Back To Blogging

So it's been a really long time since I last blogged anything, and there're quite a few reasons for that. But I've decided to give blogging another try, if only for the opportunity to ramble on about my thoughts (read as: nothing in particular) without boring my friends and family. A blog is a strange thing - by it's nature, it's completely public; but to a degree it's also quite private because of it's anonymous nature - you probably don't know me, except by what you read here. And it also seems private because there's not much two-way conversation - sure, you can leave comments if you like, but if you don't, I don't know if anyone's even reading this. I could come up with some metaphor about releasing a post onto the net, in the same way that a small child might release a paper boat onto a river, never knowing whether it sinks around the corner, just out of sight, or whether it sails on to the sea, with other people noticing it on it's long journey - but I won't ;-)

But it is public, and while the odds are that no-one will read this, someone might - and would I really be writing this if I didn't think someone might read it? Possibly, but that's another issue - and while the odds are the someone who might read this doesn't know me, it's possible that they do. It's easy enough to google on my name and find this blog. And what you might not mind strangers reading, you might mind people you know reading - or vice versa, I guess. And what you might not mind friends and strangers reading, you wouldn't particularly want future employers, or your parents, or your children (if you have any) to read. So a blog is a very contradictory medium.

My aims with this blog hopefully aren't too contradictory - it's a place to put my thoughts, whether anyone reads them or not; it's a place where strangers or friends can maybe get to know me a bit better; it's a place where, if I ever do anything interesting, I can post about it and point friends and family to the post rather than having to repeat myself; and it may even, at times, be a place to say things that I would like people around me to know, but don't have the opportunity (or, in some cases, the guts) to say in real life - with the added advantage that I don't actually know if they've seen it, and they can choose to pretend that they haven't ;-)

The down side of this, which is some of the reasons that I gave up blogging before, is that firstly it takes a lot of time. More than you realise, and more than you intend when you sit down to write a quick post. Secondly, I tend to think about things while I'm riding my motorbike, or just before I fall asleep at night - not really a convenient time to haul out your laptop, or switch on your PC, or try to tap out a post on your PDA. So what I'd do before was make notes on a piece of paper, sometimes - but part of the function of blogging is as cathartic experience, and by the time I'd made detailed enough notes that I'd remember what I wanted to say in the morning, I lost the emphasis behind the idea and didn't really feel the need to go and post it. Which brings me neatly to another reason that I stopped blogging - that last sentence reminded me of a Snoopy cartoon (I actually have it on a noticeboard in my office) which I'd like to include here, except that it's such a mission to include pictures in a blog post. I have an account at a picture hosting site, but I have to log in there, find the picture, upload it, get the url, then post it in here with an tag (which I always forget the syntax for, even though it's ridiculously simple!). So a lot of the time it's just not worth the bother, since (like now), I'm typing this on my work laptop which I brought home for the weekend and which isn't connected to the net. But in the absence of the cartoon itself, I'll try to describe it: Snoopy's lying on top of his doghouse, at night; then he's lying on top of his doghouse, in the day - and he's saying to himself: "When you think about something at 3:00 in the morning ... and then again at noon the next day ... you get different answers." Which is true not only for coding (the reason I have it in my office), but also for deep thoughts in general - so maybe it's a good thing that I can't blog in the middle of the night when I can't sleep and lie there thinking deep thoughts about nothing in particular :-)

Anyway, given that I've just bought a laptop backpack, I can now bring my laptop home on my motorbike whenever I like - although it's pretty heavy, and I don't think I'll be doing it every day. But I'll probably bring it home every Friday, and I'll try to make a point of blogging at least once over the weekend, because I'm sure that there are millions of you out there waiting eagerly to hear what happened during the week ;-)