Hello, World!

Of course, naming your first blog post ever "Hello World" has to be the most clichéd way of starting a blog Man has ever conceived. I mean, I just googled the term "Hello World" and got over nine million hits! Yeah, this is a good way to set my new blog apart from the pack right at the beginning. I'll bet Instapundit is just quaking in his boots now...

But then, another term for "cliché" is "tradition", and the "Hello World" tradition is one with an admirable pedigree. The purpose of traditions is to inform us of our place in society and in the universe, and to inject a little order and purpose into our lives. It is traditional for a programmer, learning a new computer language, to start by creating a program in the new language that does nothing more than print the words "Hello World" to the screen. After all, if you can't figure out how to get output to the screen, you can't tell what your program is doing, and you should probably change your major.

So, what does this "Hello World" post indicate is my place in society and in the universe? Probably it means that, so far as blogging is concerned, I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. Additional evidence was provided last night when my first attempt at writing this post (which was significantly wittier and more original than what you're reading now) got swallowed into the ether by a WordPress hiccup. I mean, I clicked "Save and Continue Editing", and what happened? Poof! Followed by a message that "We apologize for the short notice, but WordPress is undergoing maintenance and you will be unable to access your dashboard for the next 43278 minutes". That, plus a bunch of other problems, and I gave up and decided to restart my blog on Blogger instead of WordPress.

Further lesson learned, I have now decided to compose my blog posts in Notepad and transfer them to the blog post editor form when I already have it fully composed. See, I'll get the hang of these internets thingys eventually.

So what am I doing here? Well, I figured that all the cool people were doing it. Although on further reflection, I'm not so sure of it. Regular blogs are, like, so early-2006. It occurs that all the really cool people aren't actually doing it here, they're doing it on Facebook. (All the people who only think they're cool are doing it on MySpace). But then, I long long ago gave up any hope of ever being one of the cool people, so this doesn't bug me.

I suppose the reason that I'm here is that I'm a horrible backseat driver. My lovely wife started up her blog last October, and ever since then I've had Blog Envy. I find myself saying things like, "Oh, you should write a post about the time that..." and "I think you should capitalize that Q" and "Are you sure that's a word?" and "Maybe if you rearranged the paragraphs like this and added a little exposition here, the blog post would flow a little better". But despite being an absolutely lovely, wonderful lady, she doesn't always react well to my gentle remonstrations. So I ultimately decided that if I started up a blog of my own, I could correct my own grammar to my heart's content without bugging her. Great! Perfect solution! Now I just need to think of some decent things about which to write.

These will be on pretty much any topic that tickles my fancy--frequently the kinds of things I try to talk to my lovely wife about late at night, while she's trying to go to sleep. They include family, child-rearing, religion, philosopy, science, society, harp music (harp is the instrument I play), vocal music, especially sacred vocal music, and whatever else happens to grab my attention enough to help me overcome my habitual laziness, kick everyone else off the computer, and pound out a few hundred words.

Oh, and I like comments. :-)