You can really feel the love down at the MetShop today.

I have unrealistic deadlines looming over my head (granted, the most critical ones are on the way to being corrected).  I have a to-do list down to my legs with items of varying importance, urgency and interest.  My personal email inbox contains 1,155 items to act upon—again of varying importance, urgency and interest.  My uni email inboxes have remained unchecked for months.  1,300 items await my attention in Google Reader, despite my intentions for this service to provide me relief.  I’ve been AWOL from Facebook for over a month; 121 pending messages and 386 notifications there.  MySpace and Twitter loom in the background also pining for the tiniest slice of my time, even though they know they’re dead to me.  Old accounts of various online services remain in existence—dormant, but their existence seems enough to stress me out.  Addressed paperwork floods in through the letterbox and wants a place to be filed.  People that matter to me are slowly reducing contact and their displayed interest to catch up because of my repeated failures to deliver on promises to make it happen.  Dust and grime settle and accumulate on every single surface no matter how frequently I vacuum and clean.  More money is going out than coming in.

All of this.  Swimming around my head.  Virtually all of the time.

I’ve had tonsillitis for two weeks now.  It won’t go away because I’m consistently too stressed out (or too busy) to let my body heal.  Work hours seem to be getting longer; my ability to cope seems to be wasting away.

It all looks quite ridiculous on paper, really.  Surely I could find a logical, tangible, simple solution to every single burden I’ve addressed above if I really tried, but regardless of desire I just don’t seem to have the energy.

I suppose the things that worry me the most are the things that involve other people.  I’m not as averse to letting myself down; it’s the idea of offending or failing others that upsets me, for better or worse.  This alone is probably why Facebook causes me the most anxiety of the lot.

To that end, perhaps the best first step is to better limit my available avenues of communication.  Surely a single online point of dissemination and contact is enough, and that’s precisely why this website exists.  Without a Facebook account there is no expectation to participate; there’s one less unmonitored inbox accumulating unanswered messages from people who just might think from my lack of response that I’m ignoring them.

I really like the idea of the relief that declaring email bankruptcy (applied to other online media in addition to, or instead of email) could yield.  Messages can only require answering if they exist; if they are deemed impossible to answer then their existence serves no purpose.  No Facebook account would cause me less anxiety than one.

I am resolving to deactivate my Facebook account as soon as I decide on a suitable alternative for hosting photo albums.  Perhaps that too will be this site; being time-based, like these posts, that would probably make the most sense.

The rest, for now, doesn’t matter.  One thing at a time is enough to master.

How you came into our lives was never quite clear to me; I think we found you meowing and scratching around within a wall of the local primary school.  How on earth did you get in there?  We’ll never know, but we didn’t think much of it at the time.

Your curiosity persisted though, and it later had you dangling from ironing boards by your foot, lodging your head in tuna cans and getting trapped in the garden shed.

Sleeping in doll houses and shoe boxes and commandeering a number of the dog’s kennels comprise just a couple of the many things that made you unique—the many things that I don’t want to forget.

From the very beginning you had a bizarre resting posture.  You’d either flatten yourself on the ground or fold your legs in like some sort of amputee.  We always wondered whether this was because you’d adapted to inner-wall living at an early age.

We used to have a good laugh over how you would traverse the backyard by balancing on the garden hose, like walking directly on grass was below your dignity.  Your commando antics on various garden critters also had us in stitches.  One time you were determined to teach some noisy cricket a lesson; you fired into the air off your hind legs and landed on top of it with your two front paws.  The elaborateness of your display was amusing enough; that you had actually given the physics a thought as to how to maximise your impact, though, left me in awe.

You were a clever and attentive cat, and you had no qualms about using this to your advantage.  If you wanted to come inside, you would open the door and come inside.  You had watched how we operate our spring-loaded security door, and so you devised your own technique for opening it—complete with sliding back down it with your paw wedged between the crack after you’d jumped on the handle, so that you could thwart the spring-loaded mechanism.  I am so happy that I managed to get this on video once.  Your typical follow-up would then be to either open the pantry and help yourself to packaged dry food, or find a nice spot on the wooden floor, literally fall over and relax.

The way you would bolt inside at full speed and then essentially keel over initially worried us, but we soon had you worked out.  Were you narcoleptic?  No; you were just odd.  Perhaps, like a cheeky toddler, you were amused by the reaction you got when we thought we’d heard something fall off a bench.  You certainly weren’t the world’s smallest cat; you had a fair bit of weight to you.

