* private unsigned long lHugeNumber;
So, um... Captain BS?
Indeed, this is the alter-ego of mine that will inhabit these pages. The name was actually bestowed upon me a long time ago by my 8th grade science teacher. Back then, the nascent Internet was just beginning to crawl out into the daylight, and the hipster-geek who was Mr. B found himself smitten. For him, there was no greater joy than coupling with the terminal program on his Mac II to write poetry like the following:
psu% telnet wisconsin.edu
Connecting to wisconsin.edu...
wisconsin% telnet nebraska.edu
Connecting to nebraska.edu...
nebraska%
And so on. I spent many a lunch hour (the daily meeting of the school's informal science club) watching him do this.
One day, Mr. B decided that he would rather spend his afternoons telnetting around from place to place than teaching spring semester physical science, and he informed our class thusly: "Ladies and gentlemen, I have exciting news -- we're going to Mars!" [ineffectual pause for effect] "Rather than slogging through the textbook chapter by chapter, this semester we're going to take an imaginary trip to Mars, during which we will explore the red planet's history, geology, and relationship with our planet Earth.
"I will appoint one of you as the captain (and I think I have a pretty good idea who it will be " [he sent me a wink, as if to dispel any lingering doubt about my uber-teacher's-pet status] ") and he will -- err, he OR SHE!! " [damn that Title IX] " -- he or she will be responsible for steering the ship and leading us through our voyage."
A day later, the Captain had been identified and introduced.
"There really isn't that much you have to do," he explained to me at lunch one day. "Just break them up into groups... Have one group do some research at the library, maybe another can simulate our journey in a HyperCard stack" [riiiight... HyperCard...] " and don't forget we have some stuff about Mars on LaserDisc!"
Um.
"Hey, don't worry about it. If you run into trouble, just make something up... hey, with your initials, maybe I could call you Captain B.S.!!"
And that was that.
Charming, but what's your blog going to be about?
An excellent question, and one without a definitive answer.
Okay, so essentially you're making one of those blogs about nothing that just takes up space on one of Google's servers?
Well, I can't completely deny the charge, but it may be the case that, over time, various patterns and topical trends will bubble up through the electron-fabric of this here blog. For example:
- There will be geekery. Yes, that's why at the beginning of this entry I made a ha-ha using a footnote that declared a 64-bit integer in C++/C#/Java/probably 300 other languages. Yes, I am writing all of the HTML code for this blog by hand. (Okay, no I'm not.) Yes, I work for a Boston-area software startup. However, when it's all said and done, this is not a joy-of-being-a-software-geek blog, as I also like to get my geek on in ways that do not involve 1's and 0's. Some of these are covered in some of the bullets that follow.
- We learn interesting things about the world sometimes, and these things will be shared. As is the blogging norm, on many occasions I will include my personal observations and analysis of said interesting things, with the hope that you, faithful reader(s), will add yours.
- Some things are intrinsically funny, and they will be listed. Aimlessly-hopping bunny rabbits. Action-figure Jesuses. Things with an excessive number of heads, arms, and/or internal organs. Speaking of which: pancreases. Upside-down flying cows that shoot tomahawk missiles. Non-euclidian spaces. Anything that comes out of my Random Bad Romance Novel Generator. And so forth.
- There will be random references to and retellings of various scattered memories from my childhood. This is where I regale you with stories about how I could not be beaten at Four Square if "Hanging' Tough" was playing on the radio, attempt to convince you that The Neverending Story is the best movie ever made, ponder the reasons why I threw a giant sheet of foam out of a school bus heading down I-5 on the way to soccer practice, and reveal a startling command of Final Fantasy damage physics.
- Every now and then, there will be appearances of purported "creative writing." Growing up, I spent most of my time convinced that I would be a fiction writer of some sort, but after the first book I tried to write was rejected by the publishing houses (shocking, considering it was an unsolicited manuscript from a 6th grader that had no plot whatsoever) and my more concerted effort at producing an all-encompassing parody of adolescence stalled out on Chapter 3, I've resigned myself to live vicariously through my 39,291,039.2 aspiring-author friends instead. Nevertheless, you'll occasionally see random short works of fiction from me on these pages, but I offer absolutely no warranty as to their quality or ability to amuse you in any way -- most of the time, I'm just trying to amuse myself. Example: this Christmas Pageant that I wrote, probably while overcaffeinated.
- Black holes, time travel, parallel universes, and other stuff mentioned in A Brief History of Time will show up on occasion. I dunno, I have a strange fascination with the stuff. This explains why I'm captivated by Lost (if you ask me, the smoke monster is totally a roving, sentient disturbance in the fabric of space-time), and why I waited an extra 20 minutes to leave for work today because I was watching this guy explain String Theory in terms of everyday things like traffic lights and ants.
So yeah.
Huh. Okay then, well, I guess I'll just let you do your thing!
Much obliged.
