The point of this post is rather obscure, but here it is anyway.  I remember once talking with Grant Killian about blogging.  He was lamenting about not feeling like he had enough "Good Content" to blog about.   My response to him was that you never know what part of a blog post is going to end up being useful to someone, and I told him about a blog post he made through which I learned something really valuable.  I really believe this to be true.  You may feel like blogging about a particular topic is redundant, but chances are there are lots of people reading who will be enlightened by your insight. 

Something happened this weekend which for me really illustrates this point.  Through reading blogs, I ended up protecting my family from would be burglars and fires.  How?  See, I've finally been reading Code, which I discovered through reading blogs.  This past weekend, what I learned in Code helped me install a new alarm system in my house.

Sidebar: ADT locks you out of their alarm systems, so that you cannot use it as a local-only system without paying for their monthly service.  The system that was installed in my home (by some previous owner) was a ADT "SafeWatch Plus" system.  After loads of research, I found out that this basically was a modified "Moose Z900" system, with the master installer feature that allows you to set the alarm to local mode disabled.  So, when I disconnected my local land line phone service in my house, the alarm started going off at random times (once at 4AM), so I eventually had to disable it all together.  It was sorta like ADT telling me “Hey, You Need to Pay Us!”  This seemed like a waste, as the entire house was wired with keypads and sensors which was just sitting there looking ugly and not doing anything useful..So for $4 on eBay, I bought a brand new Moose Z950 board, and this Saturday wired it into my system and voilà! The entire system works great!  And no connection to ADT! 

The interesting thing is that reading Code taught me all about relays, ohms, latched circuits grounding and all the stuff I needed to know to make it through the relatively complex process of re-wiring this system.   The person who originally turned me on to the book, and in fact Charles Petzold himself could have never imagined that his information may one day save a life (okay, that's a big stretch, but I really wanted to drive the point home here).

Anyway, there's a lot of talk going on about posting appropriate stuff, and moving blogs around, and creating side blogs, and rss feeds clogging up the pipes - but I, for one, really want to encourage people to post!  The last couple of days has been pretty light in the blog world I'm tuned into.  Perhaps everyone is busy, but look: post whatever it is you're thinking about that day, and be sure to give your post a good title so that it can be filtered easily.  If you're posting about your dog, or boyfriend or cooking, label it “OT” so it can be safely ignored.  But don't withhold all that knowledge from the rest of us! 

So, perhaps someone will Google “SafeWatch,“ find this post, read Code, install a Moose Z950, start writing code, and someday create a solution to scaling RSS.  You just never know. 

-Brendan