I started dabbling in C++ in the late 90's, writing my first "hello world" program in like 1997 out of some book I bought at Border's because it included a version of Code Warrior that ran on MacOS 7.5. I thought the program was hella corny at the time ("hello world"? please...) but as I got older, I came to appreciate it as a rite of passage when taking those first tentative steps on a new digital journey.
I have started dozens of short-lived blogs, and I don't have any delusion this one will be any different, but in this fraught historical moment, I feel compelled to write down a contemporaneous record of my thoughts and ideas to keep from going crazy. My intended topics are my old favorites: music, technology, and mechanics, but I can't address those topics thoroughly without getting prescriptive, and getting prescriptive means getting political. Like Skunk Anansie said in 1996, "Everything's political."
Any views expressed here are my own, but even then, only as of the writing - my "views" are subtle, nuanced, and in constant flux - I tend to believe that's the only responsible way to be given the unprecedented information streams we're all struggling to process these days. While I strive to base my views on the best available information, "best available" is laughably subjective and, on top of that, I fall short all the time, getting hung up on my own assumptions and prejudices. I'm just trying to articulate and iterate to improve, let's see how I do.