My recent summer vacation [see ‘Entropy and junkies‘ on August 2nd, 2023] was a period of relaxation, recuperation and reflection.  One of my reflections was on the future of this blog.  It has become more of a commentary from an engineer than the ‘engineering commentary’ referred to in the tagline in its masthead.  Perhaps this was inevitable when I have been writing a weekly post for more than a decade, starting in January 2013 [see ‘500th post‘ on February 2nd, 2022]. There is an archive of almost six hundred posts available for you to browse, including about twenty written before I started weekly posting.  I have decided that I will aim to complete twelve years of weekly postings and then probably return to random postings in early 2025.  About five years ago, I wrote ‘Sometimes it is a joy to order my thoughts and commit some of them to writing; other times it is a chore and a challenge to dream up something vaguely interesting to tell you’ [see ‘Thinking more clearly by writing weekly‘ on May 2nd, 2018]. Recently, it has become more often a chore and less often a joy so I hope to temporarily redress the balance by creating an end-point without taking a precipitious decision to stop weekly posts now.