Who, What, Why?

As I contemplated starting this blog, I asked myself, Why do I want to write this? What am I going to write? Who would I be writing it for? And, does the world really need another blog?

My main motivation, and the main source of content that I foresee writing here, stems from the knack that I seem to have for encountering strange problems in my work - problems that do not lend themselves to solution by a quick search on Google. I end up searching all the documentation that I can find, googling the whole world, searching half a dozen different forums, and then experimenting till I find the answer.

Most of the time, I'm absolutely certain that someone else has run into the problem - the problems are not that far out there - but either no one has written about it, or I haven't found the magic combination of terms to put into the search engines to find it. So I want to share some of the things that I have learned, and hope that the search engines will pick it up and make available for the next guy that runs into a similar problem.

But I also, from time to time, feel like I have things to say in other areas of life as well. So this may end up being a strange mixture, and I'll see if anybody actually read it!

Geeks Have a Life, Too

My self-assessment is that I am, indeed, a bonafide geek. I'm a career-long software engineer (computer programmer to laymen). I have 4 computers in my house. I'd rather look it up on Mapquest than carry an atlas in my car. And I haven't kept a check register since 1990 when I started using Quicken.

I spend 8+ hours a day in a cubicle working on computers, and then, most nights, I come home and work on my own computer projects, mostly web sites I'm working on, because that's what I enjoy.

But computers do not define my life. I do have a real life. I have a group of real life (not facebook) friends that I see regularly. I love to country western dance, and have friends that I see on my nights out there, usually once or twice a week. I am active in my church (Bent Tree Bible Fellowship), and have several close friends there.

While I expect a lot of my postings to be technology related, I feel like I am grappling with significant issues in the real, more relevant aspects of my life - my walk with God, and my relationships with others - and I feel like, from time to time, I will have something worth writing about in those areas as well.

Thanks for joining me. I hope that you find something of value in my occasional musings in this space.