First post

Here goes. My first blog. I was daydreaming at work today, trying to figure out how to use a Citrix portal to run Windows applications on my Linux machine (warning! geek alert!), and something itched in me making me think that I ought to write a blog. If my youngest brother can make a blog as a puny college frosh, then certainly I'm up to the task.

Obviously, this software makes it easy enough for Grandma to make one. So that's not the challenge. I think it was probably a discussion with CB the other day about Lent: I said I wasn't giving anything up, but that if I you're going to do something unusual for forty days, you might as well make it proactive, like writing in a diary. She asked if I kept one, and I said that I only did when I was younger, still figuring out how the world. Now that I'm omniscient, what's the point?

But I think the more important issue (besides my omniscience) is that diaries are solipsistic. Sure, there are some things you can write in a diary that you wouldn't post publicly on the web; so it has its own niche. But after writing in a diary, I realized that the only reason why I was doing it was out of some self-centered hope for postmortal Anne Frank-esque fame. It's pretty naive and solipsistic to think that anyone, much less a large number of people will give a hoot about that kind of stuff once you're gone. Andy Warhol stored boxes and boxes of crap--shoelaces, trinkets, magazines--that some poor historian had to sift through eventually. He gets away with it because he's Andy Warhol. The rest of us, with much less than even fifteen minutes in the limelight, can't bank on that much.

But, the critics say, who will read it? (AD, I'm thinking of you on this one.) True, true, but the same argument can be levied against writing about the determination of Vub from exclusively reconstructed charmless semileptonic decays of the B meson, a piece of writing to which I devote a much larger fraction of time and which has a much smaller audience (let's be real--there are at most 5 people in the world who will ever read my disseratation, and probably not a single one of them will make it all the way through; who could blame them?). So the small-audience argument by itself does not discredit the medium.

I could keep going, but I wonder how this is going to look, so time to publish...

p.s. Is it possible to edit these posts easily? Only one way to find out.