Introductions are one of those uncomfortable things that often make you have to think fast on your feet and come up with nice things to say about people. In the case of introducing a written piece I have the benefit of time, and an ability to edit. It follows, then, that I use the most excellent rhetoric I know to talk about my blog, which will be marvelous, stupendous, fascinating, witty, insightful, wide ranging and specialized. It will be so good that it makes you stop and think “I can’t believe I just read something so incredible” after each and every post.  Wow. Just writing that description almost made me want to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Now that I’m done lying I can start at the beginning, with my motives for creating a blog. The first is to practice my writing, which has always been one of my weak points.  The second, and strongest, is to learn something. I hope to use this blog to find interesting topics, research them, and report back you. In saying that I can’t promise that every post will be interesting to everyone, or even anyone. But I do have a few goals; Post at least once a week; Make any technical posts understandable to someone who doesn’t know anything about the field; Be as interesting as possible. Of course, this is a blog so it will have the requisite stories about my weekend and photographs of cats with ungrammatical statements. 

I would like to encourage as many of you as possible to comment. When it comes to user generated content there is a Pyramid. Generally about one percent of the population creates the content, ten percent interacts with it and the rest observe. For example, with Facebook one person might upload a photo, and then a few people will comment on it and many more people will look at the photo and read the comments. These comments add a tremendous amount of extra information, and context to the original content, and are as valuable and useful as the initial piece of content.