One thing that has been bugging me about doing this thing online is whether or not to replicate the formatting that I use for my offline versions, be it paper or digital. The practice comes from back in the day when I was really into writing Object Pascal code, better known at the time as Borland’s Delphi. Paper or computer, I would end my statement with a semi colon; like that; like this; I don’t know why I started doing that, but it has carried forward all these years and now, when the time has come to actually put this up for public consumption, I debate if I should carry on with this method.

After giving this an extended review last night at my TH-FH session (yeah, look that up so you know what that means) I decided to go with the way I have been doing so; with the semi colons; why, you may ask; because, this is my blog, my “novel”, my “so called life” and what I say goes; how about that; sounds good to me; in the infamous words of a certain Star Trek character, “make it so”; later;

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Whether in my digital version or on paper, I always time and date stamp the header of the entry, along with the location of where it was made. I have no idea when or why I started doing this other than for my own sake when trying to find something at a later date. This is the format that I generally attempt to remain consistent with:

• City location and always the ICAO identifier if it has one. For example, Calgary, Alberta is YYC, Los Angeles, California is LAX
• Location within the city or town, such as a coffee shop, at home or elsewhere. These are further shortened to as few characters as possible as I tend to go to the same places often. JU would be for Java U cafe in YUL (Montreal), TH-FH is the Tim Horton’s across from Foothills Hospital in YYC (Calgary). B3 is where the subject of this entry is being made, and that stands for Bench By the Bow. B3. The Bow being the Bow River that flows through YYC and is just across the street from my other favourite hang out here, Extreme Bean Café. Or EB for short.
• Day and date in this format: SUN 25 JUL 2010
• Page number as such: 1., 2. etc.
• Local time in 24 hour format to the closest minute. 1955 is 7:55PM Mountain Standard Time (daylight savings)

Therefore a complete entry would be, for example this particular one, YYC – B3 – SUN 25 JUL 2010 – 1. – 2043. I will also make a note at the end of the entry or post with the time and word count (if it’s a digital post and the count is available). So there you have it. The start and end of all my notes. What comes in between is another matter and something that I hope you will find interesting or at least, mildly amusing.

By the way, this post was published to the site from B3. The signal from EB is that good.

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In the intervening 5 years or so, I have managed to amass somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1.4 million words on the subject. Mostly in note form and the majority of which were created in the NoteTaker™ application on G4 iBook. Initially I had envisioned a traditional approach, you know, a book format. But the more I wrote, the more I realized that my style was not that. As evidenced here, it is more of a “notes” style as opposed to a narrative.  Then to was the matter of how to distribute the result. Various ideas came to mind. A complete “work” self-published via Lulu.com or the like, on a dedicated web site in “book” format, or some combination. It was my recent “conversion” to WordPress from Joomla! that sealed the deal. Once I saw what WordPress 3.0 could do and how easy it was to do it, the decision was made. Switch over the existing LyleChamney.com from Joomla! to WordPress 3.0 and do it in a blog format based upon dates.

As dates are how I functioned when creating my notes, this seemed to be the ideal way to make it available here. It also will allow me the flexibility to create the posts in a non-liner manner. They can be created for any date and as long as I set them to the correct category, they will be in chronological order.

So away I go. This is the first post and it will be in the Introduction category. Bookmark or subscribe to keep up with the latest skivvy.