years in the making...

...though it's not about the numbers. Sometimes it seemed as if it was taking ages to get here from my 365th. Today my 365th doesn't seem that long ago at all. As I have absolutely no plans whatsoever to stop there will come a time when the first mere thousand seems as small a proportion of my total blips as the last thousand days are of my life to date.

Still... nice to have the odd balloon and a shiny new icon every now and then to mark the occasional milestone.

Many thanks and much praise to the Creator and his minions for giving us all a reason to be here in the first place, those who lead the way and TFP (also 1000 today if you've not seen it) for handing me a post-it with the blip URL on just over a thousand days ago.

I used to worry about the amount of time I was spending here but after passing through various phases such as dithering between twenty different crops (including testing each at thumbnail-size and seeing which worked best OnMouseOver) and frantically trying to stay on the popular page (back when there were far far fewer contributors) and the hypertextual narcissism of the 400-500 region when I'd post loads of links to some of the spare pictures I'd spent so long dithering over that I felt I had to use them somewhere... I've now relaxed and don't worry about posting on the day, don't worry if a gap isn't immediately filled (like the week-long holiday-gap I quickly shoved some unaccompanied pictures into yesterday evening, though there's no way I'm going to leave any permanent gaps if at all possible) and don't feel I have to try and write anything when I've either forgotten what I was going to say or can't think of anything relevant. There'll be other days and many other blips if I remember what it was. The easiest way to not spend too much time on here is to not spend too much time on here; it's self-regulating as making fewer comments (erm... sorry for not commenting much recently) leaves less entries to track and keep up with and brings fewer comments to read and possibly reply to. When I have the time to spend here I shall spend it here; the entries I've not seen yet will still be there when I've time to look at them.

Similarly I shall now stop fiddling about with the source images to try and get a better colour balance and go and put everything back where it was before I moved the contents of the room around.

Though I will re-edit and upload a better version of the picture later. When I have time.

Which I've just finished, a few hours before it becomes five days old and too late to change it. Hurrah for GIMP and the slightly better-than-CS2 path-selection tools.