Your displays of affection, and how you would always give your absolute best effort, fascinated me.  When we leaned down to pat your head you would jump up and balance on your hind legs.  When we relaxed on the couch you would join us, and you would treat us to full-bodied hugs—complete with your little arms wrapped around us, you would rub noses with us and you would rest your forehead on our chins like some sort of bizarre telepathic transfer was taking place.  If you weren’t hugging us with your paws you were holding onto our hands with them.  It was amazingly sweet to watch.  In a way, your actions seemed almost human.

Interestingly, I feel that I have learnt more about affection from you than anyone or anything else.  I’ve never been one to show or feel much affection, but something about your interactions with me made me a whole lot less averse to the idea.  Because of you, I am now a lot more capable of showing affection than I was.  Perhaps this alone is a primary reason why I’m so upset that you’re gone—perhaps I feel that I’ve lost a part of myself with you, even though I really haven’t.

I’m sorry I never let you jump up on me when I visited.  It wasn’t because I didn’t want you to; I was just horrendously allergic.  I really wish I’d just tolerated the aftermath now.

I hope to remember some other specific things about you as well.  Like the way you’d follow us to the bathroom and “ask” us for a cup of water.  The way you’d wrap your tail around yourself—always the right side—and then stand on it.  The way your eyes would slightly converge when you were about to do something cheeky.  The way you’d sometimes start to meow and then pause halfway through it for ten seconds to decide whether you were going to yawn.  The way you were so vocal about everything.  I don’t think I’ll ever forget your meow; I keep thinking I hear it around me in the strangest places.

We will probably never know for sure what happened to you on Monday evening, or why you didn’t come home sooner for help when we may have been able to save you.  But we’re all glad that you did at least return—I am sure of this much.  The idea that we may have missed out on closure altogether is not a pleasant one.

Seeing you in your state at the vet was painful for all of us.  You could easily see our distress.  You persevered as best you could, trying to purr for us like there was no need to worry.  Perhaps you believed that we were there to take you home and everything would be alright.  That we weren’t hopefully can’t be seen as betrayal; you know that we were certainly wishing for no other outcome.

I’m sorry I didn’t stay with you until the very end, and I’m sorry I wasn’t there for your burial.  It wasn’t because I didn’t care enough: I just couldn’t handle it, and I knew this before I was even presented with the reality.  How the rest of the family managed to brave through this amazes me.  The moment I saw that green liquid in your IV drip heading towards you, I panicked and fled.  I flew down gravel roads in excess of 120km/h to get away as quickly as I could.  The memory of watching you die—artificially, like we’d given up hope—would have stuck with me forever.  I didn’t want that to be my last memory of you.

Even in your final living moments you were doing your very best to be as affectionate as always; you were using all your energy to come closer, nuzzle your head and place your paw in Niki’s hand.  This is my last memory of you, and as much as it hurts to know that there will be no more, I am grateful that this last one is a nice one.

Your departure was premature and unexpected, and I think this makes it all the harder for everyone to accept.  It truly has blown us all away.  I still struggle to believe that you, our youngest pet, are really gone.  I still don’t want to believe that when I next visit the family, you won’t be there to greet me at the doorstep.

Farewell, Bucky.  We will always miss you dearly.

November 1, 2003—September 19, 2009

Our first assignment for this subject required us to use Perl to build an online job agency (the original specification in Word format is available).  I had an absolute ball working on this, and the appreciation that I developed for Perl is why I sought employment at realestate.com.au for my internship—which was ultimately life-changing.

After this assignment was finished I left it online, and eventually it got spidered by Google.  Some time later I received a cease-and-desist order from the owner of the (now defunct) JobSurge.com service.  Evidently he was concerned about me being a professional contender or something.  I didn’t know whether to be extraordinarily flattered or question the guy’s sanity.

Online demo

Bash the demo around as much as you like.  You are more than welcome to create accounts, but some username/password pairs already exist if you’re lazy:

• centrelink/alexpeters (company)
• zikaiq/123456 (company)
• apeters/alexpeters (job seeker)
• sipsas/123456 (job seeker)

Source code

Download a ZIP of the source code if you’re interested, but heed the following warnings:

• This is not how I would do it now. I wrote this code in 2005 as a first-year uni student.  I’ve been a full-time Perl programmer since the end of 2006.  I post the code here for nostalgia and not as a demonstration of my professional abilities.
• This is not how you should do it now. Most Perl web applications born before 2006 probably look like this (which might be why Perl got dumped for PHP in future incarnations of this subject).  These days frameworks like Catalyst, Template Toolkit and DBIx::Class exist to make things a lot more manageable.  My code will teach you Perl syntax, but that’s about it.  Good Perl programmers don’t mix HTML and application logic, write data to flat files or directly manipulate cookies!

