On Introductions

I generally can't stand the things.  An introduction is, generally, this pesky thing that stands in the way of me and whatever I want to write.  Surely, if I just dive in and strew the jumbled contents of my over-exited mind across the screen pell-mell, you can follow, yes?  But, alas, this is not so, typically.

Crucially, an introduction forces one to choose what one is going to say.  Which, in this case, is an unknown.  Most blogs I've seen have an introduction of sorts laying out a goal for the blog, and in this case there is none, other than a hazy desire to write down for general consumption (now there's a scary thought) some of the reflections knocking about in my head, or perhaps things I've learned that might be of use to someone else.  I'm only starting this at all because my D&D game got canceled today, and I have an hour or so to kill before heading off to free Salsa, and an hour or so is insufficient time to bake bread, or do laundry, although it is probably enough time to do some cleaning, but I'm deciding it's not on the unassailable grounds that I don't feel like cleaning right now.

Perhaps I shall tabulate what I might write about, with absolutely no guarantee that I will ever actually get around to it.  My accentuated tendencies towards superlative verbosity make it rather unlikely I could ever manage to keep to some sort of schedule, given the difficulty of balancing the time commitment necessary to relinquish all my most-favored multi-syllabic words to the screen with the myriad other distractions I am so skilled at creating for myself.  (Case in point - the preceding paragraph consists of two sentences.)

Possible topics:

• Matlab and the joys thereof
• An idiot's guide to processing gravity data
• Social dancing and the joys (and travails) thereof
• A miser's guide to starvation avoidance in Vancouver
• Easy (and maybe some not so easy) styles to do with long hair
• Musings on feminism and geophysics
• Volcanos
• Reflections on culture
• Harping and Celtic music
• Miscellaneous rants and diatribes

I anticipate this being an interesting experiment.  Now that I've written that, I suppose I must follow by setting up the proper proposal for said experiment.  Flex those grad student muscles, as it were.

Hypotheses to test:

1. The readership of this blog will be limited to a handful of my friends/relatives
2. I will actually write more than 2-3 posts total
3. What I write will be of value to someone else

Methodology:

1. Finish, and publish introductory post
2. Finish, and publish, additional posts
3. Wait
4. Conceive a ridiculous quantitative way to tabulate the results, if possible by using 3-D isosurfaces in Matlab.

(To do: write more real-world proposals so I can satirize them more effectively)

Another thing I despise: conclusions.  As this would be the "tell you what I've told you" part of the writing process, here's what I told you: I'm writing a blog.  The blog will contain stuff, most of it completely unrelated to the other stuff.  People might read the stuff, and I might write other stuff, that people might then also read.  The people who read the stuff might like it.

(I am rather fond of the word "stuff".)

El fin.