Saturday, April 5, 2008

The What and Why...

This being my first entry I think it appropriate to briefly touch on some background, not because it is particularly interesting, but because it will give context for what follows.

I've wanted to start posting for the better part of the past year. My main motivation was and is to provide a purpose for my tinkering with technology. I'm a computer scientist by trade but my interests often lead me beyond the familiar realm of software. Surveying my desk I'm reminded of countless projects, started, but not entirely finished. The primary reason for this isn't so much a lack of time as it is an absence of purpose for further effort. My initial drive is usually to satisfy a curiosity which often happens before the point of "completion" as one might traditionally think of it. That is, to say, once I see something is possible I loose interest and move on. Which brings me back to my motivation for writing here. My hope is that by documenting my tinkering I'll provide a further purpose to finish what I start.

This perhaps raises the question, of what specifically I'll be writing about? After all, "technology" is an infinitely broad subject. To answer I would say, the question you should be asking, having read the above paragraph, is, "what's on your desk?" Given the greater descriptive value of pixels over words, here is a picture of my desk. I must admit this photo is slightly contrived, I do own shelves. My desk isn't usually this cluttered, though it is often short of a clear slab. None the less, you can see there are a lot of random things in this picture, embedded computers, a bar code scanner, RF id readers, GPS and wifi antennas, iPods, and computers running the Linux, Windows, and Solaris operating system to name a few. In fact, the desk itself is a mash-up of a chest of drawers from Ikea conjoined with a slab of wood and steel pipes from The Home Depot.

Besides the purpose of this Blog, this photo also serves to illustrate its' title, "The Random Bit". Which is to say, simply, I plan to write about a variety of different stuff. It seems silly, but lack of a suitable title was the main obstacle to me starting this sooner. Despite intending to begin a number of times before now, I could never get past those first words, I think these three capture the theme well.

If there is something you are particularly interested in learning more about leave a note and I might oblige by tackling that first. Otherwise, readers or more probably just the Google crawler will be at the mercy of my scattered interests.