I’m leaving the title of this default post more or less unaltered since the “hello world” program is a tradition in the field of programming / computer science / software engineering / whatever we’re calling it these days 🙂

(Though I have changed the title from “Hello world!” to “Hello, world” on the theory that someone is sitting out there with an automated scanner looking for brandy new blogs to hack :))

This blog will mostly be miscellaneous technical things I run across – a blog-ification of the “tips file” concept: Since 1995 or so I’ve kept a plain text file which various tech tips I’ve run across and found useful enough that I wanted them handy for easy lookup.

But don’t worry, I’m not going to go back through 15 years worth of tips file entries here.

(Especially since some of them would be quite dated at this point, like the one where I described how to telnet to port 80 on the localhost of a web server to manually try out HTTP commands… OK maybe that one would actually be cool to write a blog entry on, but maybe the one about starting a Perl script with #!/usr/bin/perl isn’t necessary – and yes I do own that T-shirt, though I haven’t worn it in probably 12+ years or so :))

My main reason for starting this blog in earnest, after wanting “to do” it for years, is that I’m in the middle of a project to convert about 70 Listserv mailing lists to Mailman. (Since Listserv is a commercial product and the current host is ceasing operations, and the organization can’t afford a Listserv license, I’m doing the conversion to Mailman which is a free / open source alternative.)

All of my web searches for resources on how to do this turned up very cryptic stuff, usually arcane bits from mailing lists the Mailman developers were on. So I’d really like to write the guide I wish had existed when I started this process.

Eventually I’m going to gather up all the blog posts on the topic and collect them into a more coherent bona fide “guide”, but for right now I really need to do the conversion. So blogging about the process as I do it is a middle ground of actually capturing all the niggling little details so I don’t forget them, and writing a full fledged (more or less) “guide”.

Oh, and the blog will also occasionally have astrology bits/posts since I find that an interesting intellectual consideration. It (astrology) may, for all I know, be psychological wankery which is nothing more than some kind of self-serving bias, but I did take classes on it for years when I lived in NYC and still do astrological readings for people on a semi-regular basis, so I actually do know what I’m doing with it. And so far it seems much more accurate than not, especially when it comes to timing of major life events/processes.

Some time soon I’ll be resurrecting the astrology portion of my main site, so you can read all about it there, but in the meantime if you are interested in an astrological reading feel free to contact me.

It’s $75 for an hour and includes discussion of basic personality and life issues along with predictive information for the next year or two, with a focus on anything special you request. And if you’re doing the math and think wow, $75 an hour is a lot, bear in mind that it takes me several hours to prepare for a reading.

Plus… what is the value of having good advice about what’s going on in your life, when it will change, what the purpose of it all is, etc.?