A few curious (and I think, slightly miffed) readers e-mailed me, basically asking me why I was so keen on ditching the blog instead of keeping it semi-regularly updated.

Oh, and there was some crack about my fear of committment.

I do not have a fear of commitment. Bring on the marriage, sissies!

The truth is, blogging is a always a massive effort for me. When I created this blog, the one promise I made to myself was that I’d always lean towards quality rather than quantity. About half the blog posts I write, I put quite a bit of thought into, while the other half is more on-the-spot incoherent rambling.

This is one of the reasons why I’m so fond of verbatim conversations, e-mails, and mock letters. They’re usually funny and cute, but fantastically easy to write. Some of my favourites include,

1. The look and the final tutorial
2. I’ll have you know, I was quite the charmer
3. To the girl crossing the street

The more creative/literary ones are always a pain to write. Notable standouts include,

1. Aisle 9: Soup, Pasta, Sauces (A personal favourite)
2. To possibilities (The first ever post)

The worst are the math posts. There haven’t been many, and it’s been more a testament to my ability to break commitments and promises than my ability to explain math to the laymen. The problem is that each one of these posts takes several hours. Figures need to be drawn, scanned in, edited, then presented.

In truth, I’ve already written about 90% of the second followup to my big projects,

1. The Mathematics of Attraction
2. Mathematics of Fluids

But they were never perfect. And I need things to be perfect. Being perfect and being polished is part of what makes me such an obnoxious bastard interesting blogger, and I’d say they’re both good reasons why so many readers eventually come crawling back for more.

My single post on the use of mathematics in facial recognition,

1. Brad gets Aniston and I get…math?

is a good example of the kind of polish I expect. That entry took me close to 4 hours to write. About an hour and a half to do the writing, another hour to draw the diagrams, scan them in, and post-process them, half an hour to do some research on the web, and about an hour to put everything together and get the coding perfect.

But that’s what you want, right?

The truth is, leaving my blog largely neglected to fester and rot while I tend to my studies is a bad, bad idea.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. My company is no different.

And that’s why it’s always going to be a stupid idea to marry me.