Cake and eat it, with extra waffle

Keeping a blog updated is turning out to be a bit like keeping a hardy houseplant. Let's face it, there's always a whole raft of better things to do, so you neglect it, keep it low on the to-do list, aware that it needs regular attention but feeding it just enough to stop it expiring completely. Then there's the inspiration factor: you need something to write about. Our problem here is that we're now thoroughly over the golly gosh, isn't England different to Spain? shock horror surprise, so it's more a case of thinking what's new – and not very much is, generally speaking. This is England after all, nothing's new, it's all worn out, clichéd and held together with little more than blind faith and a large box of zip ties. The only thing that changes regularly is the price on the display board of the petrol station on the corner of our street. Which, in turn, is slowly changing the way we get about, or at least it is for me. I'm gradually re-establishing an affinity with the bicycle which has been dormant for quite a bit longer than the blog has. Whether I use it enough to make a dent in our fuel bills is another matter, but it definitely helps that I have a friend "on the inside" and he's been giving me some bike-related work.

Normally, this would be a problem – that's to say, unless you're really lucky, work and play are mutually exclusive. I always considered myself lucky to be able to take photos for a living, but the reality is the divide between the photos you'd like to take and the ones you're paid to take is as big as any work vs play dilemma. Putting an even finer point on it, just because you're really into cycling doesn't mean you'll enjoy working for a bike shop as much as you enjoy riding a bike, no matter how wacky and wonderful the place might be. I spent a week in the shop itself, which as I mentioned a blog or two ago is in Sunderland, a small town near Newcastle (sorry guys, couldn't resist ;)) – basically cos they were short-staffed, but also to get a handle on the EPOS system which also drives the shop website. There are a good number of pics needed too, once the refurb is complete, but there's plenty to be getting on with for now getting their web presence up to the standard of their service. So far, it looks like this (which may be the finished article if you're reading this in 2009...) with the homepage more-or-less finished, barring clearance of some bugs helpfully built in to the EPOS software.

The best thing about all this is the shop cycling club, which is a big incentive to get out once a week, and the generosity of Ian the Boss, who keeps offering me the use of some very nice bikes, which in turn inspires yet more riding. I was out on Saturday and I'm out again tomorrow on one of these lovely machines. A bit of a climbdown from the hand-built race bike I'd been hoping to ride but this one just fits so much better... I'll spare you the tech spec and review. I'm hoping to do a 35 mile loop down to Durham, up to Tow Law and along the moors via Lanchester back to Chester-le-Street, and praying that the muscles which (I noted yesterday) appear to be specific to road-riding (...) have been rejuvenated sufficiently such that I don't double up in agony on the first serious climb of the day.

Anyway, enough about bikes, this was supposed to be about blogs. There's something ironic about trying to find time amongst all your Real Life activities to write a post, when Real Life ends up being no more Real than the blog is. I was on about the time I spend on the computer, how everything seems to have a digital heart these days, or at least the way so many RL activities involve at least some physical inactivity, parked in front of this screen. If/when you get to this state, as I seemed to be heading, I reckon it's a good idea to set yourself a corresponding physical activity for every prolonged period of inactive computing. So the many days of web design for the bike shop are complemented by regular days out cycling; hours and hours processing images for one project or another are (thoeretically) balanced up with time out to get out with the camera and take some more. On paper, so to speak, it works. While taking pictures feeds the digital machine, emailing, blogging and the like are fed by RL interaction with Real People. Hmm.

This could mitigate one of the big hazards: ending up a Billy No-Mates or worse, lapsing into mild sociophobia. I was just reading about Alan Turing, the founder of modern computers (it says here), how he bizarrely envisaged the advent of a machine that would think and interact just like a real human. Not, I reckon, to give the machine a place in the human world, more to develop a digital brain for humans, a virtual mind, a comforting and familiar retreat when RL gets too much to handle. In a recent book he's been characterised as being socially inept, among other things, and given his ideals it all seems eerily prescient re the problems his machine seems to be generating. Using the machine has become a new form of interaction in itself, in both human and digital realms, and the big machine – that interweb – has an insatiable appetite, devouring RLs at an astonishing rate. Predictions abound of collaborative working taking over the world (or at least a big human part of it) with web-based life potentially changing "every aspect of our [real] lives". I could live with that, I'd even be happy to be part of it, but I'd want my cake and eat it. I realise blogs were conceived as a way of keeping track of online "events" (from "web log", innit?) and even though these days a blog can be everything from online diary to photoblog to a kind of social medium (and ours is a bit of all of these) it all takes up valuable time. With a bit of effort and a bit more awareness, it's got to be possible to feed the machine just enough that it feeds you in return, and even if it does become the source of your bread and butter, it has to be possible to restrict it to being a life tool, rather than your whole life itself.

Hasn't it?