Why am I doing this?

There are people who start a blog to give the world an opportunity to bask in the glow of their opinions. That's not why I'm doing this.

I do, of course, have my own ideas about things but nobody really has a compelling need to hear them. Only a small number of people are deeply troubled when they find that the scope of their opinions exceeds the boundaries of their expertise. I doubt that I'm any exception to this general rule.

So why am I writing? It's definitely not so that I can add one more shrill voice to what passes for public discourse in this day and age. Actually, I'm writing for work reasons. I want to learn more about creating blogs and since you learn best by doing (an opinion!) I'm creating this one. Still, I'll try not to waste the time of anybody who who takes the trouble to read it.

It's not false modesty, of course, to say that I anticipate the tiniest reading audience imaginable. My only reader, in fact, may end up being some scholarly drudge in a future era who uses this blog as source material for his PhD dissertation on the lives of obscure people at the dawn of the Internet era. That's the breaks, I guess.

As for what I'm planning to write about, I intend to focus most of my attention on the books that I read, on the (mostly home) projects I'm involved in and on my assorted hobbies and (very limited) travels. I'll do my best to address larger issues only if they occur within eyeball range of wherever I happen to be sitting at the time they happen. In other words, I will do my best to focus my attention only on those areas where I can claim to write with some small amount of authority.

As for why this blog has the title and url I've given it, that's a subject for a future posting.