I’m actually half-tempted to re-write this as a Catalyst application just to observe the difference.  I’d be much less averse to that being used as a learning example.

Things are always changing.  Nothing is ever timelessly set in stone.  What one says or feels at one specific point in time is ever likelier to become invalid as time continues to progress.

People sometimes ask me questions (particularly around emotions) as if there’s one definitive, permanent answer.  Historically I would blindly humour this and make assurances accordingly.  Often, this has eventually backfired on me.

There usually isn’t a permanent, timeless answer.  Keeping this in mind and adjusting answers accordingly proves to be a lot wiser; it takes away the risk of being called out on my words in the future.  Views and beliefs change over time—sometimes drastically.  Making promises about the integrity over time of answers to questions is risky.

If someone claims that they could “never” or will “forever” feel a certain way about something, they are essentially declaring a precognitive awareness of the entire course of events awaiting them in their future.  To indefinitely assert something just isn’t realistic.  “Never” and “forever” are certainly possible, but they can’t be guaranteed.

Most people realise this if it’s pointed out to them, and they concede that they don’t really mean anything eternally.  Sadly though, for one reason or another some people simply can’t or won’t do this; they know what they’re talking about and you’re a fool to doubt them.  So how should one approach such an occurrence?

The best way is probably for One to accept Another’s assertions peacefully while remaining open to those assertions changing in time.  Then, should they ultimately change, One will be prepared for it and no real damage will be done.  One might be temporarily agitated or hurt over Another’s change of heart, but they won’t hold it against Another since One entered the agreement prepared for that very possibility.  And besides, Another never set out to deceive or upset One.

Things become so much easier sometimes when following this approach, and reminding oneself that “never” and “forever” are exceptionally long periods of time to keep one’s word.

There are still so many words that remain unsaid between us, and some of those words will probably remain unsaid no matter what happens in the future.  But will anything actually happen in the future?  Will we ever speak again?

I wish I could just take solace in knowing that the ball is in her court—we’ve established that our contact will only recommence when she feels ready.  But what if “when” is really just a polite “if?”

What if she already knows that it’s never going to happen?

I remain a total villain in her mind.  Her mentions of me on her blog are increasingly infrequent, but never fail to testify her view of me.  Am I really as evil as I appear through her words?  In some cases with knowledge of the facts the answer is a relieving, clear-cut “no.”  In others, it’s much harder to arrive at a definite answer.

I wish I could begin to describe where our experience as a whole leaves me in terms of relationships.  How can I allow myself to pursue a relationship with anyone I care about if I “know” that when things ultimately crumble, no matter what I do, I’m going to lose them in every other sense as well?

I don’t like being held hostage to irrational emotions.

I was summoned for jury duty last week.  I turned up and spent most of the day twiddling my thumbs in what is essentially a large waiting room.  In the afternoon I was finally selected for potential involvement in a rape trial, estimated to last two weeks.  My number was called out in the courtroom; I was to be the final juror.  The accused then objected to my inclusion on the jury panel, and so I was sent home.

The day had some amusing attributes, but on the whole it was a rather boring experience.  My boss was kind enough to lend me his laptop, complete with wireless internet access, after I moaned about how boring it was likely to be.  This is how the bulk of my previous post was written actually.

We, the jurors, checked in at 9.15 and got ushered to a large seating area, where at some point we got to watch a DVD on how jury things work.  One main point I picked up from the DVD was that a local lawn bowls tournament is insufficient reasoning to excuse oneself from a trial.  The other one was how the shortlisting of jurors takes place.

Jurors who haven’t been excused from the trial are randomly drawn from a ballot box.  Their occupation is read out to the courtroom, and they must then walk past the accused on their way to the jury booth.  The accused, with their solicitor’s guidance, decides whether or not they object to this juror being empanelled.  If they do, they call out “challenge” and the juror is dismissed from the trial.  The defence may object to the empanelling of up to six jurors without stating any justification.

The only thing that is known about a juror is their occupation.  Everything else can only be inferred from their appearance.  The privilege of challenging potential jurors is offered as a means of attempting to diversify the jury panel, although it seems that nothing would stop the defence from trying to homogenise it with the type of folk they feel will offer them an advantage.

