Recently in Housekeeping Category

So in preparation for the fall yard sale I've been going over the garage (and today, up into the attic) and working on cleaning out what was left in boxes from when we first moved in, almost 8 years ago. I've been a lot harsher in making the keep/discard choice, and have put a lot of stuff into the "to be sold" pile (or outright trashed). Up on the block will be a whole stack of books (the first time I've really culled the stacks of books in, well, forever), plus a bunch of other assorted stuff (including my copy of the board games Careers, Civil War and NATO: The Next War in Europe). A large part of the "trash" pile includes pretty much all of the tchotchkes that I collected at my first two professional conferences (LISA '99 and a SANS conference from around that time frame as well).

So I've added a few new categories to the blog -- I'm looking to start dropping the sysadmin side of things, and move to more of a bioinformatics bent.  To that end, I've decided to pick a couple of areas in the scientific computing field to start teaching myself a bit more about, while I get my act together and look to more formal education in the field.

So I've finished going through the various saved RSS articles, and also cleaned out the bookmarks in Safari (my laptop needs to be reimaged to the corporate standards, so I'm in the process of going through and taking care of getting all data that I care about put somewhere that will survive the reload).  Out of nearly 700 tagged articles, I've put roughly 200 into delicious, and added another 20 - 30 feeds into RSS, and still have five tagged articles to deal with.  That's almost 500 saved articles that were either a duplicate of something saved in some other feed, or basically junk that I never used in an apropriate time frame, or could easily find with about 30 seconds in google.

So, I got the automatic posting of new delicious links to the blog working, and have started to go through the several hundred articles that I had tagged in Bloglines.  I've piled a bunch of new RSS feeds into the rotation, and added close to 100 new links into Delicious.  I've also dropped probably close to another 50 or so articles, things I'd tagged that I either couldn't remember why, or that I looked at again and said "I'll never need this, and if I do I'll just google it."

One of the things I really want to work on this year is this rather annoying habit of procrastination ("I'll set up that delicous/MT link.  Tomorrow.") and of clutter -- right now, I've got under 400 tagged articles to deal with, and I've made an effort to get the work e-mail under control, and am right now sitting with less than 20 e-mails in my inbox that I need to deal with.

Test posting from delicious posting account.

So, as part of actually using this damn thing, I've hopefully got this set up to post all new del.icio.us links every day (well, have del.icio.us set up to post it here, at any rate).  We'll see what happens after 8 AM tomorrow morning.....

So, after attempting to upgrade MT to 4.1, and not getting something about this web hosting environment (and so unable to complete the configuration process), I broke down, and added MT to my account.