Back to work — getting moving this morning was as bad as I was afraid it would be (it’s so much nicer to wake up naturally instead of when the radio turns on). But I’d been keeping up on my e-mail during the weekend, so I didn’t have a huge pile to deal with when I got to the office. For that matter, most people were smart and took the holiday off, so there wouldn’t have been that much anyway. But my pager started going off as I was pulling into a parking place, hinting that it was going to be a busy day after all.

Had a nice chat with Dave Winer about Manila and Frontier; he seems intrigued by my plans to set up a server inside IBM to help people inside the firewall connect.

And I should have a Frontier server here in the building in the next day or so, working with colleagues on the
Extreme Blue team. I’m still having fun playing with Frontier on the machine at my house, but it’s not a good long-term strategy to have the server there.

Last night’s wine seemed to go better with the salmon we had for dinner than it had with spaghetti. The VacuVin is a wonderful invention for those of us who only sip our wine.

Tomorrow, I hope to spend the day at Paramount’s Great America with my son and his day camp friends. No e-mail, no pager, no phone…sounds like a good time to me, despite the thrill rides.

I usually don’t deal with subjects of great moment here, but I enjoy being able to talk about what goes on and what I’m thinking about in a non-work, non-family context.

Weblogs inside IBM

I also think that Weblogs have value in a business context; I’ve spent part of the weekend getting Frontier and Manila up and running on Jeffrey’s old machine. Over the next few weeks, I’ll have a more permanent system set up at work and will make it available for anyone inside IBM to use; setting it up on Jeffrey’s machine was just an exercise so that I’d know what to tell the folks who’ll actually be running the machine (which is likely to be on the East Coast instead of in my building). Frontier 6.2 was easy to set up, I was happy to see — I was up and running in under an hour. I still need to do a few things, such as build a page which lists all the logs, as well as the traditional “updates”
and “most read” pages. And I’d love to be able to set things up so that all sites being hosted automatically share one member/password table.

(But sorry, Dave, my Trial Window copy is unlikely to turn into a revenue copy unless we find that we need more than one server — we already have the real license we need. I did appreciate being able to order a trial copy and play with it in the comfort of my own home — it made the learning process much faster than it would otherwise have been.)

Things I find by reading updates…

I check the recent updates page fairly often, just out of curiosity. A few minutes ago, the most-recently updated site was View from an Iowa Homestead, and as I was reading it, I found a link labelled King Peppermints, which pointed at The Dutch Market in Chatham, Ontario, Canada. Since we happen to like a Dutch coffee candy, Hopjkes, I checked their site, and they do sell it. I picked up a fdw bags of Hopjes in Amsterdam during WWW9, but it’s going to be much easier to replace it this way than to figure out an excuse to go to Holland when the supply is depleted. Cheaper, too. Thanks, John!

Wine of the evening

Corbans Estate Marlborough (New Zealand) Sauvignon Blanc 1999, $7.99 at Trader Joe’s. A bit sharp for the spaghetti we had it with — I think it would go better with something spicier. It would probably have been better on a warmer day, too.