I started this blog all the way back in 2003. I’m writing this about page in 2025, so that’s 22 years already. When I set up the blog initially it wasn’t to use it as a personal site. I was interested in mobile at the time, and found the idea of read/write sites along with mobile to be a particularly interesting intersection of evolving technologies. So I was working on a mobile blogging client for the Palm series of devices, and I just needed a Wordpress install to test against. So I installed one for myself.
Once it was up and running I started posting to it every once in a while. At the beginning just to have some good test content there to exercise the app with. But I found that the journaling practice agreed with me overall. I had also just moved to Silicon Valley and was going to events, participating in interest groups, just meeting interesting new people. And the practice of sitting down to try to digest what was happening every once in a while really helped to structure and coalesce my own thoughts out of everything that was getting poured in.
The older posts in here aren’t anything special. They’re just a stream of consciousness from someone immersing themselves in the Silicon Valley that existed in the early 2000s. Which was a very cool place, but not super relevant any more. But getting rid of these posts completely doesn’t seem right either. Years after I started this blog I also had one called This is Mobility that got a lot more traffic and eventually had a ton more content. That one I got rid of completely once it didn’t really seem relevant to where the mobile industry had ended up. That felt right. But I don’t think this set of posts is ready to go. And maybe I’m not done digesting all the stuff I need to process.
Sometimes I do go back through the posts here to remind myself of things that got buried under years and years of new experiences. That’s a pretty marginal utility. Lots of the links are broken because the sites disappeared decades ago. And there’s probably missing media, and maybe some messed up formatting from when I moved this from Wordpress to different versions of static site generation. I have gotten the odd ping from someone landing on one of the posts and trying to dig up the old info. Unfortunately I don’t have anything more than what’s up here. The best I can suggest is to use the links that are still around to try to dig info out of the wayback machine. And if you do dig up something useful maybe toss them a donation while you’re there. Keeping some of this old info alive is a labor of love, but not always easy.