Missing fifty-five musings

As most of you who use Facebook know, Facebook regularly populates your page with Your memories on Facebook [1,2]. Since most of my Facebook postings are links to my musings, it’s an interesting way to see what I was thinking about a year prior.

A few days ago, I mused about being a workaholic, the first in a series about my workaholism. What had I written a year previously? I’d been complaining about captioning on the pioneers.grinnell.edu Web site [3]. The complaints were useful; the videos got captioned better.

But that’s not what I’m musing about today. The captioning complaint was musing #226. The workaholic reflection was musing #536. While it’s cool that I’d written over 300 additional musings in the intervening time, it appears that I only wrote 310 musings in exactly one year. Weren’t these supposed to be daily musings? If so, what happened to the other 55 [6]? I knew that I’d missed a few days, particularly when I was overwhelmed with work, but I hadn’t realized that it was so many. Seeing how much I’d missed expressed in such a concrete number was stunning.

Let’s hope that when musing #536 is a year old, I’ll be on musing #901 [7,8].

Postscript: Why did I pick that particular pair of musings? Because it’s when I did the math about the difference. I sketched this musing when I discovered the issue. Then I set it aside for a few days until I had time to edit it [11].

[1] At least it regularly populates my pages with those memories.

[2] It also likes to give me notices like You and X have been friends on Facebook for N years. Wish them a Happy Friendiversary! Sometimes I even do. But I don’t share the stupid photo.

[3] I love the student photos on that site. But I hate that whenever I go to the site, I get a popup that says Please remove your ad blocker for a better experience. I’m sorry, but if you’re doing something that sets off the ad blocker, it’s you, not me, who should change. And I really think someone needs to do a manual accessibility check, rather than relying on tools that might, say, ignore all the JavaScript-created content [4].

[4] It’s fascinating trying to look at http://pioneers.grinnell.edu with Lynx. There are a bunch of links [5] and, um, nothing else. Is that really equivalent?

[5] But no Skip to body link.

[6] Just in case that wasn’t clear: There are 365 days in a year. I mused 310 times. 365-310 is 55. I’m therefore missing fifty-five daily musings.

[7] 536 + 365 = 901, at least if I can still add correctly.

[8] There have been periods in which I posted more than one musing in a day. I don’t plan to return to that habit. When I have the energy to write more than one musing, I leave the second [9] as something to rework on a future day [10].

[9] and the third, and the fourth, and ….

[10] That’s what happened with this musing. Amazingly, when I edit and update a musing, I seem to make more changes than I expected. In this particular case, I cleaned up some language in the main body and then found that I more than doubled the number of endnotes.

[11] Or, more precisely, until an evening in which I did not have a lot of time to muse and thought that cleaning up a drafted musing would be faster than writing a new one [12].

[12] See endnote number 10 for a note on why it was still not a quick process.

Version 1.0 of 2018-02-12.