Many Hats

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HAVE ALWAYS had an affinity for hats.

Cowboy hats, dress hats, panama hats, felt hats, straw hats, cheap hats, not-so-cheap hats, bandanas and even the occasional ball-cap - not so's I'd admit the latter.

Part of the fun of hats, of course, is the character they impart. You can play anybody with the right hat. Not only the hat you wear, but the way you wear that hat tells the world a lot about you.

The staid old fedora worn off to the side imparts an air of raffishness, worn back conveys happy-go-lucky, worn forward conveys gangster. Or worn straight with no style in the brim conveys - well, no style.

That a hat is a necessity in my wardrobe was underscored one fine day while out solo sailing in San Diego with no water and no head protection. The sailing was great, but the sun was intense. By the time I returned to dock - some six hours after departure, delirium had set in. That was followed by partial blindness, and then more delirium and slurred speech later in the day.

So, I have a sizeable collection of hats, some of what you see pictured here; these have topped the dome during various pursuits. Not represented are a few specialty toppers, such as the bicycle helmets or the costume hats.

An allegorical function of hats is to designate role or job function. It occurred to me while putting this site together that such an undertaking requires a lot of hats. For those interested, here's a run-down of the ones I can think of:

First and foremost, of course, is the writer hat. Then the photographer hat. They represent the initial creativity sparks of the house.
The publishing side requires a few more hats: article editor, photo-editor, archiver, cataloger.
Then, there's the tech side: software developer, systems administrator, graphics/web designer.
Finally, of course, any small business needs a few more hats to cover the biz end - the accounting hat, the marketing hat, the purchasing hat, the tax planning hat.

That's a lot of hats, for one person, but that's the way it is in the early stages of the incarnating the vision.

Except for the extremely distasteful tax and accounting version (a better allegory of which might be torture devices clamped around the cranium), I enjoy wearing all of the other hats.

The problem isn't wearing a particular hat. The problem is taking one off and putting on another one. The transition changes more than just the weight on the head - it changes the role and the character. Which requires a certain amount of adjustment on the part of the wearer - a "head wrench", so to speak.

For a long while - since February of this year, actually, the huge focus has been wearing the tech hats and their various bill-types - efforts directed at getting Scribi functional enough and complete enough to get it up on a publicly accessible location. That's been a good do, and it gets things to the first stage of "alpha" review (can't really call it beta, at this stage...)

I like the tech hats. A lot. The spinning propellors are neat.

But, it's also apparent that we need more content. So now, I need shelve the tech hat collection, for a bit, and don the content-generation/publishing hats. I'll get more articles, vignettes, and this editorial up. I'll still have to pop the other hats on, intermittently, but the main focus needs to change for a bit.

OW!

I think I just felt my head wrench!

Scribo, ergo sum.

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Many Hats

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