In the case of this rape trial, I suspect that perhaps a bit of each was occurring.  When half of the jury had been empanelled, there was a clear dominance of females.  From that point forward, almost every single subsequent female was immediately rejected.  Some males too (myself included) were subsequently rejected though, and the pattern there seemed to be education-based.

I don’t quite remember all of the selections now.  A young bartender got through, and a 40-something plasterer with a heavy foreign accent took my place.  I was selected after an older-looking “property developer” in a suit was rejected.  I was wearing a suit too for lack of knowing what was acceptable court attire; the property developer and I were two of a very small handful dressed in such a manner.

In any case, no one wearing a suit made it to the jury booth.  It would seem that the defence took suits as some sort of warning indicator.  Upbringing?  Conservativeness?  Wealth?  It doesn’t really matter.  In fact, our choice of attire really could have had no play in it at all.

I managed to make it all the way to the jury booth before I was challenged.  It took a good ten to fifteen seconds from me standing up for the defence to reach their decision on me, and they would have seen my suit at the very beginning of that time frame.  So I continue to ponder what they may have seen in the last few seconds, or what caused them to hesitate initially.

Perhaps it was the way I walked, and carried myself.  Perhaps it was my facial expression.  Perhaps I inadvertently gave the defence a greasy as I walked past.  In any case I was rejected, and quite frankly I was relieved by this.  I didn’t really want to be stuck in a courtroom for two full weeks despite how interesting it may have been at times.

So those of us who were rejected or not even drawn from the ballot were returned to the waiting room, where we were told that since we hadn’t been empanelled and there’d be no more trials that day needing a jury, we were free to go and not return the next day.  I picked up my cheque for $37, and headed to work to see if things were running smoothly without me.

Lamentably, that $37 isn’t additional to my regular wages.  On the positive side though, my employer has to pay the difference of what I would otherwise have received had I been at work.  So I haven’t been monetarily inconvenienced for my jury antics.  My employer sure has though.  Sucks to be them, I guess.

So what’s my biggest gripe with software-based address books as we know them?  Redundancy.  With paper-based address books this is an inadequacy inherent to the medium; we just work around it because we have no choice, and we’re okay with that.

Software-based address books, however, mimic paper-based ones so closely that they too have those now-avoidable drawbacks.  Perhaps this is because people are more likely to adopt something with which they’re already familiar, or perhaps it’s because the programmers of these things just lack the interest in improving on the idea that’s already there.  In any case I’m somewhat dissatisfied.

An address book consists of a number of contact entries.  Typically, a contact has a name, an address and a phone number associated with it.  Sometimes the address book caters for people with multiple phone numbers; this might be done by labelling them as home, work, fax and mobile for instance.

Most address books only offer one address per contact entry.  After all, people don’t live in two separate locations; that’s just silly.  Or is it?  Perhaps.  I know someone who spends equal time living with his divorced parents in two separate houses, but admittedly this is a rare scenario.  People don’t frequently have two home addresses.  People do however frequently have secondary locations: work addresses.

With address books as we know them (and assuming space for one address per entry), what’s the best way to handle storage of work addresses?  We can’t store them as part of a person’s contact entry, because we probably use that for their home address.  Unless we know we’ll never care about their home address, we simply have to create a whole new “contact” for this information.

But what do we call it?  We could put “Jim’s work” as the name, but then Jim’s details are spread across multiple records; we don’t know by looking at Jim’s entry whether we need to look at others to find out more about him.  We could put the business name as the name, but then we have no link between Jim and where he works at all.  If each contact entry can have free-form notes then we can use that to our advantage, but then we’d be using a free-form field for information that isn’t arbitrary, and should be deemed a proper part of the record itself.

If that seems too far-fetched, consider how we currently deal with home addresses.  If you want to store complete information in your address book for a family of five, you need to create five separate entries.  This in itself is reasonable, but because each entry has its own address and home phone information, you are repeating a large amount of common data across all five entries.

What happens when, for one reason or another, their home phone number changes?  That’s five records out of date; five records needing correction.  If you then fail to correct all five, you introduce inconsistencies.

You could avoid this by regarding one of the five people as the “head” of the house, and using only their record to hold all of the home address details.  Then, you could leave the address details for the other four blank and attempt to keep in mind that these people live with the “head” when you need their addresses.  Or you could list their addresses as literally, “see Bob’s entry.”

