It's probably a completely silly and far-too-predictable idea, given that the, er, fame thing hasn't quite faded yet - somebody introduced himself to me the other day in the office kitchen after noticing I was the guy in the newspaper article somebody else had stuck up on the noticeboard, and a co-worker asked me just yesterday "what, you write a diary on the net ? telling people all your personal stuff ?" "well. it's not quite like that," I countered. But I gave in today and started a blog at work, purely (you understand) to collate all the daily research I do about the various domains of knowledge I'm expected to traverse. It's all very lo-fi but supremely functional, using an imitation of a fine product (why not the real thing ? well, I'm trying to give Python a little more air-time in my life, slowly but surely.)

This whole blosxom thing's wonderful - dump a blog entry in a directory and it just works, which is just how I'd been writing most of my own website stuff for the last few years. Creating a new category is as simple as mkdir. The codebase is all of 500-600 lines, making it ripe for local modification if I feel like it later on. Really, though, I don't want to waste time screwing around when I'm blogging for work - I just want to dump a link with a bit of context, so I can come back to it later when somebody else has decided it's important (eg. "what have you got on gigabit ethernet cards ?"). It's better than mailing my co-workers' local mailing list about it (it gets the URL into the cosmic unconsciousness, but people complain about the amount of mail they get...). It's also better than keeping 50-60 windows open in Galeon - the peril of Tabbed Browsing is that you end up with a heap of URLs open, but they're mostly out of mind and out of sight which is fine until the browser crashes (not often, mind you). You fire it up again, it happily remembers what you had open before it crashed, and there's a 5 minute wait while your pages load over work's tiny little ISDN link (yes, it's slightly depressing when you have a faster net connection at home, but as a sysadmin I can see certain advantages in having limited bandwidth at work...).