1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair… just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

I’ve been going by ‘Fiat Lux’ online for 4+ years now, but I think it might be time for a change.

I’m getting very tired of being called ‘Fiat’ by people, for one thing. I’m a person, not a car. Yet for whatever reason, people fixate on the first part of a name when creating a nickname, not the second half.

As I’ve said before, I’m also getting very tired of having my comments on Wordpress blogs filtered into the bit-bucket because whoever runs the Akismet spam filters decided that the phrase ‘Fiat Lux’ is spam.

So what are my options?

I’ve been using ‘rslux’ as my blog handle on Wordpress blogs recently (it’s also my Twitter handle), so that’s one option. It’s not terribly catchy, though, and it incorporates my middle initial, which I don’t usually use, so it has the potential to be confusing.

I could also start using my real name more. It’s not my first choice either, because frankly it makes me feel unsafe. Being female and having an easily Google-able name makes me gun-shy of putting my full name online more than I need to, although I’ll be the first to admit that any information any stalker could ever want or need about me is already available online, one way or another. Plus, if I were that concerned about my privacy, I would have picked some other domain name for my blog.

There’s also an argument in favor of using my full name — doing so is better for my own personal branding. But as Kathy Sierra saw, that’s a very two-edged sword. I’m just not sure I want to go there.

I suppose I could split the difference of all the options and switch to using ‘Lux’.

There’s one other issue to consider — there are some blogs where I’ve been a regular commenter under my current handle. I either have to keep my current handle, or risk losing my identity and credibility on those sites.

What do you think?

In a little more than a week from now, this humble blog will celebrate its 4th anniversary. But that’s not what this post is about.

I was actually blogging all the way back in 1996, although back then, it was called an “online diary”. I thought that I’d lost those web pages forever, but I finally got the Wayback Machine to cough them up (I’d forgotten the correct URL, silly me).

So, if you’re curious, you can see what I had to say all the way back in February 1996, and intermittently the rest of that year. Nothing momentous at all, really, but I’m pleased about it. And I’ve downloaded a copy of the file, so that I won’t lose it again.

I suddenly realized I haven’t blogged in a few days. Sorry about that. Everything’s fine, I’ve just been a bit overloaded.

On Memorial Day, I finally got around to joining a local health club, and now I’m trying to figure out how to work regular exercise into my day to day routine. The club membership came with three free “starter” sessions with a personal trainer, which were more than a little intimidating, but at least now I have a nice workout plan all mapped out for me. Problem is, it takes me almost 90 minutes to get through the whole thing, plus changing clothes & shower time — that’s a 2-hour block of time for each session. Trying to fit that into my current schedule, especially on work days, has been a little disruptive.

I’m hoping that once I get more settled into a routine and comfortable with how to use all the damn machines, then I’ll be able to get it closer to an hour than 90 minutes, but for now it’s a real pain. Even if I leave work by 5:30, I’m not home and ready for dinner until well after 8PM. Since you’re not supposed to eat for at least 3 hours before going to sleep, the only way I can eat dinner at all is because I’m a night owl who stays up for the Daily Show & the Colbert Report. On the flip side, trying to get a 90-minute workout done in the mornings would mean hitting the gym before 7AM; and I am not at all good about getting out of bed that early.

I’ve never been much for health clubs before, so hopefully I’ll find a way to make this work for me. Ideally I’d like to get to the club 4 out of 7 days a week, which I think is a goal that’s both reasonable, and likely to actually produce some results over time. But if I can’t get the workout down to about 60 minutes, I suspect I’ll have to do the bulk of my exercise on the weekends, which means less results over time.

I have no illusions that I’ll be able to turn myself into a muscled-out fitness goddess; I find working out far too boring for that. Getting into better general shape and turning a few pounds of fat into muscle would be nice, though.

As I was cruising around the San Francisco bay this past week, something came to mind: it’s possible that these sights, or the 1941 version of them, were the last my great-uncle Arthur saw of America, before he died over the Pacific in WW2.

During the war, San Francisco was a major naval base, and Angel Island was a major embarkation point for men going out to fight the war in the Pacific. So it’s possible that Arthur sailed out through the beautiful Golden Gate that long-ago day, never to return.

He has a grave in the Punchbowl military cemetery on Oahu, instead. We visited it when I was a child, on our one family trip to Hawaii. But he’s not there; he was MIA and presumed dead, with the rest of his crew. Whether he was shot down by the Japanese or was a victim of mechanical failure, we’ll never know.

I keep a small book that I found in a used bookstore in my top desk drawer. It’s a small, dull brown volume titled “Prayer Book for Jews in the Armed Forces of the United States” that dates to 1941. It wasn’t his, but I keep it to honor his memory.

Well, I broke my Tungsten C some three months ago and I still haven’t decided whether to get the damn thing fixed or not. With 2006 fast approaching, I need to finally make a decision, because if I do go back to paper, now is the time to go buy a planner.

Scott found a link to a highly-rated guy on eBay who apparently repairs Palm PDAs for less than what it would cost to send the Tungsten back to PalmOne for a repair. I’m thinking about it.

I’m also thinking that since I survived all semester without a PDA, I probably don’t really need one. I miss the games and being able to read e-books a bit, but the ability to do those things is not really worth $75-$125 to me right now. Especially when I can get a perfectly good 2006 Day-Timer for under $25.

Someone with psychology training might point out to me that not making a decision is also a decision, and that’s quite true. In essence, by going three months without my PDA, my decision has already been made. I just need to admit it and move on.