Every Story has a Beginning

I can hear it already.  “Really?  You’re starting a blog?  Now?  Haven’t you missed the boat by 20 years?”

Yes.  Still, now, more than ever, the time has come for me to finish a project that I started back in the 1990s.  The process of making a digital home for my thoughts, ideas and images on the Web has been a long one and it’s taken more time than I thought it ever would.

Way back in the early 1990s, you have to realize that things were much more “primitive” than they are now.  We barely had a World Wide Web.  The Gopher protocol, which was completely text menu based, was still quite common for data sharing.  And network speeds were slow – so slow that you’d have to seriously think twice before you used images in a web page.  After all, if there were too many images, it would take forever to load and many end users would just navigate away without reading anything.

Oh, just one more thing.  No such thing as mobile devices as we know them now.  None of this screen-permanently-attached-to-your-face  syndrome going on back then.  The first real flip-phone came into common usage in 1996…

All of these factors worked together to keep this project on a back burner.  Never completely forgotten, but certainly not implemented with all the timeliness that I would have liked.  But times have changed and technology has made what seemed impossible totally doable.

“In retrospect, it is both amazing and sad to see just how much of my work has been scattered to the four winds.”

Fast forward 30 or so years.  Social media is everywhere.  We have Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and probably another dozen or more places for a person to publish their thoughts.  These well known platforms are popular and centralized, which makes it brainlessly easy for people to keep up with posts that interest them.  What is left unsaid is that you are at the tender mercies of the site owner at all times.  You can be blocked, censored, even thrown into “jail” for posting something that goes against some random (or politically driven) agenda.  An agenda that may or may not be published, and may change at whim, in less than a moment’s notice.

This site is mine – 100% of it.  I’m the final arbiter of what stays or goes, what can or cannot be said.  And the only way that I end up with a 30 day authoring ban is if I choose to take the time off.

Another real plus in hosting your own blog site (separate from, say, the freebie sites hosted at WordPress) is that I can use the system to show my own art work without having to worry about quotas, NSFW censorship or bandwidth limitations.  I pay for what I use, so it’s all mine.  No more free rides!

This isn’t my first foray into public authorship – I’ve been doing it since college.  In retrospect, it is both amazing and sad to see just how much of my early work has been scattered to the four winds.  I’m hoping to slow the leakage down by having a single place for everything to live now.

One of my previous employers really impressed upon his staff that in order to be relevant in today’s world, you need to be out there, seen and read, ready and open for discussions.  Oh, we complained loudly about the writing deadlines, but I can see in retrospect that he was stone cold right.  It is a true blessing that he left up most of my previous articles after I left.  I’ll be freshening some of those up and interspersing them (sparingly) with new content as the days go by.  My goal is to have two articles published each week: Mondays will be a general interest piece and Thursdays will be something business related.

Let me touch on this topic up front…  If you see things that don’t work, such as buttons that do nothing for now, I know.  This web site is a work in progress.  You’ll have the same satisfaction in watching it grow as I’ll have in making it grow.  Same applies to blog sections that are not there (nothing until I post in that category) or galleries that are missing photos (until I put some out there, ya got nothing).  I know that there’s more to do.  This project is far from over.  For now, please be content with the growing blog.  I’ll make more announcements as things come along in the future days.

So, in conclusion, let me offer you a final welcome to my playground.  Enjoy your visit and come back as often as you like.  If I had to summarize the experience in one lyric, it would be this one, penned by Keith Emerson and Greg Lake:

We would like it to be known
The exhibits that were shown
Were exclusively our own
All our own, all our own