{"id":979,"date":"2005-03-03T11:57:52","date_gmt":"2005-03-03T11:57:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/?p=979"},"modified":"2005-03-03T11:57:52","modified_gmt":"2005-03-03T11:57:52","slug":"i-needed-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/archives\/979","title":{"rendered":"I needed that."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So this week is Yahoo!&#8217;s 10th birthday.  As a part of their celebration, they&#8217;ve posted <a title=\"Yahoo\" href=\"http:\/\/promo.yahoo.com\/birthday10\/incorporation\/\">their homepage, circa 1995<\/a>.  I loaded that page up and suddenly I was sitting in the library at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wooster.edu\">The College of Wooster<\/a>, poking around on one of their few web-enabled terminals, reading <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\">Wired<\/a> with near-religious fervor (hey <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powazek.com\">Derek<\/a>, remember they heyday of <a href=\"http:\/\/hotwired.wired.com\/\">Hotwired?<\/a>) and remembering that feeling of being blown away by possibilities.<br \/>\nThe world has moved on since then, to steal a phrase from Stephen King.  Now it&#8217;s a world of weblogs, of Flickr, of Google, of Treo 650s, of terrorism, of 30&#8243; displays, of plasma TVs, of <I>American Idol,<\/I> of <i>Lord of the Rings,<\/i> of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lauras-adventures.blogspot.com\/\">Laura in Japan<\/a>, of my expecting-to-get-married-and-then-not, of <A href=\"http:\/\/www.rubyonrails.com\/\">Ruby on Rails<\/A>, and so on and so on and so on.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s a <i>different<\/i> world.  Some things get better, some things get worse.  Everything changes.  Sometimes I sit here and feel like there&#8217;s nothing next, that hope and dreams have been replaced by nostalgia and apathy.  Sometimes I&#8217;m full of energy and I feel like I&#8217;m straining against my physical constraints, growing as quickly as possible.  There is wisdom in realizing that neither of these are permanent conditions; <i>make hay while the sun shines,<\/i> as my mom always says, and <i>do the best you can with what you&#8217;ve got.<\/i>  In other words, use the energy while you have it and do the best you can when you don&#8217;t.  What is progress if not a blend of these moments, a cocktail of inspiration and determination?<br \/>\nYesterday I was inspired.  Today I&#8217;m burnt out.  When the two are averaged, progress is still being made &#150; and that&#8217;s deeply reassuring.  Perhaps the real wisdom is realizing that it&#8217;s normal and OK to have slow days, and you shouldn&#8217;t worry unless you have them all the time.<br \/>\nOr something like that.  Bear with me, I&#8217;m still trying to figure all this stuff out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So this week is Yahoo!&#8217;s 10th birthday. As a part of their celebration, they&#8217;ve posted their homepage, circa 1995. I loaded that page up and suddenly I was sitting in the library at The College of Wooster, poking around on one of their few web-enabled terminals, reading Wired with near-religious fervor (hey Derek, remember they [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4e5QR-fN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}