With the new year, I am planning to move my "social" blogging to my LiveJournal account (rjray.livejournal.com). Thus far, I've just been using it to enable my LJ-using friends to include me in filters they create for privacy. But it has a lot of features, as any die-hard LJ user will attest, and it just makes more sense to use them than to keep trying to hack Blosxom to add the same basic functionality as already exists. Perhaps one day I'll get around to writing a nifty, pluggable, slick package of my own. But for now, LJ will fill the space just fine.

This site is not going away, though, just changing in its focus. I will be making this domain a portal for the varied blogs I keep (most of which update far too rarely, an issue I'll probably set as part of my New Year's resolutions). Specifically, I will be aggregating all of these many and varied sources into this blog. So if you prefer to read from here, not only will you not miss anything, you'll be getting more than before. Well, you may actually miss some things, because LJ will allow me to create filters for friends which will allow me to write about things that are more personal, things that I currently don't write about here because I have no control over the readership. (I could add more Blosxom plugins or write my own, but that goes back to the previous argument about using LJ instead of reinventing it.) So, you may still miss things, but you wouldn't have seen them anyway so does that really count as missing them?

At present, I plan to be collecting the following here:

• LiveJournal - http://rjray.livejournal.com
• use.perl.org Journal - http://use.perl.org/~rjray/journal
• Java Eye for the Perl Guy - http://jroller.com/page/rjray
• This Week in Warfare - http://www.thisweekinwarfare.net

The last item is a podcast that I started back in May, but which I've only managed two installments. That's also on the resolutions list.

Should I (foolishly) add any other journalling to my pantheon, those too should get reflected here. When I make the switch-over, odds are that the others will initially show up here as a flood. In the case of the LJ, Java and podcast streams that won't be too bad; the LJ account has fewer than 15 posts in it at present, and neither of the Java or podcast blogs has yet reached double-digits. The Perl blog, though, I've been using for quite some time. Whatever the limit of entries it returns in an RSS feed, expect them all to land at once. These things, they happen.

And speaking of RSS (and/or Atom) feeds, if you use them then the one from here will just be that much more useful, since it will encapsulate the whole mess. Currently, there's a syndication channel on LJ that reads the RSS feed for this site. I'm hoping to have the current one removed so that I can re-create it under my ownership (the existing one was created by a friend, but as such my ability to monitor/control it is essentially nil). I may even go so far as to customize a feed specifically for LJ-based syndication (for those of you who read this via that channel, and might be thus interested). Otherwise those who are LJ users already and have me listed as a friend will end up seeing my LJ posts twice, which is not a good way to keep people interested and reading.

Went well, very well. I felt very welcomed by everyone here, the people I met last month at the interview and people that were new to me. Any worries I may have had about whether I made the right choice, these were laid to rest today. I'm home.

In about, oh, 12 hours or so, I'll be hitting the road to return to California. This isn't what I had planned for December, back in May when I left. But then, nothing has really gone as planned these last 7 months or so.

Yesterday, I had lunch with that pastor I mentioned earlier. I mentioned that I was worried that at some hidden emotional level, I'd really chosen the job in California strictly for the money. That's a dangerous reason to take a job, because you can find yourself without any foundation if the going gets at all tough. But he pointed out that I'd already talked a lot about the friends I have there in the bay area, and that it seemed to him that there was more to this choice than just the difference in salary.

Either way, I wish I'd had the foresight to stay in California. I mean, Colorado has been beautiful, my friend that I've been staying with has been super, and I've met some interesting new people. But moving a second time within the year, that's going to be the opposite of fun. Trying to pick and choose what I can fit in the Saturn and what has to be left behind... and this is just in reference to the materials I've been using on a day-to-day basis. I'm not even counting the stuff that was intended all along to stay in storage while I was in London. I've been most of the day packing, and trying to sort things into "stay" and "go" boxes. The car will be pretty full, much more so than in 1997 when I only carried a suitcase and 4 boxes of books. For one thing, I learned that I need more than that to get by on.

I just hope I know what I'm doing, taking this route. I feel good, very good about the job itself. But part of me still feels like I took the easy way out, picked the safe option rather than challenge myself. But the pastor-guy was right in that a lot of it came down to missing my friends, a lot. I would be a hell of a wreck right now, emotionally (well, moreso than I probably already am), but for the people that are waiting to greet me when I get there. My life's suck-meter is reading pretty low right now, so I am definitely stopping short of any actual complaint. But complaint and self-doubt are two different things, and I still have plenty of the latter to go around.

See you guys pretty soon, now...