My name is Will Sargent. I write things on the blog, mostly about code and software, mental tricks, and other things that interest me on a daily basis.

This website is a project of sorts. I work on websites for a living, so I wanted to write a blog that did what I wanted it to. Namely, not have a calendar, be able to filter out stuff that didn't interest me, and have a focus on providing as much information with as few page refreshes as possible. Thus I have the expanding tree thingy and the dynamically expanding comments (that I stole from Joe Hewitt) and the filter combo box.

The filter is really cool. You should try it out. None of the other blogs have it. Go on, you know you want to.

The blog has also taught me about CSS and DHTML and searching and how hard it is to be a good web designer. You see those lines on the left? Took me days to figure out how to get all the horizontal and vertical lines so they intersected properly in both Internet Explorer and Mozilla. I dunno, we can put a man on the moon, but we still can't get an Internet that doesn't suck. Makes me boggle at the CSS Zen Garden.

I'm wandering off-topic, I know I am.

I read books. Lots of them. This has turned into a bad habit, as somewhere along the way my book buying and book reading got out of sync and I am consistently about ten books behind. This only got worse when I found a hidden trove of R. A. Lafferty and Umberto Eco. Great writers, but I can only read about fifty pages at a time before they tie my brain in knots.

Normally I would forget these unread books. I run my life this by means of an organization system called Getting Things Done which does all my remembering for me. I would say it was wonderful, except that I have the ambivalent grumpiness of someone forced to do everything he's supposed to. Occasionally I'll wander into my room and wonder who on earth cleaned, labelled and prioritized everything. I am my own Stepford Wife.

I had a geek code, but I lost it. I classify on the MBTI as INTJ. There's an article in the Atlantic Monthly called "Caring for Your Introvert" that you might find helpful.