Blogger's Block #1: Joelprah

The slightest post in the series, and knowingly so: a housekeeping note about being unable to write, hung on a digestive metaphor ("Hold your nose!") that Steve rides until it visibly gives out on the page, and says so. The comic center is not the coinage in the title but the confession needed to explain it — Steve actually watches Oprah, sneaking looks while his wife Linh has it on, laughing at a guest's joke, hooked until it's over. The same candor runs through the scary part: he'd always read the praise-and-bashing cycles around Spolsky "with interest but without emotion," and reports that the trick stops working the instant the crowd is glaring at you instead.

It doubles as a record of how blogging worked in 2006: a personal server hauled back to "the dismal concrete bunker in downtown Seattle" where his ISP lives, fifty old rants ported by hand at ninety seconds apiece, one man's links functioning as a weather event. And it catches early Google fandom from the inside — "I work there now, you know" arrives as a mid-post aside — with Steve rating his employer's products "just good enough" (Blogger, Pages, the spreadsheet holding his diet log) and noticing he has started living in his browser, well before everyone did. Slight, yes, but the anxiety under the jokes is stated plainer here than anywhere else in the medley.