But then not only do your records depend partially on information residing solely in your brain (somewhat defeating the purpose of an out-of-mind “copy” in the first place), but now they also inaccurately suggest that you don’t know the addresses of these four people.  Or you’re placing usage instructions in your data, which is inelegant.

What happens when you know people with multiple personal mobile numbers?  I’ve never seen a paper-based address book that caters for this ever more common occurrence.  Perhaps on paper you would jam all of the numbers into the one space, or cross out “pager” and write “other mobile” in its place.  After all, assuming that everyone has a pager in this day and age is probably overkill.  With most software-based address books though, we don’t have the facility to overwrite labels on a per-record basis.

These are deficiencies that can’t be avoided on paper, but can on screen.  How, though?

Recognise that people and locations are separate things, and treat them separately.

Give Jim a “person” entry containing his name and his personal mobile number.  Give his house a “location” entry, and give his work a location entry.  Then, create links between Jim and the two location entries.  The links themselves could also hold information telling you what the link signifies; one link is for “home address” and the other is for “work address.”  This information goes into the link rather than the location entry itself, because one person’s work address might indeed be another person’s home address—what if Jim is a butler?

Create five separate “person” entries for the family of five, each containing personal mobile numbers as appropriate.  Then, create a “location” entry for the address at which the five people live.  Then, create links from each of the five people to the location as a “home address.”

Where does the home phone number go?  It doesn’t belong to any one of the five people; as a fixed phone line it belongs to the location itself.  Therefore, it goes into the location entry and not the individual people entries.  Looking at the people entries and following their links to the location entry, it’s easily inferred that those people can be contacted via that number.  Because that number is stored once, when it changes it only needs to be changed once.

How about email addresses?  Many people have many email addresses for different purposes (often just for something completely unrelated to email, like MSN).  I just tried an online contact manager that allows you to store only two emails per person: a “home email” and an “office email.”  Terrible!

How is the problem of multiple mobile numbers (and emails) per person solved?  So far, it isn’t.  These would go into the people entries, but perhaps both the people and location entries would be designed such that they can accept as many numbers (and emails) as one wishes to store, and the user could assign any label they like to each one (“primary mobile,” “secondary mobile,” “line 2,” “MSN address,” “uni email address,” “fax line,” “garage door opener,” etc.).

Yes—garage door opener.  My place of employment is setting up a spare phone number to accept incoming calls from employees as a trigger to open and close the garage door to the car park, saving people from carrying around a remote control (or not being able to open the door at all when there aren’t enough clickers to go around).  Pretty neat.  How would one go about storing this in an existing address book?

So at this point, we’ve gone from a set of “contact” entries containing as much information as possible relating to one contact, to a set of “people” entries, a set of “location” entries and a set of links between them.  The people and location entries hold phone numbers specific to that person or location, with a label specific to each number.  Software that implements an address book in this way would, I think, leave me happy.

But in thinking about how I would go about implementing this, I then realise: is there any major difference between “people” and “locations?”  They both have an identifier (such as “Jim” or “107 Lygon Street”), they both have phone numbers hanging off them and they both link to other things.  So really, they’re just information holders linking bidirectionally to other information holders.

If you reason that no information is lost by turning phone numbers into separate entities and linking to them, all we’re left with is a graph (not to be confused with chart) of tidbits of information, made meaningful via the relationships between them.

And at this point, we’re no longer limited to storing just contact information.  By being able to link anything off a “person” entry we can now store dates of birth, favourite colours, shoe sizes, car registrations…the list is endless.  And of course by being able to link anything to anything, we can even link people together.  What started out as an address book can now also function as a family tree, among other things.  Anything that can somehow be linked back to a person can make an appearance.

So now, we’ve gone from sets of “people”, “locations” and relationships to just “nodes” (small bubbles with tidbits of information, like a name or an address) and “edges” (the relationships between those tidbits of information).

Given any arbitrary node (perhaps retrieved by name), we can follow its edges to other nodes.  In this way we could eventually traverse the entire knowledge base.  What if we just want to see a list of people though?  We’ve generalised away the concept of “people,” so all nodes are now equal in status.

Simple: create a node called “person” or “people,” and link all nodes representing people to this newly created node.  Do similar for “locations,” “phone numbers” and “dates” perhaps.  If you then wanted a concise reference to all the categories that you’ve defined, you could then link all of these to a new node named “categories.”

