Yak Shaving

It’s only fitting that the first post on this new site should be about yak shaving.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept (as defined by Wiktionary):

Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.

This clip of Bryan Cranston’s character Hal trying to replace a light bulb, but being distracted by an apparently endless set of tasks before being able to, illustrates it nicely.

I’ve been doing some yak shaving of my own over the Christmas break in order to accomplish the seemingly simple task of publishing an article. Writing the article is easy enough, but then the supposed prerequisites creep in:

“Where do I publish the article? OK, my blog is dead; I need a new blog. Hmm, this design doesn’t suit me anymore, I need to redesign it. Well I definitely need to come up with a new name for the site…”

It’s a never ending list of things to do in order to “just” publish an article.

But here I am, with my “shaved yak” (a new domain name, a new blogging platform, and a spiffy new design [which I’m quite proud of]). Now I can finally start on the task of writing the promised article about custom mechanical keyboards.

There are always more yaks to shave, but hopefully with this particular one out of the way I can focus on the long list of things I’d like to write about.