Rocket Science

The U.S. Government just announced the design for the new $100 bill.

Looking at the design–I don’t understand why we don’t finally use full color in bill design. Something more along the lines of…say…the rest of the world? The new $100 looks really strange–I know there’s a drive to keep the “green back” (which isn’t really green, but black). Why don’t we just take the final step and go to all color “paper” money? Or better yet, change the material from paper to something else? (Of course I’m partial to this since I’ve been fortunate to travel to lots of places.) I mean, they’ve even gone so far as to create a video to help educate people about the new bill…

Another stat from 2009. I averaged 1,656 characters per post (Year End Stats). Using an estimate of approximately 5.5-6 characters per word (4.5-5 characters per word plus 1 space on average), my posts averaged 276-305 words per post.

…in no particular order…

• Convert to a new theme, based on Thesis
• Split the personal and professional sections of this site…to highlight the professional posts more.
• Figure out what/how/when to cross-post to Twitter

So, after having written YA1HP (yet another one hour post), I got to thinking about how much time have I spent on this site in the last year.

At 1 hour per post x 277 posts (based on my update from 2009)= 277 hours or 5 hours per week.

That seems a little high, there are some weeks when I don’t work on it at all, or for something like an hour. And there are others were I spend 10+ hours working on the site. The question is, does that average out to 5 hours per week? I’m thinking it’s closer to 4 hours a week on average.

Add to that how long did it take me to setup the site? Probably 40-60 hours over two or three weeks in December 2009.

So, all in all, this has been a non-trivial investment of time.

Well I’ve been blogging for a little over a year now, and I thought this would be a good time to reflect on what I’ve accomplished.

Writing for this site tends to come in spurts for me. I don’t lack ideas, I do find it challenging to set aside time to write regularly. We’ll see what I can do about setting aside more time in this upcoming year (in addition to the other “habits” I’d like to start or get back to).

I’ve published 277 stories, or on average 3 posts every four days. With 88 “Professional” posts and 187 “Personal” posts, plus a handful of others. I’ve also received 38 comments (2 of which I still need to craft a response to before posting). And I’ve received a few emails as a result of my posts, which technically count as comments. So I’m averaging better than the one in ten commenter to lurker percentage–though I’d like to see more comments.

Coming soon (I hope) is a site redesign and facelift, I’ll be transitioning the major focus to more “Professional” posts at least on the home page. Though I expect that I’ll still have a 2:1 ratio of personal to professional posts, those posts will just be a layer down. I also hope to do more Friday Funny posts.

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