he “where life takes me next” theme often implies a major transition in one’s career. For me, there was never such a transition. No transition was ever sharp and usually there was a lot of overlap in transition, which is actually a good sign of stability and balance.

I have been thinking a great deal about time management recently. As I already spend a lot of time outside the house I find myself struggling to blog unless I do so on a portable keyboard whilst away. Moreover, with work commitments changing all the time it has become clear that even less time than before will be available for blogging. One possible solution is to increase the use of audio, which requires no proofreading and is generally quicker to produce once everything is streamlined. This is likely to be a direction of choice. But here is the other major point.

Android has been gaining a lot of power recently. Android is not a startup, it is part of a massive and well-funded company called Google. In some ways (ignoring DRM and other impediments), Android is the Linux dream come true, to paraphrase Chris DiBona. The question is, need I — as a Linux advocate — bother helping Google when they are perfectly capable of helping themselves? I think not. In some way, I accomplished what I had aimed for over 5 years ago when I became very serious about GNU/Linux advocacy. Now that it has become more mainstream (with hundreds of millions of phones running Linux), I do not feel so necessary. I will definitely continue in my quest, but it is mostly likely that I shall concentrate on patent reform, technology rights (not in the “rights holder”sense), and whatever seems like a high-priority issue at any given time. To work with the exact same goals for 5 consecutive years makes little sense because everything changes all the time. Novell is dead, for example, so how relevant is a call to boycott Novell?

Battling for justice has always been thrilling and the exhilarating experience I’ve had running half a dozen blogs is not a thing of the past. In moderation I shall carry on posting analysis on a daily basis, potentially moving a bit in one direction or another as priorities shift based on contemporary events.

In my eyes, the great thing about blogging is that it can be done at any age, so I might still be blogging (or equivalent) in 50 years from now when I’m in my 70s. Unlike physical exercise, the peak for one’s writing abilities is not in the early 20s; so although I no longer compete and win trophies for the former activity, the latter activity I can do for a long time to come and do quite well, hopefully. I am not a strong believer in academic publishing because it is an ageing medium.

It is worth noting that blogging might not be all that relevant in 10 years. The Web is only about 20 years old and nobody can reliably predict what will come next (if it was predictable, then it would have happened by now). These days the Web is a combination of high authority sites like Facebook, a search engine (mostly Google), and many pages that are blogs, wikis, news sites, etc. To a certain extent video too is making progress and TechBytes is an attempt to keep up with what people favour for information digestion. Originally it was intended to be a bit of an experiment, but as the crowd grew and the audience provided feedback, Tim and I realised we should take it more seriously and recently we started organising the shows a little better. In a month from now the show will turn one. It is an important milestone which demonstrates maturity and adds certainty to the long-term future of the show. This morning I made the following banner for OpenBytes, placing more emphasis on the audio part.

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