Sunday, September 26, 2004

That First Post: Bandwagons and the Introduction to Myself

Hmmm. A blog. My chance to shout at the world and be heard. Disseminate my insights and knowledge to the masses.

What a crock.

No one is going to read this, and if they do, I pity them. See - I'm pitying you right now. I've needed to start journaling some of my random thoughts for a while, if only to get them out of my head and make it less cluttered. I tried writing little journal notes to myself, but now my computer hard drive is cluttered with them. So consider this my virtual pensieve*.

Topics will range from my fibre hobbies (knitting, crochet, cross stitch and hardanger), to my music hobbies (playing French horn, piano, and my occasional attempts to learn to play a carillon), my family (husband, cats, parents, siblings) and friends, my current day job (PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Toronto , studying language variation and change) and my previous job (desktop publishing, layout and output technician at a DTP service bureau, printing everthing from press-ready 4-colour film & colour-matching proofs to colour photocopies and large colour posters), which keeps coming back to haunt me.

The run-on sentences are a bonus for the reader. My thoughts, your bad luck. I'll try to update at least once a week. The URL might change to be hosted on my website, once I decide if I want to continue this and figure out how much server space I have there. So perhaps this is actually a test-run of my virtual pensieve.

I have political and religious opinions, but I'll have to be pretty provoked to air them here. Having been on the internet since pre-WWW, I have developed a keen sense of self-editing before hitting "send". Never forget that anything put here is for public consumption, and has the potential to stick around forever, unlike things said in person. That goes for anyone who sees fit to comment on my blog. I've found old email archives from usenet groups I posted to in the early 90s. Damn. Longevity can be a harsh mistress.

The title of this blog, btw, was the brainchild of my husband. It is sometimes useful to have a pun-meister in the house.


*And if you haven't read any Harry Potter yet, don't waste your time here, get on with it! There's a difference between jumping on a bandwagon vs. stubbornly avoiding something really good because you don't want to appear to anyone, particularly yourself, as if you're jumping on a bandwagon. Hence the reason I now have a blog.

And if you simply "don't like that kind of book", then my pity for you now knows no bounds.