New Beginnings

When I first started blogging—or at least made my initial attempt at something resembling blogging—it was “way” back in 2004. (Hey, in “Internet time”, 6 years ago is practically ancient history.) As fast as technology and innovation continues to march forward, the online world was a bit different back then. Blogging in general was experiencing explosive growth during that period. This was a forerunner to the new “Web 2.0″ generation of social media, when the now ubiquitous Facebook was in its infancy, and Internet darling Twitter was, at best, merely an idea. Today, the “social” Internet has become a part of the daily lives of millions worldwide, yet more traditional long-form blogging continues to grow and evolve, and is here to stay, in some form.

My previous forays into blogging were on again, off again, from about 2004 to 2008. People seemed to like reading what I had to say—sometimes to my surprise—but updates were sporadic, and there were frequently large gaps between posts. Looking back, I’m not sure what the problem was. While blogging had become a very popular thing at the time—and many sites from that period have long since disappeared—I wasn’t doing it for any sort of recognition. I had plenty of things to write about, but just didn’t get it done. Whatever the reason, after about a year passed since that final post in 2008, with the site fallow, I finally decided to retire it, though the site remained online, until recently. People grow and evolve throughout their lives, and I believed I had grown out of it, and it didn’t quite properly reflect who I am.

I podcast with Geek Cred, I post idle amusements, frustrations, and what have you on Twitter, I rant and interact with like-minded geeks on IRC—and love to, and will continue to do so—but life isn’t limited to 140 characters, or to plain text—I’ve been itching to return to such a rich-text, long-form format, but this time, giving blogging more attention as it deserves, and I have something to say more than ever.

I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. In my mind—and, admittedly, based on some personal experience—such resolutions will all but certainly eventually be broken. While I can understand the sentiment behind them, if you’re really serious about changing a habit, or doing something new, you certainly don’t (and shouldn’t) wait until the beginning of another year. So I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. But if I did, they would probably include three simple points: More podcasting, more blogging, and more writing. You could even further boil this down to a single point: be more creative. And if anything’s worth doing, it’s worth doing now, so there’s no time like the present to get started.

Many know the slogan “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.” As far as I’m concerned, that applies just as much  (and possibly even more so!) to creativity. I have already and will most surely continue to lose sleep due to late nights, and in the end, I may end up failing miserably. Some months down the road, this web site might face a similar fate as it’s predecessor, gathering virtual dust on a hard drive inside some server, but sometimes you have to stop worrying about failure, about what might happen, and just do it.

“Disbelief is the enemy.”

—J.C. Hutchins, Author of 7th Son & Personal Effects: Dark Art

Here’s to new beginnings. Here’s to creativity. Because it’s not about having a voice, it’s about using that voice—and that is worth doing, and worth believing in!

Let the journey begin…