This should be the first entry in the new journal system. I’m going
“high-tech” with my journal. I send an e-mail to rksjournal@rnsmith.com. A
program on my home computer extracts the journal entry and places it in a
database. From there the entry can be displayed on-line or printed, or
whatever else can happen with an electronic entry. I looked at several other
pieces of software, but none of them had the ability to take an e-mail and
turn it into a journal entry.

Exactly how this will appear on-line is still to be determined. I’m not even
sure I’m ready to have my journal available on-line. One of my options is to
make it available several months after-the-fact. Time will tell what will
really happen. I think that journals are intended to be somewhat private and
only become more public a long time after they are written, perhaps even
after the writer is dead.

But, for right now, the process is to write the journal entry in an e-mail
and send it to the home computer. I will also build an ability to send the
entries in HTML format as well as in the database format to a CD-ROM so that
the contents are somewhat preserved in case of computer problems at home.
It’s been known to happen….

This change comes about in part because the journal that I’ve been keeping
is almost full. I’ve bought a new book, but haven’t started it yet. Also,
most of the entries in my journal happen as I’m on an airplane as that’s
when I have the time to write. My handwriting has gotten so bad that I think
the written journal is fast becoming unreadable. With this system I can
write entries anywhere. All I need is some kind of a mail client, either
browser based or otherwise. The risk is that since these entries will exist
as computer bits rather than as ink on a page, they somehow disappear, or
technology changes so quickly that the format in which the data is created
can no longer be processed, or that the entries get altered somehow. Paper
seems to be a fairly universal media. So, the system will definitely include
the ability to print these journal entries, one per page (or set of pages),
and put them into a notebook. So, the entries will be preserved on paper as
well as on a CD-ROM.

Since this is the first entry, perhaps I should describe the home computer
system. We have a wireless broadband connection to the internet from Sprint
Broadband. Their antenna is on top of Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs
and I have a corresponding antenna on the top of our house. Their modem
provides me an RJ-45 ethernet jack. That jack is plugged into a small HP
Pentium 90 (circa 1996) computer running Linux and a Linux firewall. The
firewall is currently compromised and I’m working on a replacement which
isn’t being very cooperative.

On the other side of the firewall we have four other computers. One is a
generic Pentium II computer, named Bradica, running Linux as the operating
system, Apache as a web server, Sendmail as the Mail Transfer Agent, PHP as
the scripting language, and MySQL as the database server. It is also running
Samba to provide file and print services. I have my own computer, a Dell
Pentium III computer running Windows 2000 and a bunch of other stuff. This
is my primary computer at home. Nina has an IBM Thinkpad Notebook computer
as her primary computer. I often bring my office notebook computer home and
plug it into the home network as well.

I have another Linux computer on the network that I use as a kind of a test
bed as I’m developing software or capability. This system is named Heather.

The journal system is running on Bradica. It is written in PHP and the data
is stored in a MySQL database. Over the next several months the system will
probably grow and change significantly. Meanwhile, from time to time I’ll
mail in another journal entry!

This entry was transferred from an older journal system into this program on 29 November 2002.