I find this whole business of the Republican criticism of the president rather remarkable. It's almost as if Senator Graham and others are completely oblivious to the impact of US political influence inside of Iran. Or, really, the niceties of diplomacy in general.
I'm not sure if this is sheer political gamesmanship (I hope) in the sense of "Oh look... President Obama isn't advocating liberty in Iran: something that everyone in the free world wants. Let's accuse him of being soft on dictators." Or (I fear) maybe the Republicans truly and honestly believe the George W. Bush school of diplomacy and dictating terms to the rest of the world is the only way to, in the words of Senator Graham "lead from the front."
So, what I'm saying is that, as I see things, the Republican Party's stance on Iran is either disingenuous or idiotic. And this is the party that, according to commentators, operates better as a minority party? I suppose it's fair to say that the party is having a crisis of leadership and is attempting to return to what it's good at... but if what it's good at is responding to a nuanced approach to diplomacy with a shrill appeal to the base fears of the masses, I'm afraid I'm not buying.
So I've been jotting down a lot of half-done essays on a variety of work-related topics of late. Meetings, performance reviews, layoffs, peer reviews, re-orgs... the beat goes on.
The point is that I get a lot of half-done writings put together, primarily in meetings. This is, of course, because easily half of the meetings I sit in (time-wise) are comprised of agenda items which either inform me of nothing or add absolutely no value to my work for my having heard them. As a result, I have a lot of time to write, but it's very disjoint time. I do plan on finishing those essays, but it's a somewhat lengthy process that really doesn't leave me updating a lot.
This of course, also gives rise to my using twitter... and even better, because verbosity is something that I continually struggle with, the 140 character limit is a test of my revision skills and at the same time allows me to pass on information without spending 20-30 minutes of the time that I'm actually at my desk typing up blog posts (not to mention the several hours of polish that they probably really need.) It probably wouldn't be very professional of me to use my work time for that...
This of course, by necessity, also leads me to contemplate the future of this blog. More frequent updates are preferable, but they necessarily suck up time or just end up being low-quality. I feel that something like twitter fits the billing for that rather nicely and has the added benefit of enabling me to communicate links.
Of course, I really should come up with some sort of twitter aggregation service to plug into my blog here... and that leads to another point. We really do need to upgrade our services to MT 4.0 or something else... really, anything but a blogging service that dates back to sometime in 2004 or 2005 if memory serves. In the land of the internet, our back-end is will-nigh unto prehistoric.
So, new objectives:
1) Longer, more significant and less frequently-posted essays.
2) Mechanism for conveying links and "cheese sandwich" updates in a (hopefully) witty manner.
3) Update to the blogging back-end.
I'll get right on those and tell you how it turns out.
Oh, as to the twitter piece, for right now I can be followed at @vengeful_cynic