A Blog Around The Clock

The new question-of-the-week was just beemed down from the mothership:

How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?

I do not have a day job! I am a stay-at-home dad.

I occasionally teach - but that is either on Saturday mornings (lab) or evenings (once a week), so that does not take too much time. Preparation also does not take much time.

I am supposed to be writing my Dissertation, but I've been very, very lazy for far too long. Most of the writing and statistics is done, but making graphs - hundreds of graphs - is a killer. One of the programs I have to use for many of my graphs works only on Macs and, furthermore, new Macs do not like it. It was last updated in 1982! So, I have a 10-year old PowerMac just for making those graphs. It takes a good dog-walk for that computer to start up. Many minutes for the program to open. Hours to get a single graph looking good.... It's a major pain. Still, I am going to crack down on it this summer (which may reduce some of my blogging time).

Most of the blog-posts do not take much time to write: you see something cool, grab a link or two, write a brief comment and publish. Even the longer posts do not take that much time away from work - I build them in my head while driving, walking the dog or taking a shower. Once a post is fully formed, I sit down, type it down, and post.

Finally, my sleep schedule is crazy. Thus, I am often awake while everyone else in the house is either asleep or not at home - having peace and quite is quite conducive to blogging.

Once I do get a real job, whatever and whenever it may be, I assume that my blogging frequency will drop somewhat, but I do not see myself ever being so overwhelmed to stop blogging altogether.

This post took less than 15 minutes to write.