random… very random

I started by putting my site up many years ago. I’ve never had much traffic, not even when the band I was in was doing pretty well.

Did I care? No, not really. My server on the Web was for me, a place to dump files so I could get them remotely. A place for me to try new code and designs out and a central point for my family and friends to get photos or music I had made.

Someone linked to my homepage once, and I’ve seen my site crawled by various spiders and bots but that’s about it for my online life until now.

Anyway, I signed up for a blog because I wanted to see what blogging services were like. How do the rest of the world do it? People who don’t really want to mess around with running a server, or writing code. So here we are; my WordPress blog.

I’ve read quite a few blogs, but never really got into the whole “blogging” culture. I’ve never really seen the point and have tended to think that most personal sites (to be fair, including my own) suck. What’s the point if you don’t have anything to say? I started thinking about why people blog, and how most blogs are pretty dull.

That led me to thinking of a more interesting question. Why do people read blogs? In looking at a few of these “online conversations” (which incidentally I have read and have been told that joining in on them is the best way of getting your voice out there into the blogsphere), I am constantly amazed that anyone bothers at all.

I love making and listening to music. If I can combine making stuff, electronics or computers with music, so much the better!

I spend most of my day coding, looking at code or planning code. Why, therefore, would I use my time out of hours doing the same thing?

Well, to be honest it’s because I enjoy it.

As a kid, I spent most of my time hacking around computers, learning how to code assembler, BASIC, Forth. The rest of my time I spent making or listening to music, gluing things together or sticking wires into electrical sockets to see what would happen.

These were the things that stopped me being a cool kid, but somehow I never cared. To be honest I still don’t care.

Electronics, software, Lego, paper and glue… Face it, finding out how stuff works is fun, and making new stuff from that knowledge is even more fun.

Once, we had two dogs - Jasper and Scrappy.

They reached an incredible age and when they died, they left a huge hole in our lives. Such a big hole can only be filled by something equally huge, so we looked around and found Scooby.

Our wonderful puppy.

Is this worth a thousand words?

I hope so, as I’ve never been particularly good at writing a lot.

Urgh. I hate being put on the spot like that. Is it lunchtime yet?