When I decided to embark upon this daily gush, I had two or three goals in mind. The first was to have something different on the web site every single day. The dead stuff in the pool thing was (or rather, is) fun, but inconsistent.
The second goal was to improve my communication skills. And the best way to do that is to exercise them. Considering that the last class I had in writing was a technical writing course over fifteen years ago (from which I took only this: "The passive voice should be avoided"), I am overdue for a little verbal calisthenics. After all, equations and programming can only get you so far in life. Making this column daily then satisfies the advice of some authors, who claim that one should write every day if one is at all serious about writing. And I intend to be quite serious at times.
Finally, I wanted to take the opportunity to express some of the thoughts that I have and share them with the readers of this page. I won't claim that my ideas will all be good, or profound, or even correct, but there may be the occasional grain of wheat amongst all of the chaff. When I take pictures, my ratio of good photos to duds is about 40 to 1. I hope that my performance with this column is somewhat better than that.
Of course, before I actually sat down to put virtual pen to paper, I had a million ideas for what I wanted to share. Now that I've started, writer's block has already set in. However, I am going to try to develop habits that will provide me with a constant flow of ideas. Actually, the ideas aren't the problem - it's remembering them long enough after I get out of the shower to get them "on paper" that is difficult. If only my Palm were waterproof...
Well, until I get an aquatic computer, I'll just have to make do with what I manage to generate in my dry state.
You can respond to my ranting here.
Old rants neither die nor fade away.