Rock and Roll McDonald's

Get your nerd on

I'll be attending the Seattle Mindcamp tomorrow. If you're going and see me there, say hi.

Introduction

Many years ago (it's frightening exactly how many years ago), I attempted to write a weekly column for the student newspaper at the University of Washington, where I was attending school.

How hard could it be, I wondered, to write a few hundred words each week? As it turned out, it was excruciatingly painful. In the world of writers, there are speeders and there are bleeders. I'm a bleeder who's low two pints -- I only attempted the column for one academic quarter; in a ten-week period I missed some three or four columns. Of the ones written, only two or three were worth reading. The problem, I discovered, is that once your initial pool of ideas is exhausted, you have to find something new, something interesting, some novel angle. After a handful of columns, I ran dry, and was unable to come up with original views or delude myself into thinking that I did. That experience made me leery of having a blog since I didn't want to end up in either of the ruts many weblog authors fall into: regurgitating what everyone else is saying and linking to, or documenting the minutiae of their daily existence.

For the past two years I've kept a LiveJournal account. However, I've kept all the entries limited to people on my "friends" list. For me, this was basically a half-assed way of keeping a blog (but an easy way of keeping up with some friends with minimal effort). The problem is that because you already know everyone (and everyone knows you), whatever you say is inherently interesting. If I go to a coffeeshop and spill my mocha all over myself, that's interesting because the audience cares in some way. If my writing is sub-par, it doesn't matter (standards are certainly lower), and I can fill space with "taffy is good" posts, the latest quiz-of-the-week saying what color M&M I am, and the fact that they burned my pizza at lunch. Who cares? My friends will keep reading -- maybe not as closely, but they'll keep up because I'm terrible at staying in touch and it's an easy way to see what I've been doing.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work quite as well in a public arena; there may be some of you who have arrived here because you know me in various contexts (probably, in this order: as a member of a certain rock band, as a UW CSE student, as a friend, a friend of a friend, maybe as family) and are curious. Eventually, whether or not you spend your attention here is going to be based on your answer to one question: "Does he have anything to say that's worth hearing?" (on the other hand, if you want to know what color M&M I would be, friend me on my LiveJournal account -- if you can figure out my id).

The downside to a private/limited readership, though, is that you miss out on the greatest part of this medium: the dialogue, the interactions that I see in others' public blogs/journals, and the community that follows between people that have never actually met each other. Interesting, thought-provoking discussions that would likely never take place in the physical world; certainly not as easily and from as wide a range of informed people. Missing out on that is missing out on a big piece of the best of what this new medium has to offer. And that is what I hope to get, in some way, from this -- as well as a place where I can dust off the writing chops.

If you've made it this far, welcome! I hope you stick around. Taffy is good.