About
I have been blogging for about four years now, although I haven’t always called it that. I’ve always been a power user in a series of small business and corporate jobs but I set up my first crude website almost exactly four years ago just before my son was born. That little website which was created with Microsoft Word and posted to the free hosting account that came with our high speed Internet lasted only a few weeks. In fact, that website didn’t even make it to the birth. I quickly upgraded to FrontPage, thinking that I wouldn’t be interested in doing all the coding myself and that FrontPage would take care of most of that for me. Of course, FrontPage (like all Microsoft products) is decent but it created bloated code and was hard to work with if you do want to customize the code at all.
It didn’t take long for me to get irritated with FrontPage before I decided that I wanted to learn HTML and just code the site myself. Given my geeky interest in databases, static HTML just wasn’t interesting enough so I quickly adopted PHP and MySQL both because they are free, open-source system and because(s) there is a lot of good help online that you don’t have to pay Microsoft to provide. The FrontPage site gave way to a new, custom coded website that I created. The third generation site went live in early September 2004. It was cool (it had flash graphics and was database driven) but I spent most of the limited time that I had for my family website tinkering with the code, not writing content.
While I really liked the third generation site, I soon realized that what I was actually doing was blogging. Inbetween pictures of the kid(s) and related stories, I filled space with reviews of places I went and so forth. Everything from seeing Phil Shane at a new restaraunt in Long Beach to standing in line in the post office to giving away one of our cats to watching the SuperBowl all provided inspiration for my little family website. My friends and family readership never totaled to more than a dozen or so regular readers but the few who share my sense of humor did actually seem at least mildly interested in what I had to say.
I got tired of maintaining the code, though, so I went in search of something that would allow me to continue to publish our family website but not spend so much time tinkering with code. As fun as tinkering with code was and is, our busy lives just continued to get busier and I was having trouble keeping up with the demands of the family for pictures and stories of our kids (not to mention my off-center comments on other things). Given my preference for the open-source systems of PHP and MySQL, I found WordPress. I had come full circle from the FrontPage system that was supposed to do all the work for me to the much more user-friendly, flexible and powerful WordPress.
The fourth generation of our family website, using WordPress, made its debut in October of 2005. I was gearing up for the arrival of what turned out to be our daughter and I knew I needed a website that was easier to maintain and that had to be up-and-running before the birth. I used WordPress for the design and haven’t looked back. WordPress is obviously a great blogging tool but it is also very useful for a personal website like ours. You can still post pictures and stories and give family members opportunities to comment but all of the code is pre-written (yet the system is flexible enough to meet my need to tinker with it constantly).
Anyway, now that I have my family website stablized I wanted to write more and more about things other than the family. I still like to write about the family and to post pictures but I really wanted an outlet for the other commentary that I used to post on the family website but that didn’t really fit there. I like writing and I like even more writing about the random topics that float through my mind when I am driving to work; however, I didn’t really want to subject my family to articles about politics, religion, code, the Chicago Bears and the NFL, etc. while they were looking at cute pictures of the kids. That lead me to create my own blog that was separate from the family website.
I don’t expect readership to ever amount to much but I will use standard tools to make it more accessible such as search engine registration, syndication, etc. In an effort to protect the privacy of my family, I never really publicized the family website. Without having to worry about personal privacy or watching my manners in front of the family, I am now free to cut loose a little bit and wrte whatever comes to my mind and let whoever wants to subject themselves to it do so of their own free will.
The inspiration for the title of my blog is a book that I am now reading for the second time: Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I really can’t recommend this book highly enough and have already purchased several copies for friends and family (my wife is tired of hearing me talk about it). I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out statistical probability as it relates most specifically to pattern trading in the stock market. And, just when I thought I had a decent handle on statistical probability, I read this book and it opened my eyes to the hidden role of chance in many things that we all often think of as non-random. This theme will be constant throughout this blog as it has changed the way I look at a lot of things. As I read the book for the second time in preparation for Taleb’s follow-up book due in April 2007 called The Black Swan, I am planning on developing an essay of my own in reaction to it which I hope to work through during my posts on this blog and, eventually, make available.
Along the way, I plan to post at least once a day and touch on any subject that comes to mind. In so doing I will violate the first rule of all of these “How to Blog” articles that I have found on the Internet. That is, to narrow a blog’s focus. Forget that. I won’t limit myself and I don’t care if anyone ever reads this thing. It’s not for the readers anyway…it’s for me. I will also do my best to make the choice of language suitable for all ages (which is difficult for me given my potty mouth) even if the subject matter may not be.
The one topic where I allow myself to be fooled by randomness is the Chicago Bears and the NFL and everything that comes with both. Taleb talks about his willingness to be fooled by the randomness of poetry because of its beauty. And, while I don’t deny that poetry is probably beautiful, I am not nearly smart or sophisticated enough to appreciate it. So, my primary random activity in which I derive some pleasure (and a lot of pain) is in my love of a team from a city that I only lived in for one year long after I became a fan. For the record (because I am always asked), I grew to like the Bears in the early 80’s (the last time they were any good before the last few years and around the time they won the SuperBowl) primarily because they were the only team at that time who wore black shoes and didn’t look like they were dressed in some bad 1970’s movie. Uniforms really sucked back then. I know it stupid, and random, but it is what it is.
Finally, I will be placing advertising on the site. In the low probability outcome of a growth in readership, I am hoping to recoup the costs of maintaining this site (and the family site and a few others) but I am not counting on it. If you are offended by Google ads, then go read someone else’s blog.
I hope you enjoy this blog. If you do, please come back and check it regularly, register and make comments and tell people about it. Unlike my family blog which I always kind of wanted to fly under radar, I don’t care if this blog finds its way to others but I also don’t care if it never does either. Whatever.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Fooled by Randomnees:
More generally, we underestimate the share of randomness in about everything, a point that may not merit a book–except when it is the specialist who is the fool of all fools. Disturbingly, science has only recently been able to handle randomness (the growth in available information has been exceeded only by the expansion of noise). Probability theory is a young arrival in mathematics; probability applied to practice is almost nonexistent as a discipline. In addition we seem to have evidence that what is called “courage” comes from an underestimation of the share of randomness in things rather than the more noble ability to stick one’s neck out for a given belief. In my experience (and in the scientific literature), economic “risk takers” are rather the victims of delusions (leading to overoptimism and overconfidence with their underestimation of possible adverse outcomes) than the opposite. Their “risk taking” is frequently randomness foolishness.
