...where do you get all this time during the day to post stuff? If I weren't on vacation, I would be WAY too busy to post....

I replied with this short answer:

It all rattles around in my brain and I just disgorge it here. The physical typing happens in the early AM, lunchtimes and sometimes in the late PM.

But my answer has been bothering me because it's really superficial. So now I will entrap you in welcome you into the frightening maelstrom depths of my mind in search of the complete answer.

Things do rattle around in my brain. I've come to understand that my brain dysfunctions differently from most people's. The best analogy I can come up with is a computer. If my brain was a computer it would have multiple processors and those would all be multi-threaded. My brain is a natural multi-tasker.

I don't think of one thing at a time. I concentrate on one thing at a time but I think about many. I'll be writing up a test plan for new software and at the same time I've got background process going that are thinking about the things on the van that need to be fixed, whether or not the socialist movement in Europe has reached the top of its curve, funny words that rhyme with "snot" and just how awesome boobs are.

And sometimes that thought about funny snot rhymes will trip a flag and come back again later for review. If it develops enough to warrant it, eventually it will find some time in the frontal lobe where it gets actual concentrated development. It can go through several sessions there - sitting on the throne, driving to work and lying in bed before falling asleep are all excellent active thinking activities. This particular post was mostly "written" on the drive home yesterday evening and refined on the crapper this morning.

Once it's fully developed it gets typed out into Notepad, edited and then saved as a draft post. This usually happens in the early AM before work or the late PM before bed. Around lunchtime I'll do a final edit of the draft and then publish it. That ends up looking like I've spent a furious morning writing stuff and throwing it all out at noon on the blog though the truth is that there's a fairly long development process, much of which is not under conscious direction.

When I was on fuckmybrainplease medication all of my background processing shut down. All of it. That's the main reason that posting was exceptionally sparse here for a couple of months. It wasn't a time issue - I had lots of time when I was unemployed. It was a complete shutdown of the post generator.

So there you have it. My quantity and quality of posts is pretty much solely due to being closer to a diagnosis of mental dysfunction than the rest of you. Multi-threaded multi-processors. Now if I can just get a memory upgrade...