First post. Hello, world!
I have spoken to others in my small circle–people who have a lot more to say about the world than I do, generally–about starting their own blogs. Curiously, they tend to dig their heels in and refuse. My father, who generally has the most fascinating things to say of almost anyone I’ve ever met, mostly because he’s had a ringside seat at a lot of 20th century history, is mum. Another beloved, Horgan (H.L. Schurr) who has the best rants, ever, is also word-shy. Dad has written nine fiction books full of cool stuff, mixing science fiction with memoirs. Morgan…has at least nine books worth of fantasy and steam-punk ideas stored away. I’ve seen six pages so far, and they’re quite fine. I wish they’d find a way to write publicly. I’m a freaking web master. I built and customized Dad’s (empty) blog, also a Wordpress thing. Yo, Morgan! I’ll host your blog, too!
“Hello world” is one of those things you always do when you first learn to program in a new language. I’ve lost count of the number of languages I’ve programmed in. Hmm…uh…Basic, Assembly, VAX VMS (is that a language? maybe not), Fortran IV, C, maybe a smidgen of Visual Basic, LISP, oh, what is that thing that’s a lot like C that they used to use for undergraduate CS people? And then there is web tech scripting: PHP, XHTML, CSS, a little Python… my memory fails me. If you don’t use them daily, you lose the details.
When I was in undergraduate engineering at the University of Virginia, they had their own humanities department in the engineering school, and they made us read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, of which I remember little except that every chapter was Chapter One. Always Hello World, always Chapter One. Whew. And then I look around one day and ta-da! I’ve written a 500-page draft of a novel! Whoa.
And yes, I’m actually on the fourth book of a series. No, I haven’t really edited them properly. This one’s meandering around, keeping me company, basically, but it hasn’t bothered to tell me HOW I’m going to get there (plot points) from here. It will in time, I’m sure. Always the first step. Always with the patience.
And, eventually, I’ll be updating this silly blue theme to match the rest of the site. Of course, by saying this, I’ve doomed myself…