Halloween. The second most commercialized "holiday" of the year. People crawl out from under everything to get dressed up. I never really understood it. Which is why I'm going out this year as a cynical and curmudgeonly system administrator who dreams of telling his users to stick it in their PCI slot. (If you're not a sys admin, trust me; that one's a hoot.)

Then there's my friend, Eric. He's an interesting guy. For very complex values of interesting. We worked together for a while at a network operations center. Eric was midnights, I was day side. We didn't see much of each other when we first started working there and he got some bad advice about me implying I wasn't someone he wanted to associate with. Ironically, the person he got the advice from was actually someone that no one wants to associate with. Anyway, Eric and I discovered we had all sorts of interesting aspects of life and personality in common and have become pretty good friends.

Anyway, he made a comment with a vaguely boogerish tone to me today on ICQ that I wanted to share:

Eric (2:29 PM) :
It's all green and slimey and at body temperature, waiting for you.

Eric is gaining a reputation for being quoted in blogs, it would appear.

Well... This sucks. I had a nice long post talking about how I liked how the page looked and about color-blindess all finished. Then, when I went to publish it, I got a database error.

I suppose that you get what you pay for. I'm really not complaining yet. I'm a professional geek and I know that glitches happen. But on the second try??? Bleah. I'll try to remember to copy the new blog entry to the clipboard before posting it so if the system burps again, it's just a matter of pasting. No work wasted.

Maybe I'll try again after lunch. Wendy's again. Bacon Jr. Cheeseburger with mayo, mustard, and extra pickles; five piece chicken nuggets, BBQ sauce; chili; XL Diet Pepsi. $4.52. Maybe the cute girl with the sad and pretty eyes will be working today.

So I wanted to see what this whole blog thing was about. I decided to read a random sampling of 10 or 12 blogs from this and other sites. Of the ones I read, I decided that I could do one that would be at least as entertaining as about half and better spellchecked than perhaps 80%. I don't guarantee that I'll spell everything right each time or be absolutely grammatically correct, either. In fact I write in a very conversational tone which frequently lends itself to grammatic license, so there ya go.

I'm most likely doing this the way nearly everyone does at first: I give a justification for doing what I'm doing, tell how I'm going to do it, and then get into the conversations. Call me a sheep. But I'm a self-aware sheep.

I don't really know how often I'll post. I suppose, as with anything new and shiny, I'll use it frequently at first and then taper off as time goes on and the novelty wears off. Especially if I realize it's more work than I thought it would be. I'm a lazy person by nature, so the simpler something is, the more likely I am to use it. The irony is not lost on me that I'm a systems administrator who deals with computers of all shapes, sizes, flavors, and complexity all day long. But maybe that's why I like simpler things in life outside of work.

I'm gonna stop now and post this, just to see what it looks like. A lot like taking a look at those boogers before we flick them away.