It’s no secret to people who know me that 2009 and I got off to a shaky start…

It’s no secret to people who know me that 2009 and I got off to a shaky start. Since the beginning of the year I’ve dealt with a week-long cold, a cough that’s persisted on & off all January, two back-to-back bouts with the flu and a few minor interpersonal issues. But somehow, I landed on my feet.

In between working on a contract job, recovering from various bugs (seriously, I’ve usually got a strong immune system…) – I’ve toiled long and hard, late into the night, working on my personal projects, including this blog. So in the last week or so, I’ve:

• added an area for my favorite “quotes”:http://jacob-stetser.com/play/quotes
• added Places, explained below
• improved search… fewer pages not found!
• released two ruby gems for “Flickr API”:http://code.wideopenspac.es/flickry/ & “Google Analytics”:http://code.wideopenspac.es/gstats/
• fixed a few bugs,
• and generally cleaned up around the place…

So what are “Places”?

The easiest way to explain it is to let you check them out: try visiting “New York”:http://jacob-stetser.com/places/new-york, or get more specific and go to “New York City”:http://jacob-stetser.com/places/new-york/new-york … Inauguration-happy? Go see the “White House”:http://jacob-stetser.com/places/district-of-co…!

Places are a way of organizing the stories of my life, stories that are important to me — photographs, blog entries, poems, quotes — by placing them not only in the context of when but also where. This is something I mentioned in the first entry I posted to the site, “Reclaiming”:http://jacob-stetser.com/play/entries/doc/reclaiming -

“As the site evolves, I’ll be adding more relationships between these pieces of me: location; time; the people involved; the subjects and topics at hand — tying them together in ways both expected & unexpected.”

I’ve tied Places into Yahoo GeoPlanet’s “Where On Earth ID”:http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/ and Flickr’s rapidly evolving “neighbourhoods data”:http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008/08/08/locatio… … everything on the site (including comments, eventually!) now has information about when and where it was created and by whom.

So I’m working with that old “people, places & things” concept, because everything in our lives exists in a particular context – who and where we are, the people we’re interacting with and relating to, our interests and preferences – within a specific time. I think understanding the environment and the relationships surrounding the stories of our lives enriches our experience and awareness of them.

So eventually this all ties back into bigger ideas, ideas I’ll share in more detail as they progress. In the meantime, you can use the Places links underneath the titles on most pages to get an idea of what was important to me when and where….

A few of my favourites…

• … all the action currently happens in “Boulder”:http://jacob-stetser.com/places/colorado/boulder,
• though I spent a lot of last year in “Illinois”:http://jacob-stetser.com/places/illinois -
• and “Hamilton College”:http://jacob-stetser.com/places/new-york/clint… made a reappearance!
• I spent my formative years in “Maine”:http://jacob-stetser.com/places/maine
• oh! & I was wedding photog last summer in “California”:http://jacob-stetser.com/places/california/

It’s interesting swinging back and forth between creative pursuits, like writing poems and entries, photographing the world; and technical projects.

In certain ways, they’re not such different domains – they each require different skills, different talents, but the challenge in each activity remains the same – to create something out of raw material by using the power of our minds to perceive, connect, understand and assemble the things of our world – to give form to a vision…

And that’s what I’ve been trying to do lately, in between good days and bad days: to cultivate my creative passions by writing – poetry, prose (much of it cathartic) – and code. It’s a bit of a dance, and the tempo changes often…

But isn’t life itself a dance?