[random][geek] Why a blog?

The above title should be spoken in as close to a Groucho Marx voice as you can get... Think "Why a duck?" and you'll be in the right ballpark. If you're more politically inclined than geeky, the content ratio of this blog has probably been your cup of tea. If you're geekily inclined you've probably wondered if I'm going to actually add any substantive geek content, of if I'm gonna stay stuck on stupid and continue to rant about politics. The answers are "Yes, I'm going to add some 'real' geek content" and "Yes, I'm probably going to stay stuck on stupid". I like politics too much to not write about them, and for the last few months politics have weighed most heavily upon my mind. Given my political orientation, this should come as no surprise, and I've found writing to be a great release. I think another factor in my decisions about what to write has been some insecurity about my own geek credentials... When I opened this blog, I had every intention of writing about coding, trends, toys, neat stuff I'd learned or read or stumbled across. As I started posting though, I began to get cold feet. Politics comes easy - I'm secure enough in my political beliefs that whipping out a rant and posting it on the Web comes easily to me. Writing about geek stuff? Not so much. You see, I started off as a political animal - then the Cold War ended and the Bush 1's recession kicked in, and I found myself conducting (and eventually supervising) survey research for a political marketing firm in Boston. This led to a job doing data editing and validation for a major research firm in Maryland, where I started programming surveys in a proprietary language. From there, I wound up with a programming job with another major research firm. I had been programming for 5 or 6 years before I started to learn any languages other than specialized procedural languages for coding surveys. My first 'real' (ie., marketable) languages? Visual Basic 6 and MS Access VBA, which I was able to transmute into some 'real' programming gigs. You see the roots of my insecurity? I have no formal training in any of this stuff, and my first 'real' language was a widely ridiculed one... Fortunately, along the way, I've picked up a decent mastery of T-SQL (MS SQL Server-flavored) and I've been able to move on to C#. At this point, I'm being paid to have fun: learn new stuff, write code, work on a good product... And slowly, I'm coming to realize that I might have some stuff to offer on this front - I just have to work up the courage to start tossing it out there. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to try and refrain from political content and focus on other topics. Maybe some music; maybe some books, some TV, some movies. But definitely, more geek content. The request line is open.