A graphical user interface could probably incorporate this in a nicer fashion: it could make “category” appear as an adjustable attribute for each node.  Perhaps the interface could then colour different nodes appropriately, according to their category.  It can be seen however that the data structure itself can hold all of this information, and it would; the user interface would simply choose to interpret it in a special way.

It can be seen that because edges (relationships) provide the meaning to the data, there will be many of them—possibly even hundreds—for some nodes.  Perhaps a user interface would want to offer the ability to somehow limit or filter the display of relationships.

For instance, perhaps I could have a view (a predefined set of filtering rules) that tells the user interface to start by showing me only “people” nodes, and when I open them, to only show me links to “location,” “phone number” and “email address” nodes.  I could call this my “address book” view.

What other views could one build?  It depends on what would be useful for the data stored.  A “family tree” view might start with display of just people nodes and limit viewing of relationships to other people nodes.  A “password manager” view might only list website URLs with links to “password” nodes.

On the topic of storing passwords in a structure like this: if you don’t use a different password for every single thing in your life requiring one, this data structure could give you interesting insights.  Relationships between nodes can be traversed in either direction, so you could discover exactly which services use a particular one of your passwords.  In a situation where this password is compromised, you would have a concise list of services that require you to go and change it to something else.

This inverse observation of things obviously applies to anything in the data structure, so you could learn all sorts of new things from information that you already know, simply because you’ve never had the inverse relationships pointed out to you.

So here’s the question: is there any software or online service already in existence that offers anything remotely like what I’ve described above?

The closest graphical equivalent I’m aware of is FreeMind.  Primarily, however, FreeMind “maps” function as trees; hierarchy is enforced whereas in the structure I’ve described above, any hierarchy is merely incidental.  Links can be made between two arbitrary nodes of a FreeMind map, but I don’t know much more about it.  And as software, your data is only accessible from your own computer; you can’t just log into an online service to retrieve something if you’re out and about.

In terms of actual functionality (though not necessarily usability), wikis might come close depending on how they are set up and used.  For instance, a wiki page would serve as both a node and its links; the page’s name/title would serve as the node’s name, and the page’s body would document its relationships with other pages.  Links would be strictly unidirectional unless the wiki software offers “backlink” functionality (a list of wiki pages that link to the currently displayed one), and depending on the quality of that functionality, one might have to visit the other page to understand its relationship.  Creation and maintenance of such small wiki pages would be tedious since wiki pages are designed for much more content.

And so for now, I remain tempted to implement my own solution to this.  I’m always hesitant to act because I don’t want to start and then discover that someone else has already done it, but then I don’t think anything would function quite the way I would like it to.

Should I embark on this development adventure, these will be my considerations:

• Web-based. If it’s accessible from a web browser, your data can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection.
• Simple mobile interface support. I would want to be able to use it from my phone, which has limited screen space and limited processing power.

The system would start out predominantly text-based, even though in my mind I visualise it as bubbles or boxes with lines to other ones.  Further down the line it might be possible to dynamically generate still shots of parts of the data using Graphviz.  Even further down the line, with continued lessons of wisdom from a good friend it might be possible to offer an AJAX-like Flash interface complete with traversal animation.  I would most probably write my code in Perl using the Catalyst web framework, and I’d probably use MySQL as the data store since that’s what my web host provides.

In the meantime however, I guess I’ll just continue keeping all of my tidbits of information disjointedly on sticky notes and hope that I find some other information management solution that works for me.

1. you look forward to getting home so you can vacuum the house;
2. you get excited at the idea of learning how to fold fitted sheets;
3. you dream at night that you somehow found a way to rid the walls of those stubborn scuff marks; and
4. you sadden when you realise that it was indeed just a dream.

This is an amusing quip I made on Facebook recently under the influence of heavy fatigue.  It’s the only thing I’ve written recently that sounded remotely suitable for the title of this, my fourth online journal incarnation.

I think I’ve realised by this point that regular, consistent journalling just isn’t for me.  However, I do have bouts where I wish I had the means to do so for a little while without technology getting in the way.  I also figured that consolidating all my past public journal posts in one place might be a clever idea.

And so here I am on WordPress.  I don’t maintain the technology, so it can’t get in the way.  I’ve imported the content from two of my three past blogs so far, with full intentions of importing the very first (which surprisingly spans a period of over two years) sometime soon.

And as for near-future content: who knows?  I’m at a point where things around me are starting to weigh me down, and I guess I’d like to start learning a bit more about myself.  I foresee at least some near-future content.