Ah Well

[Ed: this post was started at the end of October; I have several draft posts like this one, but I feel like pitching them and starting fresh. Stay tuned!]

Not doing too well with the whole "restarting the blog" thing, it seems. I'm going to keep trying, though. Leslie is still nudging me to blog, so I shall do so.

So, what's been going on?

That Relationship Thing
Well, for one, Leslie and I are still doing well; she's visiting her parents at what I will term an Undisclosed Location in the midwest this week, though I do occasionally bother her with cell phone calls.

I did some gift shopping yesterday; probably my major vice these days is exercising insufficient restraint when it comes to the lavishing of goodies on Leslie. This Christmas season should be no exception.

Some friends around the office are holding a progressive dinner later this month, and I'm looking forward to that. Going out with a person of considerable fabulosity has definitely increased my level of social activity. I like it. :-)

What can I say? I am really, truly happy.

That Wiki Thing
I've known in the abstract about wikis for a fair while. For the uninitiated, a wiki is a website (not entirely unlike a blog) whose pages can be edited by anybody who can read them. That's it, and it's surprisingly powerful. While it would seem like the wiki recipe would be one for chaos and unmanageability, in practice it's surprisingly effective at assembling a central location of well-maintained information.

Anyway, we in the Books-A-Million IT department have been looking around for some sort of tool to help us with our intradepartmental communication, and I put together a quick wiki (using the JSPWiki engine, since we already had Tomcat running on a test server) as a test, and so far it's been useful to me for maintaining my to-do lists and as a place to keep notes of How I Do Stuff.

One of the things I like most about wikis is the relatively simple syntax that they use (mostly) for their page editing. It's much simpler (and more legible) than HTML, and offers most of the important text-formatting and interlinking flexibility that HTML does. I really wish that Blogger would allow wiki syntax for its post editing, but I suppose everyone but me is moving to the WYSIWYG editor these days anyway.

That Blog Thing
I suppose I'm trying to figure out exactly what I want to do with Brain Squeezings lately. On the one hand, I'm struggling with the motivation to post (life is good, and I'm not quite so motivated to opine, or complain), but on the other, I have lots of friends and family members out there who would love to go back to keeping track of my doings here, so it's a real service to them when I do condescend to post.

I shall make the attempt to do better. :-)

-Rich