the way, this whole post is a way for me to NOT talk about what really has me steamed right now.... perhaps I'll, in the best IBM tradition, replace this post with what I really want to say instead.

Update:

In accordance with the recommendations made by the This page intentionally left blank project, I decided that my personal site needed one of these. So I created one.

Blog till you drop?

I've got to get me some of these pencils!
Image by kaurjmeb via FlickrI know that people make money from blogging. (not me, unless you count the 34 cents in AdSense revenue (or whatever it is, I try not to look) I've gotten so far) But I had no idea that there were "blogger sweatshops"...

The New York Times reports that people are burning out, and other outlets are also talking about how some blogges have actually died.

That seems messed up to me. While I've gotten some comments about my update frequency and about the quality of my posts... I'm doing this blogging thing for me, not for pay. As soon as it's not fun any more, I will stop. That's as it should be I would think.

Does this frenzy to work, to make money at blogging have anything to do with WMF projects or with free content in general? Well, I'm not sure. Money? not so much... people shouldn't be creating content for the money... but obsession? I've talked about obsession before and how it ties into doing what we like to do. I am sure I'm not the only Wikipedia editor who has looked at the time in shock, wondering how it got so late! It is easy to lose track during a good work session on an article, a policy page, or what have you, but it's important to keep a sense of perspective. As with anything else, some rotation is good as well... don't JUST hang out at Requests for Adminship, or the Articles for Deletion pages or Featured Article Candidates or whatever... take some breaks.

That's one of the reasons I'm glad I have multiple hats to wear within Wikimedia Foundation projects... when I tired of the hurly burly of the English Wikipedia, there are always pictures to categorise or upload (after all, I've got plenty of old pictures!) over at Commons, or things to do at Meta, or the like. But I also have my other obsessions too. Oh, and a real life and a job and a family and bills to pay. That sharpens the perspective I think.

How about you? How do you keep a sense of perspective?

Planet Wikimedia

So I just put in a request to be added to Planet Wikimedia. This feed aggregation collects blogs from various wikimedians and is designed either for blogs that are primarily about Wikimedia Foundation related projects, or else that use filtered feeds to restrict the topics.

I had been holding off for a few reasons...

1. I wasn't sure I would be able to stick with this for very long, but I've been hitting an average of one post a day for over a month now (with a little fudging, note I said an average!)
   
2. I wasn't sure what I would be doing, I thought I'd be talking more LEGO and less WMF, but that hasn't been the case. (I have a few things I want to say about LEGO and I will )
3. I wasn't sure how to do filtered feeds. But this help explains it. Hopefully I did it right, we'll see. I filtered on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, and Commons. I (ha!) left out Wikipedia Review as a filter tag.
   Ouroboros.
   Image from Commons
   

So what do you think dear (4, is it now?) readers? Worth reading and adding or just vanity on my part?

(By the way, this may be the most self referential post I've done yet!)

(Also by the way, see that "Zemified" logo? That's a nifty little addon for Firefox I found from Zemanta, it will suggest links and pictures for you. The Ouroboros image at right was suggested by it when I put 'self referential' into the text)