Obligatory first post

I put up my first web page back in the 90s, but I've resisted blogging for years, partly because I'm anti anything that smacks of being hip and trendy, and partly because I was put off by much of the style of the so called "A-list" bloggers -- you know, the ones who post six times a day, consider their words to be equivalent to those engraved on the tablets handed down from the Mount, and write articles which consist solely of things like:

"This is cool."

Cool in what way? Rad windsurfer cool or nerdy cool or script kiddy kewl or ...? You really couldn't write five words to describe why I should follow that link? Having been a software architect for much of my career, I'm pretty familiar with the whole "Terse == Knowledgeable" theme, but I don't buy into it. To be fair most of the tech blogs, at least the ones which aren't about blogging itself, do better than the standard A-list genre.

Dan Bricklin's blog is one that I've followed for years and is pretty close to what I aspire to. He only writes when he's got something to say and the posts are spaced out enough that I can keep up without having to check three times a day. If I've got real work to do for a day or three, I won't have to catch up on eighteen new posts. It helps that he's interested in a similar range of topics -- software engineering, the business of software, intellectual property, open source, photography, etc. Brough Turner has a similar blog in different technology space, principally focusing on mobile, but more generally all types of communications. One thing that they both do well is tie technology to its business and social context so it's not a pure geek fest.

If you catch me backsliding by posting drivel or using oh-so-trendy terms like blogosphere, feel free to send a cyber-slap my way. My one nod to blogging culture is to choose a faux-edgy blog name which is a play on my initials and the popular engineer's retort RTFM (Read The Fine Manual) from back in the days when users had manuals printed on dead trees. Not a very original idea, of course. That URL on Blogger was taken ages ago and hosts, like so many others, a place holder blog.