Unveiling

It’s about time for the great unveiling of the new name of this blog. As you’ll recall I asked for suggestions and promised to give away a PC World subscription to the person who’s suggestion I used. Naturally, it turned out to be a bit more complicated than that. Two people sent in suggestions that I thought captured part of what I wanted to do with this site now, but neither really captured exactly what I wanted. Toby suggested “Out of the Fire and into the Frying Pan”, suggesting that moving into helpdesk was like that. I liked the idea, although after having been in this position for awhile, I felt fairly sure that I wanted it the other way around. Leaving the simmering constant heat of a one-man department and winding up in the fire of dealing with end-users all day long. So I wanted to switch it. Also, Chris suggested “Thoughts from the Cube”, which I also liked.

At the end of the day, I wound up combining them into “Out of the Frying Pan, and into the Cube” -Wherein I describe my journey from one-man IT Department for a not for profit organization to helpdesk jockey in a medium-sized law firm.

Now since I actually had an offer from PC world to give away two “gift” subscriptions when I renewed mine, I thought this would work out well. Unfortunately, Toby lives overseas and the extra postage I would have to pay to have his subscription sent to him all year was going to be prohibitive, to say the least. So again, it wasn’t going to be that easy. Luckily, Toby was generous enough to ask me to go ahead and give away the subscription to a friend of his who lives in the US instead, so problem solved, finally! (Although I may look into getting Toby a subscription to an email newsletter after the first of the year anyway.)

Thanks to my wife, I now have a new logo to put on top of the pages. I’ll be working to clean up some text and other things that I’ve ignored for too long, and coming up with new stuff to put up in the Cafepress store over the next few weeks.

Over the next few weeks I’ll also be thinking long and hard about what gets written about here, and how it gets written. As most of you know, Angela is going to be switching to a password protected blog any day now. (In fact, now that we’ve redone her template today, it’s just a matter of getting the passwords entered.) A few of you may even have heard from her the events that have lead her to this decision. In light of those events and her choice, I’m re-thinking some of what I do, both here and on the Child Abuse blog. I’m absolutely going to keep both as a public sites, and I’ll still be writing about my personal life in both places, but you’ll probably see fewer mentions of other people here, like family and friends, especially when it comes to their children. Also, some of the changes I’ve made, in terms of commenting and other things, were made with the idea of giving myself more flexibility. This should allow me to put up the occasional post with comments turned off, or I can move to a moderated comment system if I need to, etc.

Not that I haven’t always been very aware of how much information I share with you all, and taken steps to keep things from getting out of hand, after all I still don’t give out names of the places I work, or people I work with, but it never hurts to give myself a bit more flexibility when it comes to what is being posted by others on this site.

Hopefully, the new comments aren’t too much of a pain, the new mail list should work better than the Topica one for those who like to get the posts by email, the cleaner template loads the page quicker, and you all can have a bit of fun with the new logo.

I spent over 4 years writing Life of a One-Man IT Department, and those archives will still be here, but I’m very excited about the new name and focus of the site. I hope you all will continue to tune in, and continue to make all the great contributions that have made this such a great experience for me!

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