James E. Lee's Blog / Personal

Meaningful separation - personal blog spinoff

2006-04-23T23:14:14Z

I've finally gotten around to taking a cue from my brother-in-law's smart idea, and decided to spin off a personal blog. This is a good way to insulate my family and (some) friends from my more technical writing and share more personal stuff with them.

If you know me and don't have the address, let me know, and I'll send it to you. If you don't know me, you probably won't find much of interest in my personal blog. If you want to read both at once, create a feedmix.

I know I'm going to run into situations where I'll want to cross-post, but I'm not sure what is the best way to do this. I guess for now, I'll just post an intro/pointer from one to the other, but I'm curious how others have done it.

Happy Birthday to My Blog!

2006-02-26T01:06:29Z

(Thanks to schmitee for the photo!)

It was one year ago today that I posted my first blog article!

I've been a bit surprised to see how much blogging has changed me; finally, I've started writing on a regular basis, something I've been meaning to do for several years.

I'm happy to have made some progress moving to my blog's new home, at http://jameselee.alwaysaskwhy.com/blog, where I expect to stay a while, since it's my own domain name.

I've thoroughly enjoyed this first year of blogging, and look forward to many more to come!

Duking it out!

2005-12-30T21:49:00Z

(Image borrowed from Todd Lockwood, which I hope is ok!)

When I ask how he's doing with regard to work, my co-worker Martin sometimes responds, "I'm duking it out!" That would definitely have been my response earlier this week, except no one was around to ask. I felt like the guy in the image above, only I didn't realize I'd be fighting more than one "enemy" when I started. Every time I thought I'd gotten things settled down, a new problem popped up.

It was supposed to be a relaxing week off work, since we typically shut down for the week between Christmas and New Year's Day. I volunteered -- as I usually do -- to cover our IT systems over the break, and a problem developed just before I finished eating Christmas Eve dinner (which is really important to Ania, who spends that day and much of the one before preparing it), and I didn't get it stabilized until around 1:30AM Christmas Morning.

Little did I know, that was just the beginning; a total of 4 separate problems developed between Saturday and Tuesday! Fortunately, Martin returned from vacation Wed and helped a lot by taking over and putting the last remaing problem to bed.

On the bright side, I prevailed (I was able to at least mitigate, if not resolve all the problems), there were no lasting negative consequences from any of the problems, and it's been a while since I've had to excercise my problem-solving muscles to such an extent, and it felt good to see they're still in good condition!

Whew!