Welcome!
Unlike a typical "blog" that contains chronologically sequenced commentary,
my site contains a slowly expanding collection of original writings on a
variety of topics, across several categories. I try to write about topics
and issues and observations that will remain insightful (and sometimes
inciteful) years from now.
Sometimes I'll post something and then later incorporate it into my blog. Here's something I just drafted on Leadership Qualities.
If you'd like to chat about anything I've written, just send me e-mail using
the "reply" button (top left). You can explore this site from any page using the green navigation bar and the Home button. For info on how I designed this site, see below. Let me know if something doesn't work right with your browser.
A little bit about me:
I'm a husband, a dad (two great kids), and a Senior IT Architect for IBM. I try my best to balance my time between my passions (what I love to do) and my priorities (what I need to do). Thankfully, they are often the same. There just isn't enough time to do it all, completely.
I'm just starting to add content to my new blog. My old blog, hosted by my former employer, is still accessable.
So why do I blog? Good question! As I think through a topic or experience something interesting, I've found it useful to write down my perspective. At times, I point to one of these when apropos to a personal or professional conversation. Google brings searchers here whom I might impact or entertain in some way. And, since I can never find the motivation to journal, this is somewhat of a legacy - recording who I am and what I did, loved, thought, and believed in - at least those things I can mention in public.
Blog Topics
You can access these topics and my related postings and favorite links using the navigation bar across the top of each page.
| Topic | Description |
|---|---|
| Technology | technical, compute and engineering related topics |
| Puzzles | a fun collection of some of my favorite puzzles, of different types |
| Exercise | my journey in combating the deadly forces of age and appetite |
| Humor | some things that have made me laugh |
| Music | my adventure in playing the sax and electronic wind synth |
| General | my "junk drawer" - musings that don't fit into other categories |
| Personal | experiences and observations that have touched my heart |
| Faith | thoughts about the spiritual side of our purpose, journey and destination |
By the way, I built this web site by hand and host it on a server running RedHat Linux and an Apache webserver. I had fun learning about and using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that decouple site content from the presentation, HTML Forms and Perl-based CGI Scripts for e-mail reply handling, Javascripts to fix non-compliant IE bugs, the setting and reading of Session Cookies to pass data to the CGI script, Server Side Includes to provide shared headers and footers and to conditionally set the page title, .htaccess rewrite rules to unify the domainname to enhance search engine rankings, and Image Maps to provide linkable hot spots within an image (see the site design below). I can now quickly add a new post that automatically inherits my site standard HTML headers. And I can change the look of all of by blog postings by adjusting a single CSS file. Here is an illustration of my high-level site design.
There are 12 links inside this image map to code examples!
