Introductions

There are various forces motivating me to start a blog, now, as the entire nature of the blog fades away into two directions: one turning professional, a link-sharing generator of advertising traffic which can be monetized and marketed to; the other turning amateur and drifting towards 140 characters of heavily-abbreviated and very poorly-spelled glossolalia.

One force is historical in nature.  This is not the first time I have attempted to start a blog.  Previous incarnations of my online journal have been called MattJournal.  I started journaling online because, at the time, my career as a software engineer was going extremely poorly, and I figured that writing would make a perfectly fine trade.  Serious writers kept a journal, and so I did as well.  (This would be "cargo cult art".)  The problem which killed MattJournal in its cradle was a natural consequence of its author -- so you could argue that it was a genetic condition.  Rather than simply using an existing tool for blogging, any one of the CMS systems (which were admittedly in their infancy at the time), as I was a software engineer, I felt the compulsion to roll my own blogging platform, and that rapidly turned into a fool's errand.  I'd gut and rewrite the platform underneath the posts, trying to add context-sensitive link suggestion, to tune performance and make modular systems that could be templated and extended, automatic sarcasm heuristics, and I would actually become so obsessed with the blogger that I never actually took the time to blog, and that proceeded to iterate through several cycles until it eventually petered out a few years later.

One force is a friend, whom we'll call Grumples.  I met Grumples in Austin, where we both lived, nearly ten years ago.  I left Austin in 2002, about a year after the last job opening had skipped town, and once Grumples forgave me for taking her best friend (also, my wife) with me, we struck up a long and fruitful friendship via Instant Messenger which was, quite frankly, much better than it had been when we saw each other face-to-face twice a week.  Last year I encouraged her to start a blog of her own, which led eventually to this conversation:

Me: so the fact that you're a blogger makes me feel like I'm much more up-to-date on how you've been for the last month or so. 

grumples: indeed

grumples: where i practically know nothing about you

grumples: which means you should start a blog to help me out with these details

It was true -- I was keeping various other people up-to-date on my goings-on via e-mail or IRC or IM or text message and thus not everybody was on the same page.  I considered mass e-mails, for about 10 seconds, and then decided "hey, blog.  Seems reasonable."  Also, Grumples seems to enjoy maintaining her blog, http://chickenmonkeys-and-goatchimps.blogspot.com/, and that provides a positive role model to encourage the behavior.

But now that we've got all of this impetus to blog, what would the blog be about?  I have a great job which I'd only be able to complain about vaguely and intermittently.  I have tiny creative interests, ranging from the aforementioned writing to origami, teaching myself to play the piano, and can always lean on the day-to-day details of my life and struggle futilely to the challenge of making them interesting.  But another IM conversation comes to mind.

Me: So, what's the weekend plan like? 

grumples: sunday night a horror movie night group (look, i'm branching out [...])

Me: why do you feel the need to defend the movie choices?

Me: am I really that transparently judgemental with films?

grumples: yes

Me: that, btw, is what my blog would mostly wind up being

grumples: i'd like to read that

I am indeed an avid consumer of culture, very particular about what I like, and even more so about things that I don't like.  I read a lot, although I have recently entered a dry spell where my reading was limited to The Big Sleep, James McPherson's brilliant Battle Cry of Freedom,  and Java documentation.  I have a very large movie collection, amassed due to some midwestern nesting instinct where we're so scared by the prospect of being snowed in for a week that we can't imagine being without a wide selection of Clint Eastwood movies.  The collection covers my walls and can fill any idle hour you throw at it in any mood at all.  I have also discovered that television is much better than it was in my childhood, and that television is even more fun  to watch, binge-style, on DVD.

And so, as intimated in the second IM conversation I cited, I strongly suspect that this blog will consist primarily of being extremely judgmental about the things which, in an earlier part of my career when I was involved with Yahoo! Shopping, would have been considered "Type 1 Items":  Books, Movies, Music.  (Type 3 was Computers, Electronics, Software, and Video Games, and Type 2 was everything else -- shoes, handbags, clothes, kitschy jewelry, mail-order brides...)

I'm also a NaNoWriMo participant (and, in 2009, a winner!) and am teaching myself the piano, so let's assume that entries in November will involve a lot of discussion of writing progress, and that periodically I'll mention that I just learned to play a new song.

A last notable element of the blog will consist of project updates.  I usually embark on "complete works" type projects -- read every Sherlock Holmes novel and story, in order, watch every episode of BSG in order, read every play Shakespeare ever wrote, in rough publication order (that's hard -- it's not like we've got a stack of Playbills sitting around which show us the original casts and premiere dates.)  I'd expect reviews of each of those, grouped into watching project order.

One final note:  a constant feature request which doomed the software development cycle of MattJournal was the constant requests of my readers for a comments section.  Blogger provides this free of charge.  I'll open those up, but I'll have them set to moderated.

And with that, l'aventure commence!  Let's see how frequently I wind up writing.