Well, I'm moving too...

After Kelly, it's my turn to move out... From this point on, I will be blogging from my new Wordpress blog. I will be manually transferring some of the posts I already have here, but there will be no further updates...

Why am I moving? Well, first of all, the editor actually properly recognises HTML. I can type in HTML and I will not see my entries mungled. Also, I find the themes are nicer, and perception is fairly important on the web!

See you at the new location!

Title Change...

I decided to change my title...

My IBM internal blog was using the same name, so I needed a better differentiator between my blogs. Since the internal blog was first, it will stay as "Gold" whereas this one with go to "Silver". This is not to say that this is worth less, I just need a new name and decided to stay with precious metals.

Kelly's on the move! Why?!?

It seems that my fellow IBM blogger, Kelly, has moved off Blogger and to greener (at least she tells me) pastures.

Blogger is my first attempt at a blog, so I am not overly familiar with the various "engines" out there. However, Kelly's move has me wondering...is there indeed better environments out there?!? Hey, if it gives me a better editor than what Blogger provides (where at least I can type in HTML without fear of reformatting), I think I would be gone in a second. Especially since I do not yet have much baggage to tie me down anywhere.

So I'm asking the blogosphere at large (OK, the two people who read me - Hi mom!): Why would I want to stay with Blogger and why would I want to move to the "X" engine/site?

Back from St. Louis

Well, I was actually back last Thursday - but just barely...

The flight from STL to YYZ (Toronto Pearson Airport), where I (unfortunately) had to change planes was a few minutes late. This resulted in a lack of ground crew, which meant we had to wait on the tarmack. Luckily, it is not a good thing to have a plane just sitting there, in the way, so we got a crew to direct us in within 20 minutes. Not great, but not too bad... And then, the fun started. Since that crew had to be diverted from another flight, they had to get back to it to finish unloading, before being allowed to come back to us. Well, that meant another 45 minutes waiting for the sky check luggage to come through (CRJs just don't have enough storage space for the laptop bag and my overnight bag). I can only imagine how the people who checked luggage must have felt... Now, of course, that meant that the bus that would normally take us from the satellite terminal to the main terminal was no longer waiting (it took the passengers that had checked luggage), so we had to wait for a new one to be dispatched (another 15 minutes). At that point, I had to go through customs (luckily, and unusually, very quick) and make my way from terminal 2 to terminal 1...which means getting out of the secure zone and through security again!!!

Well, I made it. I was probably the last person to board the flight back home, but I made it. I should mention again that I do not like YYZ as an airport. It just seems stuck in a century past (perhaps the century of the fruitbat - with apology to Terry Pratchett).

All this, and I was locked up in a meeting room for three days in St. Louis and did not get a chance to see the sights... I'll have to try and go see the Arch the next time I'm over there (in a few weeks).

Off to St. Louis

I'm off to St. Louis tomorrow. Not a pleasure trip, a business one where I will collaborate on an internal project. It looks like it'll be three intensive (and long) days. If all goes well, I may be able to talk about it in a couple of months (after it is announced to the world at large - or at least to some people...).

I like traveling. It allows me to see new places and maybe bag a couple more geocaches. The down side to this trip is that there aren't many flights from home to St. Louis, and none direct. This makes my transit fairly long (6 hours or so each way). It's almost faster to fly to Europe (direct to London, UK). And, I have a terminal change at Toronto's Pearson - one of the worse airports to have to go through a terminal change...

Is edit HTML really so?!?

Why is it that I need to remove all line breaks when I create a post in HTML?

I decide to use HTML because I like to control the formatting. So why does the Blogger HTML post editor insist on replacing all line breaks with <br/> or <p>?

Quote: Relative simplicity of software ...

I like this quote from InfoWorld's Bob Lewis (from this blog entry):

"Simple problem" is a relative term. I'm well aware that in IT, "simple" means pretty durned hard, "difficult" means "if we make quite a few design compromises we might deliver this before we all retire," and "hard" means "finishing this is what purgatory is for.