i summon one kim

Call me an Internet addict (it might be accurate, actually), but I’m very used to having broadband Internet access always. I consider having available on-demand (some might say “constant”) access to my Internet-connected servers the norm. I read my mail on-line (in plain text, no less). My RSS aggregator is on-line on the web. I contact my friends on-line on IRC.

Yet there are times when I’m not online. Most commonly this used to be while commuting to and from work. I’d be on the train for about an hour each way. My favorite pastime for the commute was reading. But sometimes I would have liked to write down some thoughts, either for the blog or maybe for an email reply.

I knew about offline blogging tools but I had never really looked into them. I had experimented with Windows Notepad and the Blackberry memo application. Both are fine for writing the bulk of the text, but the “cleanup” tended to be too tedious: there are a number of fields you still have to fill in before a blog entry can be published or an email sent out.

I recently went through the weblog clients listed in the WordPress Codex to see what my options were. I chose to install w.bloggar on my laptop. With just a little bit of configuration (and a couple of tweaks on my non-standard WordPress installation to accommodate language selection) I had successfully published a test entry. Quite painless so far.

With w.bloggar I can set all the common post attributes (title, tags, timestamp) without any of the tedious cut-and-paste that would be necessary without a dedicated offline blogging tool. Once I’m connected to the Internet I can easily open each saved post and publish it. (That statement will be validated by the fact of this post appearing on my site…)

There’s a first time for everything: I got out of bed in the middle of the night to write an entry in this blog. I’ve considered it a few times in the past, but never actually done it before.

I just arrived in Germany yesterday, and I was hoping to conquer jetlag with the usual method of staying up late without any napping in order to sleep soundly through the first night. Maybe having nodded off on the train is the culprit, but I woke up at 3am and could not go back to sleep.

Last night after dinner I was eventually ready to fall asleep standing up. I enjoy conversing with my brother and sister-in-law, but it is obvious now that my brain was mostly storing rather than processing at the end of the evening. A trip to the bathroom was enough time for it to completely wake up, and at that point it was a total avalanche of thoughts!

You know how sometimes in the evening you cannot fall asleep because something is stuck in your thoughts and won’t go away? It was sort of like that, but different, because after each thought there was a new one pushing its way through. And there was no end to it — conversations from yesterday; tasks to tackle once I arrive in Finland; that it’s really a fact I’m not living in the USA anymore; and so on.

Finally at 4:30am I gave up and thought it would be better to actually focus on something. So much easier than a constant merry-go-round of random thoughts in your head.