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Like Keith, I keep a largish folder of bookmarks bearing the title "To Blog". I don't know why I do this, since none of the addresses in there has ever been the basis for a blog entry of mine.

The folder contains items that struck me as interesting in the peculiar way that gives rise to the tought "Oh, I might blog about this." In theory, it is there to dip into when I've run out of "live" topics : the ones I get worked up about, enough so that I'll actually write an entry to get it out of my system.

In practice, if there isn't anything I get worked up about, I don't blog. The "To Blog" folder serves more as a trail of breadcrumbs, telling me where the "subsidiary" focus of my attention has been over time. (The blog itself is a trail of breadcrumbs too, telling me what I've gotten worked up about over time.)

Right now - for the last week or so - I can't get worked up about much of anything. It's the holiday season - I haven't been at the computer much, I've been thinking mostly about gifts and meal and wine, fooling around with the children and so on. Thoughts of projects or programming are not too present right now. I'm also wondering if this could perhaps be a fallow season.

I get these occasionally. Times when I just can't seem to do anything of much value, for days and sometimes weeks on end. Then it passes, and I find I've moved on to new areas of interest: fallow seasons usually end when I've found something new to engage my thoughts. Sometimes the shift in topics is very large - as when I lost interest in XML and started to investigate Extreme Programming. On other occasions it's quite minute. I don't seem to have much conscious control over either the timing or the duration of my fallow seasons, or the magnitude of the changes that ensue.