More uninteresting crap… Now from England!

Chris and I went fishing Friday on the Yough (the Youghiogheny River Friday. With the help of some online resources and the local sporting goods store we found out where to access the water.

Without a boat (I need something that will tow/hual a boat soon) we stuck to wading down the river as we fished. This proved quite challenging (as Chris can attest to) do to the very irregular and rocky bottom. This is however the perfect habitat for the fiesty Smallmouth Bass. Pound for pound they might be the toughest freshwater fish.

I was fighting my new rod/reel combo (I don't know if I really like this new Powerbraid line) and Chris got the first fish of the day. It was mostly slow going as we each caught a few more fun but small smallmouths. However persreverance paid off as I hooked into two large ones downstream. A 19″ and a 17″ proved to be quite a fight on an ultralight rod and 4lb test. I fought the 19″ fish for at least 5 minutes as he pulled me downstream. I put them back so someone else can have a try at catching them. (As much as I like fresh fish, I'm a big proponent of catch and release.)

The day did end on a bit of a sour note though… The local constable gave me a ticket for an expired plate (it's a bitch keeping tabs on 5 vehicles.) What really irratated me was that it was only expired by 3 days… Come on, can't a brother get a warning? I could have renewed on the spot via my phone, but I doubt that would have got me out of the ticket. Didn't want to wind-up in Gitmo for giving him grief either.

BTW: To the Perryopolis policeman that pulled me over: Consider using about 1/100th the amount of cologne you currently use. A bottle of Drakkar Noir, Old Spice, or whatever the hell that was, should not be a weekly expense.

I've reached a point were I no longer will tolerate complicated and/or tedious software installs (well at least when I'm not getting paid to do them.) If I can't have it up and running in 2 or maybe 3 minutes, I really start to question my need for the software.

What brought this up, was investigating blogging/wiki/bliki software. I'm largely sick of Moveable Type. Sure the license change was a pain, but in general it's too fiddly for what it does… which for me isn't much. Ideally, I'd switch to a bliki (weblog + wiki) and be able to import my old stuff, and be off and running.

That is still not to be. The leading contender Snipsnap is nearly excellent, but the speed of its development seems glacial, and the documentation is craptacular, and not even all in one place. A well documented, easy interface for creating new topics would be great… it would make importing data from my legacy systems a snap. It is however the model for easy to install. Even if you don't use the webstart installer, you can download it and be up and running in maybe 60 seconds. No messing about with databases, installing a dozen different libraries, or fooling with Apache. They do this by including a lightweight database and webserver as part of the package. If you want to tap into a heavier weight database, you can, but to test drive the software you don't have to bother with that hurdle. (Jira from Atlassian is similar in this respect.)

All the other packages I tried (I'm too lazy to linkify them) Drupal, TikiWiki, and even the claimed super easy to install WordPress, I gave up on. If your setup relies on me having Mysql setup/installed/ and vigilantly administered, it is not a super easy install. I honestly don't want to learn how to administer yet another database… It's not even learning, the fundementals are all the same, I just would have to fill my head with it's pointlessly different way of doing things… likely at the expense of my knowledge of other databases.

That's not to say I'd never use anything that relies on Mysql, or some other software I have yet used. I just need a compelling reason to do so. So make the initial install super quick and easy (like Snipsnap and Jira) and when I realize how cool they are, I'll suck it up an install a database for performance/security reasons.