I figured out two things which had previously stymied me today, which delighted me to no end.  The first was how to make things format themselves nicely in a wiki that I’d never used before (and whose conventions were very non-intuitive to me). (As an aside, I really don’t understand the appeal of wikis over WYSIWYG editors — how is it easier to do this [[I am a page name typed correctly, even down to the case]] than it is to just copy the page URL and click the “link” button and paste it in?)

Anyway, I figured all that out, and consolidated several bits of messy documentation — yah me!

*And* I got all my Google calendar stuff to work correctly again (this was a Big Deal).  We recently switched to Google calendar at work, and it totally borked by sync to my phone, which had worked perfectly. Fixing it involved setting up 2-factor authorizaion and application-specific passwords and then explaining to the phones PIM tools which versions of what calendars and email I wanted to have.  It was complex, but I seem to have fixed it all now.

Several of my primary workflows (such as dragging an email onto the calendar to create a meeting are broken, but that’s not something *I* can fix, so I’m just going to have to deal with it.  I’ll take the small wins where they come.

I was tired of not having anywhere to write the things I was thinking, and the old lintqueen.com was in a sad, decrepit state. So I started to research website building tools.  The majority of the ones that I found were very slick (so much slicker than last I looked) drag-and-drop site builders, but, of course, they were all closed source and proprietary, and therefore evil.

But one of the tools I found listed was Pages in Github, and since I am an open source evangelist (more about that later) and am trying to convince teachers to start using Github in their college comp sci classes, it seemed that Github Pages might be a good choice.  Plus, when you go to the documentation (https://pages.github.com) it *seems* super easy. In fact, their instructions for getting Jekyl set up are only Three Simple Steps (their words) long.

Sadly, the instructions flat out didn’t work.  Worse, they made me feel like a right idiot.  When instructions have only three steps and are comprised of sentences like “After that, simply run the command, bundle installand you’re good to go,” it does feel like I (a reasonably smart bear) should be able to figure it out.

As it turns out (much hand-wringing and a few tears later), I discovered that the instructions were actually wrong (anger).  As a result, I have abandoned Github Pages and instead am going to try WordPress (hosted this time. The last time we self-hosted and that was a bit of a maintenance nightmare).

The next hurdle is to figure out how to get all my old content over from ginalikins.com (and to remember to turn off publishing to Facebook before I do!).

Most of the time (and by most, I mean 95%+), I *love* having the richness of the internet’s information available to me. It’s pretty great to be able to know you don’t know something (like whether it’s ok to transport washing machines laying down on their sides) and instantly (or at least as quickly as I can type that into Google) get an answer (pretty much not advised unless you tighten the transport bolts and then not recommended as the weight of the barrel can cause everything to go askew*).

Sometimes, though, it’s too much.  I just want a simple answer, and there isn’t one.  For example, I want to know where to find the best price on the best flooring.  Once upon a time this choice would have been simpler, as the choice would have been Bob’s Carpetatorium or Fred’s Floor-a-rama and that’d have been that.

I’m well aware that Bob’s and Fred’s may not have had, in fact, the most optimal price/value floor, but I’d have thought they did, and that would have simplified my decision-making process.  Today I search for “flooring options” and there are millions of pages (of information) and millions more of shopping (and, of course, none of those options compare apples to apples, or Pergo to Armstrong, as it were).

So I’m overwhelmed.  And I still haven’t decided on floors.  Maybe I’ll call Bob.

* This knowledge proved helpful yesterday when Adrian and I transported his old washer and dryer from storage to our new house and my old washer and dryer to (honestly) the back porch.  There’s another round of transport (new house washer and dryer to our hold house) yet to come.  I know, you envy our glamorous lifestyle, right?