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The mark of a good break is that it feels longer than its actual duration. It feels longer than four days since I was last sat here at my desk – I'll take that as a win.

Doug Belshaw writes at Open Thinkering: "it's no wonder the quantity of my outputs have diminished in proportion to the variety of my inputs during a global pandemic." I remarked recently that it's crazy to think how small our worlds became during lockdown, how little we were able to do and experience. Constraints can provide focus and be good for creativity but taken to excess are damaging. Being able to widen my horizons (literally) this past week has been glorious. Getting out and seeing different places, having more varied experiences, is no doubt behind the Easter break seeming longer than it actually was.

Time is measured in memories.

I thought that line, time is measured in memories, had to be from someone or somewhere but a search didn't appear to agree. I found a couple of things about life being measured in memories but not time.

I did, however, stumble across this wonderful poem by Helen Steiner Rice:

Time is not measured
by the years that you live
But by the deeds that you do
and the joy that you give –
And each day as it comes
brings a chance to each one
To love to the fullest,
leaving nothing undone
That would brighten the life
or lighten the load
Of some weary traveler
lost on Life's Road –
So what does it matter
how long we may live
If as long as we live
we unselfishly give.

Ann Althouse has closed comments on her blog due to trolls, abuse and thread hijacking. It's a shame when someone has to do this but if the burden of moderation becomes greater than the comment value is there any point continuing?

If any justification was needed beyond that she supplies it:

"I have liked being a place, but I am also a human being. Read this thread. Do you see love? I have loved blogging, and I need to love what I am doing or it makes no sense for me to spend my time this way. Everything that detracts from MY loving it is a negative that I want to eliminate. What is it to me that YOU love it if what you love is access to a space where you do things alongside me, taking advantage of me, but not increasing MY enjoyment of the place?"

How can you argue with such a sentiment?

Bloggers blog because they love it, anything else is a bonus.

I think I've just fixed a timezone bug with my RSS feed generation. Since moving to British Summer Time I noticed a weird issue with posts appearing on micro.blog: the first post of the day would be fine but once the feed was rebuilt after subsequent posts the first was being 'moved' to an hour later. It was strangely only affecting the first post of the day.

I've changed date/time formatting and am now basing everything in the feed on GMT/UTC – using gmdate() instead of just date() – and everything looks to be working again.