I never really got personal blogs.  Still don’t.  I am not really sure if it is my personal disdain for the rampant sensationalism that has developed across our culture (media, government, marketing, etc.), or perhaps I just perceived it as a waste of time.  Now it appears that it is my waste of time, and I have to assure myself, like any other person out there with a blog with similar hesitations, that it is not a waste of time nor for attention, but an outlet that I can use to communicate, even if just with myself.

Why now?  Am I not riding in on the waves of the web that are just mere echos of yesterday?  One thing I have noticed is that my pattern of behavior has changed in the way I use the Internet.  I still use email very heavily, but I no longer bother to organize it much, and I have found that it has moved from being the electronic equivalent of a letter, to the electronic equivalent of a sticky note.  I really cannot express myself on a sticky note.  I also find myself relying less on searching for information, and turning to several key sources for news, support for my job, and other miscellany in life via several key blogs.  I enjoy the more expanded view of information delivered in this fashion, some fact, some opinion, and the various commentary, that all ties together into a nice package of information for me then to digest and explore further.

So again, why now?  What is so special about this day, that I would make this jump onto the edge of the blog-sphere?  Well, today marks my 15th anniversary of being directly involved on the web.  I was a sophomore at the University of Tennessee and I got my first lesson in HTML, what the “World Wide Web” was, and an introduction to a strange program called Mosaic, from Bill Rosen, the “webmaster” for the university.  Now I had been programming for years, a little here and there, in various simple languages, but something about HTML and the Web just clicked with me, and I have been hooked ever since.

So over the years, as I moved into my career, I started moving away from the front end of the web, and gravitating more towards IT; servers, networking, protocols, and the like.  The inner-workings of technology is my true passion, and with technology being dynamic by definition, I find that I get to learn and dive deeper into this subject every day.  In the meantime, UI’s were changing, what you could do on the client side was changing.  Content got separated from style, and everything became modular, wigitized if you will.  I never really lost touch entirely with how the web was changing, but due to the granular nature of my work and learning, I certainly lost some perspective on the social and personal aspects of the applications of this technology.  Over time, it has actually made learning and discovering technology less pleasing to me, though it took several years to properly identify this as the cause of my loss of passion for the web.

So the goal today, and for the future, is to utilize the technology and skills that I have been a part of for fifteen years, and re-enter the land of the light, take part in the communities that have built up around these technological foundations, and just see what all the hubbub is about.