Not that that's what it's about - but I just checked (as part of my regular backup) how much text is actually here on classy.dk. It comes out at about 1 MB of text, not counting headlines. That's a lot. I pasted the combined entry bodies into MS Word and got a page count of 334 pages (A4 format, 12 pt font). Book pages come out at maybe half that size, so if somebody had the bad idea of printing the blog it would come out at 700 pages.

I used to write my notes in longhand in A5 format notebooks. I think the old notes, made over the course of 16 years (and still growing in fact) come out at about 3000 A5 pages. Longhand takes up a lot of space, so one of these pages comes out roughly at 0.5 K (probably a little less on average) which means that the paper notes and the blog notes are comparable in volume.

What's funny about that is that I remember my time as a student as one where I was always writing these notes, and yet I think in my most productive longhand years I topped out at maybe 500 pages of notes. With luck, thats 250K text. In contrast I remember the last two years as partial work hell, where I've often been completely unable to do anything but work. During the last two years blogging has been only a fraction of my entire output, dwarfed by software and reports/specifications done as part of my job. And still it would take 4 longhand years to match 2 blog years.

Obviously, the value of text is not its length. It's closer to the opposite in fact, and I think the Pascal adage applies. I've been to busy to be brief on this weblog. But another thing that applies is that no matter how hard it is to admit, the simple truth is that I did not know how to work hard when I was at university. I do now. I've learned - not an entirely pleasent experience - to put in the hours. It's not always magic that happens, but bulk also works.