I am entering a contest at engtech. I have a couple of choices as to what I want to write for an entry and I have chosen “Why I started this blog.”

And away I go…

This blog origionally started out as content for an aspiring geeks web page. Liza and I were working opposite shifts so we could keep our then little girl out of day care. We had a little trouble in that area and decided that rather than me going to jail for killing a babysitter we needed to work out our schedules. (Ill tell that story at a later date but it involves my two year old daughter telling me that her babysitter shook her. I need to get back to the original thought because I can feel my aneurism swelling.)

Once I got Katie to bed I had four waking hours of boredom so I dove head first into computers. After I put up a web page I realized how stupid it was because there was no compelling reason to stop by. Just about the time I came to that realization the good people at Pyra Labs brought me Blogger.

What started out as a way to tell stories turned into the only form of therapy that I could afford. I found myself blowing off some steam from my day and every time I finished I felt better.

i have polluted almost every variation of blogging software. You name it I wrote on it. My head was on a swivel and I could be lured to a new interface by any new bell or whistle. My favorite and the one that I have made my permanent home is here at WordPress. Second favorite interface was definitely TypePad but I had to pay for that so it only lasted for a year or so. I told you about the jumping around to kind of explain my web logging rollercoaster. That is also the reason that I don’t have all of my old stuff and there are some weird continuity breaks in my archives. *more on that later.

I write for a while and it feels good. So then I vow to write every day and that feels good. Then I miss a day or to for a variety of reasons that all end up making me feel like shite for slacking. Then I start writing again and become hit obsessed. Then I start thinking about how self serving this whole process really is and I want to burn the whole thing down. At that point it only takes one little interface glitch to make me take the whole thing away and break from blogging all together.

Then I start to miss writing. Usually it starts with some experience that makes me crazy and the only thing that can get it off of my mind is to write it down. Then I’m staring at another in an endless pile of word documents and I feel the need to catalog it somehow. So I fire up stupid tom again.

This leads me to the last and personally most compelling reason for this web log. * I think it will be kind of cool for my kids to have some representation of me, now, when they get older. More than pictures or their memories they will have a written sample of my voice throughout the years. And this is a side of me that they won’t be fully exposed to until they are old enough to handle it full strength.

There it is my long winded contest answer. Luckily the winner will be drawn at random so there won’t be any type of grading system for me to get all cranked up about.