Ok, so a first blog post, I’m supposed to outline all the things I’m going to write about in this blog. Well, to be quite honest, I don’t know. I know ­­some of the things that I’ll write about, so I may as well start with those.

1. Institutional Repositories. Be warned – if you hold an abhorrence of acronyms (let’s call you AOA), leave now. The realm of IRs is full of them. I work on a project which instead of having a name that we can remember, we have an acronym (RUBRIC). We work with other projects which are all called by acronym names too. It’s a fascinating realm though. Between the ASRC-RFCD and the OAI-PMH, occasionally there’s some XSLT transformed from DC to METS. Confused? Me too.
2. Computers. I work in IT, therefore I must write about it. I don’t think I’d term myself an IT geek, but others may beg to differ. My excuse is that I haven’t spent my entire teenage and adult years with my head in a box, working out why a motherboard has died, or sitting in a cave drinking gallons of joe (sorry, litres). My background is actually Arts. I still don’t get why IRQ assignments are so important (I’m assured they are, but why can’t they all just get along nicely?), or why an smp kernel throws a fit when running under ESX (which it does, and is now fixed by running a non-smp kernel). I’m a big Linux fan, but don’t have a passionate dislike of MS like some others do – MS does its own thing, ‘nix does its own thing, and we all know who does it better.
3. Travel. I love to travel. I wish I could do it all the time. Ever since my first major trip I have learnt that travel does wonders for people. It makes them realize that there is more to the world than their own backyard, and that others can actually make important contributions to the world, despite our Aussie-centric view that we’re ‘it’. Admittedly, we live in the nicest country I’ve ever seen, but hey. I love learning about how other people live, and learning why they see the world the way they do.
4. Well, there’s no defined number 4, but I’m sure something will emerge as I start to write… stay tuned.