Okay. Back at the desk. Coffee's gone lukewarm already because I got distracted setting my Twitter password back to something I can actually remember, and now it's almost ten and I haven't done a single thing on my actual list yet.
This is always the worst day. Not bad-worst, just the kind of day where your brain is still running on "nothing matters, there's pie downstairs" mode and it doesn't want to switch back over. The tree's still up at my parents' place, I only got back into town Sunday night, and this morning I sat here for a solid twenty minutes just staring at the taskbar like it owed me money.
The thing that actually broke me out of it was opening my RSS reader. 1,000+ unread, capped out, the little counter just gives up and shows you a plus sign instead of a real number once you cross a thousand. That's what almost three weeks of half-ignoring my feeds gets you. I thought about doing the responsible thing and actually reading through them in order, oldest first, respecting the timeline of tech news like some kind of archivist. Lasted about four minutes. Then I just hit "mark all as read" on everything older than December 28th and moved on with my life. If it mattered, it'll come back around. That's basically been my entire RSS philosophy since 2011 and it hasn't failed me yet.
What I did actually skim through: a bunch of leftover noise about the Carrier IQ mess that still hasn't really gone anywhere, more chatter about the SOPA hearings from before Christmas (that committee room stuff in mid-December was a genuinely weird thing to watch, half the members of Congress clearly did not understand what they were regulating), and about nine different posts speculating on what Microsoft's going to show off at CES next week. I'm mildly curious about that one honestly, since apparently this is supposed to be their last big keynote slot there going forward, which feels like a bigger deal than the coverage is treating it.
Also caught up a little on the Kindle Fire discourse, which, six weeks after launch, still hasn't settled down. I don't have one. Everyone in my extended family got one for Christmas though, my uncle included, and he texted me on the 26th asking why the browser felt so slow. I didn't have a great answer for him beyond "it's a $199 tablet, man." My cousin's Galaxy Nexus, on the other hand, she's been showing off nonstop, and I'll admit Ice Cream Sandwich looks like the first version of stock Android that doesn't make me wince a little.
New Year's resolution-wise: I've got the usual pile. Exercise more, obviously, everyone says that one and nobody means it past January 10th. But the actual tech-adjacent one I'm setting for myself is to stop letting my inbox and my feed reader turn into these guilt piles that just sit there judging me. I did the same thing with email over the holidays — 340-something unread by New Year's Day — and I'm not proud of the archive-everything binge I went on this morning either, but it felt necessary. A clean slate, even a fake one.
Small, dumb complaint while I'm here: my desk chair squeaks now. It didn't squeak in December. Three weeks of not sitting in it and somehow it's developed a personality. I need to find the WD-40 before this becomes the soundtrack to every post I write for the rest of the year.
Anyway. Siri's apparently gotten a little less flaky since the fall (my brother-in-law was needling his 4S at dinner trying to get it to say something funny), and I keep meaning to write up proper thoughts on the whole post-Jobs Apple thing now that a few months have passed, but that's a longer post for a day when I'm not fighting off a sugar crash from three weeks of my mom's cooking. Right now I've got a real backlog to work through and a chair to oil.
Back to it, I guess. Feeds are at zero. Inbox is a lie but it's a manageable lie. Good enough for day one.