Last September I attended a leadership training class hosted by my company. As part of the class we all had to do some self-evaluation; things such as what we’d like to spend more time doing. One of the things that I decided I wanted to do was to write something every day. A journal would fall into that category, or even a blog like this one.

As you can see from my postings, I do not write to this blog every day, or even every week. But not to fear, work and school insure that I get my daily dose of writing and then some. I even using writing to avoid writing.

Right now I am using this blog post to avoid my least favorite writing task (performance reviews). I have 7 reviews to write (3 more as of this posting), and when I finally get that done, I have school papers to write.

Well, at least I am writing every day.

I posted this on my personal blog, but think it applies here as well.

OK, I’m a fairly advanced technology user, but there is a lot that escapes me. For example, I can’t see why anyone who is not on a plane, train, or long bus ride would want to watch video on a 3″ screen. I don’t get it, but that’s OK.

Another thing that I don’t fully understand is the appeal of Twitter. My life is definitely not interesting enough to be sending short messages telling the world what I’m up to at any given moment. Heck, you can read this blog (my personal blog) and I’m sure you’ll agree with me.

That being said, I do see a use for it. I think if I were in the marketing business I’d be using Twitter all the time. For example, I’ve become addicted to watching the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC and monitoring Twitter for messages about her. It’s fascinating to see people’s reactions seconds after she says something. The number of messages really increase when she Twitters to her fans. Last week she Twittered during her show to say that she was sick and wondered if she’d make it to the end. Her fans loved it, and sent messages back to her wishing her good health and giving her recommendations for home remedies.

What a neat way to see how people respond to your product.

I just finished writing the pages for the rest of my new domain – at least for now. I added the lightly populated beckitrue.com home page. That one was easy. It just points to this blog or to my Cisco CCNA teaching site.

I borrowed the style sheet from my DOCSIS site, so I had to do a lot of find / replace. I use vi to write my web pages, so I had to find out how to do it in vi. It turned out to be pretty easy, as it is a regex that I’ve used many, many times in Perl scripts. What was interesting (to me anyway) is how to do it on multiple lines. Here’s how I did it:

.,$s/old/new/g

.,$ means from the first line to the last of a document
s means search & replace
old is what I replaced
new is what I replaced old with
g means globally on any line, not in the whole document as you may think. The .,$ does that.

This is my blog for my professional pursuits. I’m going to start teaching a CCNA Exploration course at CSN, and will be starting my Masters degree soon. I wanted to have a place for this information, as well as notes on my certification studies that is separate from my personal website. I also moved my DOCSIS website to this domain.

I’m just getting started on this domain, so things will be a little rough looking for a while, but I will do my best to complete the transition before the end of the year.