thing13

Just thought I’d point it out: it’s been one of those years.

More accurately, actually, it’s been dramatically unlike one of those years.

In a nutshell, I found something a bit like a direction in January 2005. This was a dramatic change: before then, I’d been floating around as a biology student, then a freelance science writer, biology tutor and web designer… and all along, a band member and all-round self-assessment-tax-form-dreader/dodger.

There was this a constant feeling of not knowing what the hell was going on, brought on by the fact that I didn’t have a clue what the hell was going on.

It wasn’t all bad. Vague directionlessness can be a good thing. But more often than not, this was vague directionlessness in a bad way.

Anyway: in the blink of an eye, things seem to be a different. At the start of this year, I got a job here in Edinburgh and it was good. I’ve lived here for about 11 years, so it was about bloody time.

And soon, I’m moving to London. I’m going to be starting a new job, and a bit of a new life. A bit bloody exciting.

So, amongst other things, I’ll aim to use this blog to keep a track of what happens next… for anyone who’s interested, for me, for the sake of it.

Just so you know.

OK, so maybe we started this at the wrong time. May as well be honest about it.

Though there are lots of things that I’d like to sit down and write about - and have those thoughts kept somewhere, which was the general idea - I don’t seem to have time. I’m barely finding time to wash up, fer gawdsake.

I am making lots of web-related headway, which I’d like to write about… soon. It’s all centred around mixing CSS and DOM-based Javascript, and it’s all rather exciting. If you like this sort of thing.

Anyway. Later.

Hello.

And so: here, with just a click, we are. Actually, there were quite a few of clicks, and a small amount of dragging.

Where all this will end there’s no way of knowing. Where it began, now, we can be more specific: at work, while I was having a cup of coffee.

The thing is, even with several cups of coffee, it’s much easier to set up some blogging software than it is to do the rest. To write something that actually nudges the average up a bit.

There are so many articles about ‘what I thought on the bus on the way to work’ that it’s just-not-funny-any-more. If you want to read stuff that’s so dull that you’re forced into the foetal position, at least do it deliberately. Or get to know my workmate and his nosebleeds.

So, for the record, I shall aim to avoid nosebleed commentary.

By the way, on the subject of beginnings, I had a look around at what the blogs I read said in their first posts. Funny old things, these. Doug Bowman starts Stopdesign by saying it all pretty clearly, while Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits start in mid-flow. Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction opens with a change in geography, while John Gruber’s Daring Fireball crashes through the wall as it means to go on, with indispensable ‘Mac nerdery, etc.’ from the outset. John Hicks kicks off a new version of hicksdesign a bit tentatively, while Dunstan Orchard’s now defunct blog begins as a genuine diary.

If you try to find our father who art Jeffrey Zeldman’s beginnings, you’d better be up for a hunt. Zeldman.com goes back to the land that time forgot, before the web had worked out that it might be an idea to be able to retrace our steps… so you can only travel some of the way back with the aid of The WayBack Machine, where you’ll find pages that quite literally are ‘just so 1995’.

Anyway, I doubt this page will be so hard to find, should anyone be looking.

Hope you’re all well. I hope some of this is interesting to you. If not, you can always witter about it in your blog, right?