Celebrating Ten…Er, Eleven Years of Daniel's Musings!

Today marks the eleventh anniversary of this blog. I know, I too am amazed—that I didn't think to make this post a year ago at the ten-year anniversay. To tell the truth, I actually wrote most of this post thinking it was the tenth anniversary. (And they're letting me do a PhD in astrophysics…) Anyway, a decade just over a decade ago when I started this blog, I was one semester into getting a bachelor's degree at UH Hilo, and now, I'm (hopefully!) just a few months away from finishing a PhD at Swinburne.

I originally started this blog as a way to replace email for letting a few people back home know how I was doing. Over the years it's morphed into something like a public journal, where I can show off things I've made or done, or talk about things that interest me for later reference. Some facts about things since this blog was started:

1. I graduated with dual bachelor's degrees in physics (with a minor in mathematics) and astronomy.
2. I've worked five different jobs (while my job description and day-to-day work with the JCMT remained exactly the same during the handover between owners, it was still technically two different jobs with different employers), including ones at high altitude on the two tallest volcanoes in the world.
3. I started a PhD in astronomy, and am now just a few scant months away from completing it.
4. I learned Python, my first programming language, and have been using it for…let's say about seven or eight years in total, to various degrees. (And last year I started seriously trying to learn Rust, which I might have a post on sooner or later.)
5. I picked up a few hobbies:
• Astrophotrography
• Video editing/videography
• Knitting (and re-started crochet after learning it a few years prior to beginning this blog)
• Painting
• Digital music engraving
6. I created what is still, to date, the only video Let's Play of Dodge That Anvil!.
7. And I've written a total of 668 posts for this blog, for an average of one every 5.47 days (though this is obviously skewed by the earlier years, as we shall see).

In some ways I'm impressed that this blog is still going. My interests are often somewhat…mercurial, shall we say, and tend to shift on the scale of a few years. I can never tell if some intense new interest will turn out to be a passing fancy of a few months or years' duration, or an enduring passion still going strong a decade later. As other interests of mine have fallen by the wayside over the past eleven years, this blog is still going, even if my output waxes and wanes over time. Originally I tried to write at least once a week; a few years ago, under the time pressures of full-time employment, I settled on just trying to have at least two posts a month (and even then I've fallen short a month or two!). I do still hold to the rule I originally established of “no more than one post per day,” though that hasn't been too difficult as I can either merge things together into one post, or have material for multiple posts. I put that in place to remind myself that this isn't social media (though it's perhaps the closest thing I have to it), and that I want posts that are worth reading rather than throw-away thoughts. (I've put up a few short posts that might've been mostly filler over the years, but not too many.)

Anyway, back in 2016 I wrote a little Python script to make a plot of my posts-per-month over time. (Amusingly, I've just discovered that that post, written on the blog's sixth anniversary, was intended for the fifth anniversary, so I guess I've started a tradition now.) I still had it lying around on my hard drive, so I've modernized it a bit, applied a few things I've learned in the intervening years, and changed it to plot each year as its own color:

The numbers after each month are the total number of posts in that month across all eleven years.

Here we can clearly see me start off the first three years with a pretty consistently high output, where even the slowest months have only been rarely been equaled since. In 2010 and 2011 I was still a student, and though I did take some pretty brutal workloads I obviously still had plenty of time on my hands for writing. (I'm sure the novelty factor helped a bit, too.) For almost the entirety of 2012 I was working at the Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea, where I had full days at work and then several days off during the week, so likewise still had plenty of time (though being un- or under-employed for much of 2016 didn't really bring it back up). Looking at the line for 2013, you can almost see where I enter full time employment at the JCMT in January: it starts off pretty high at seven posts, but steadily nose-dives for the rest of the year, establishing the pattern that will generally be followed afterwards.

After the first three years, it looks like February is consistently a slow month, while May can be somewhat variable (probably because I often try to make at least one post around my birthday). Both June and July I've slipped up and only had one post in, while September through November are remarkably uniform at between two and four posts for the past eight years. And finally, December can be either pretty quiet, or one of the busiest months of the year; usually when I'm visiting family for Christmas I don't have much opportunity to write (the two years with six posts, 2017 and 2020, were ones I spent in Australia), but it's not a hard and fast rule as I didn't write any more posts than normal in 2018 when I didn't go anywhere.

Anyway, that's pretty much it. The colors used in the plot were taken from an excellent Python package for scientific plots, CMasher, created just in the past few years by a fellow PhD student here at Swinburne. I took the opportunity while making this plot to learn how to scrape HTML with the Beautiful Soup library, so instead of manually entering post counts (which is so 2016) my script now automatically scrapes them from the blog itself, which should make doing the inevitable sixteenth anniversary plot a bit easier. That's all for now, though I've definitely got a few ideas for posts for the coming weeks (and months. I should try to bump February's count up this year…) A hui hou! (Which I was also gratified to discover I've been using since the very first post ten eleven years ago.)