Last year, my new year's resolution was to write in my journal every day. That actually stuck, I wrote 262 journal entries in 2011. While I've been keeping a journal intermittently since 1998, last year I doubled the number of entries in it. And wrote a novel's worth of entries -- 53 thousand words!

Most of it is of course banal and mundane stuff. Not good compared with Lars, who does something with his journal where he goes into some detail about code he's working on, and other work. The excerpts I've seen are quite nice. But after I've written code, written a commit message, documentation, perhaps bug reports etc, I often can't find much to say about it in my journal, beyond the bare bones that I worked on $foo today or faced a particularly hard bug. I also worry that the journal, and my reluctance to repeat myself, often tips the balance away from me blogging, if I write down something in the journal first.

Here's my journal for today:

Compare what jokes are funny now with those in 1982. The 1982 ones from net.jokes on olduse.net seem juvenile. Now compare what Unix joke man pages are funny now with those I'm reading from 1982. They seem basically the same. What would Biella make of this?

Liw noticed ikiwiki OOM on pell. Tracked down to a perl markdown bug with long lines. Had quite enough of perl markdown; ikiwiki will be moving to a different engine. Added discount support to it today, still needs Debian package tho.

[censored]

Really gorgeous sunset, with a high wind, moon, puffy low, fast moving clouds. Enjoyed it ecstaticly. It's going to get cold soon. Very rainy early, but then got intermittently sunny; power is holding out ok.

Was going to roast a chicken today, but got distracted and had a large lunch besides. Need to find some quick food for supper.

I need to start a new book, should it be the River Cottage book about meat that I stole from Anna, or some SF?

Blogged about journaling, and put this journal entry in it, so also journaled about blogging. Wrote it somewhat self-conciously.

The benefits for me have ranged from being able to go back and work out dates of events, to forwarding the odd excerpts to others. The best thing though is certianly having a regular time of introspection, to look back over my the day.

If you've not got a new year's resolution yet, I recommend this one. (Learning Haskell would be another good one, if you haven't yet.)

Just write something, anything, down in your journal every day.