The Mandelbear's Musings

Spent a few minutes this morning sorting receipts. For the first time in decades, I actually have all of last year's receipts sorted before the end of January. Cool! Of course, that doesn't include bank statements and most of the album-related stuff, but it gets a major bit of clutter off the desk. Perhaps more importantly, it keeps this year's receipts from piling up and creating more clutter.

The next major push is sales tax, which I only have about two more weeks to do. Fortunately, all I really have to do for that is to identify each sale by amount and location, so I know which county to assign it to. Should be straightforward; hopefully I can have that done by, say, Friday.

"If you want something to get done, ask a busy person to do it."

I haven't been accomplishing much lately, so obviously I'm not busy enough.

There are several seemingly-unrelated projects going on in the household at the moment: I'm starting my next album, the chaoswolf is starting an HTML class, the servers are getting re-organized, and people have been after the flower_cat to write a cookbook. Meanwhile I've been thinking about writing my blog locally and mirroring it up to LJ.

They're all more closely related than one might think.

You see, I'm a geek. I think nothing of writing a big pile of Makefile templates and Perl scripts to cobble an album, a songbook, and multiple websites together from the same set of sources. The Cat is emphatically not a geek, she wants to be able to type recipes in, maybe to a text editor or a blog client, and have them magically assembled into a cookbook. And a website, of course. Hmmm.

... So that's the plan: to refactor my CD, concert, and web tools so that they work for assembling books and blogs as well, publish to hardcopy as well as on multiple websites, and do it in a way that's extensible (with plug-ins), collaborative, and simple enough to be used by non-geeks.

I'm probably going to need a lot of help with that last part.