Are you someone who scribbles annotations in book margins? Or do you regard that as an unthinkable defilement? For me, it's the latter; I couldn't bring myself to write in a book, or even to dog-ear any page to mark an interesting paragraph. So instead, I stick notes or jot some comments down somewhere else, but I inevitably lose track and curse myself for not keeping things tidier. This may be familiar to some of you.

I've also tried to keep software recipes and tricks of the trade in a wiki, which works well to build a personal reference but is not appropriate for sharing opinions and discussing subjects. It would be too chaotic.

It was time to try something else, and this is what you are reading now: a blog.