Achewood: Everybody dance... everybody dance... everybody dance... like there’s ass in your pants! I was all ready to pump this one up until I saw today’s strip, featuring critical puffery from Michael Chabon, Douglas Coupland and Time Magazine. *Snort.*

Brent points out that there’s a non-trivial cost to supporting multiple kinds of weblogs in a blog front end tool like NetNewsWire or Manila Envelope. Weblogs may look alike on the surface (and to an RSS aggregator), but they’re all different software platforms underneath and accordingly have different information needs. This is fine as long you don’t have to expose the mess to the user.

This is one of the reasons, I think, why the MetaWeblog API came about. Abstracting the common elements of the data elements into a new API layer is smart. Unfortunately not all the platforms support it...

...that would be a good reason to not have posted for three days. As it is, I can point to our mostly-finished front bedroom, which is finally losing its green and maroon color scheme, as justification for not having written.

I started a new job at the same company yesterday. I spent the day in training, so it’s hard to tell how it went. But I will have a meeting this morning to talk about my goals, and then things will get running. I feel in some ways like this fresh start is like coming home to a skill set that I thought I’d never get to use again. In other ways, of course, I feel like I’ve given up on the other job, and that’s something I’m going to have to continue to work through.