Beginning

Why do this? I have a suspicion that this blog may vanish into the sea of content that is now the internet. Back in 1996 when I first got on the wonderweb, it seemed easier to get noticed. You could put in a wrong URL have nothing happen. These days you always seem to get re-directed to some page or other that's acting as a placeholder for some company who may wish to purchase "www.bbc.co.uk" or some such variant, however unlikely that may seem. Even worse, you make a mistake and you end up on a different web site that contains content that is completely different to the content you are after. Our tool at work for recording vacation time is called "vactool". If you make a mistake with that (and I always do) you get taken off the intranet and onto the internet. Instead of recording vacation, you are tempted into a range of professional vacuum tools - just what I need when I'm rushing to get off on vacation. So I was a kind of pioneer back in 2000, with my own website and all. So is it easier to get noticed now? The website back then did a great job and a terrible job. It re-united me with some people that were very important to me from my past and also united me with many bored American school children, who had nothing important to say, beyond : "Hi, I'm Laurie and I'm bored, math is awful", you get the picture. However, I've been recently blown away by the quality of some of the content that is out there in blogland. I think the distinction from the early days of the wonderweb is that it was the (as marketeers put it), the "early adopters" of the technology who were creating the amateur content in the mid to late '90's and the early stages of the Millennia. Some was good, but some was pure cybergeek nonsense. It seems there are a lot more ordinary folks out there with ordinary, but interesting things to say. The technology has become mainstream and is driving much more interesting, relevant content. That can only be a good thing.

So I'm kinda going to gently drip some of my own material back into the vast sea of content that we have now in wonderweb land and see how I go, it seems the right time to do it. I also think I'm at an interesting juncture of my life and I have more interesting things to say now. After spending the first 38 and a half years of my life in Scotland, I moved to the wonderful, expensive, frustrating, diverse, rich, poor, risky area that is the San Francisco Bay area. OK - cliche time; you learn a lot about yourself when you move to a new country. Well, some cliche's happen to be true. You also learn a lot about your home country when you begin to see it with a foreigner's eyes. So I'm developing some new perspectives on the glorious cultural muddle that is exchanged between both sides of the Atlantic. I've been on somewhat of a voyage of self discovery (ugg that's a bit of a cliche too, two in one article) over the past 12 months or so. Becoming 40 was always a big worry to me. Some close family members had a real bad time when they were that age and the age of 40 hung over me like Banquo's ghost at the feast. So I took it upon myself to learn as much as I could about what drove me to make some choices in the past, how I was stuck in some behaviour patterns and how I could re-order some of my thinking. That's led to some real interesting change, I hope I can get round to talking more about that later.

I stopped keeping a diary at the beginning of 1985. I tend to think of the middle of 1985 as being the time that my life really began. I still think of '85 as the best year of my life (my sister has the optimistic notion that the best year of my life is maybe yet to come, I like that - Idon'thinkink I would have had that thought without some outside help!), it was mainly as a tribute to the incredibly good time I had in '85 that I started my old website. So just when it became interesting, I stopped recording my life. Tprepre-'85 entries are horribly boring, I'm glad all the diaries are locked in a storage vault thousands of miles from where I am now. e.g. "March the 1st 1981, "watched Porridge on TV"". As my life became more interesting, I stopped having time to record it. Well - OK, I was often too drunk by the end of the day in those days to manage to write anything sensible. I'd often thought about writing a diary again, but this seems better.

You have to make some sensitive choices about how much information to share with the whole world, but I like the notion of having a diary, recording stuff so you can remember your own state of mind at a particular time and at having other people somewhere out there wonderweblandand being able to share your experiences, maybe comment on them, maybe add to the total of human experience / knowledge- who knows? The danger here is that I'm one of the millions here in America who becomming cash rich (relatively) and time poor. I also work in the tech sector and I'm stuck responding to e-mails all day. So there will be somchallangeses inherent in trying to do this. Having written 1000 (or does it just feel like that of e-mails during the day, that say things like "OK, I can make 10.00 am pst meeting", I sometimes have trouble typing anything outside of work. I'm looking at the clock already and it's only 10.16 on a Sunday! But I'll see how I go, how much enthusiasm I can work up for this and how good I think my blog entries are.

So this is just a start and the picture is of my favourite, much used and much travelled iBook, with my first blog entry on it. It does however seem a bit strange that the Yahoo spell checker does not know the word "blog" , I suppose most people on this site have noticed that before. I did hear Yahoo's chief technologist at Oracle Openworld, say that Solaris was an "old fashioned OS", so what do Yahoo know......?