I drove back to the Bay Area yesterday in record time -- just a little over 5 hours from Cerritos to Mountain View. While most of the journey was wet, and visibility was low, there were surprisingly few accidents given the volume of cars on the 5.
My route up was 605 North to 105 West to 405 North to 5 North to 152 West to 85 North.
Afterwards, I watched the first episode of Joss Wheedon's Firefly and the miniseries of Battlestar Galactica, both of which were really compelling television.
I saw parakkum organizing his writing files yesterday, and was struck by how meticulously his records over the past years have been kept. This blog is so many things to me --scrapbook, journal, bookmarks, photo album, notebook, a collection of thoughts and reviews, and yet because of this diversity of subject material, I find it very disjointed. This is something that I want to change in the coming year ahead, and this will likely mean that the website will undergo further transformations. Additional information is available in the extended entry.
I created my first webpage in July of 1995. It was designed with the web browser Mosaic in mind, and it embarasses me now, although a Netscape version of the page did garner me a mention in a Vivarin-sponsored student competition for webpages. I blogged even back then, writing down a series of thoughts while attending Cal. But the early web didn't really have much in terms of blogger to reader interaction, with the exception of an e-mail or two that would occassionally reach my university account. When I bought my domain name in 1998, I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but I continued to write down my thoughts, although it was on a rather irregular basis while I was employed at Blizzard. I moved to Blogspot in the winter of 2002, and in doing so, I found my writing style changed in the transition. Instead of spending hours composing and constructing opinion and editorial pieces as I had done in the past, many of my entries were more suited for del.icio.us -- a quick post describing the link and not much else. The majority of my posts are currently in this style.
When I originally started this blog in 2004, it was partly experimental. I had been using blogspot for over a year, and while blogspot continued to improve, as a free service it didn't provide many of the features I found to be essential in blogging, such as integrated comments, or server space for photographs. Many months later blogspot would have these features, but by then, I had found movabletype to be more than adequate for my blogging needs.
Shortly after moving to movabletype, I joined the community at movabletypo, a blog feed aggregator that my friends had created. This too, changed my style -- while I was still writing for me, I was also writing for a far larger audience that included friends, as well as friends of friends. As time has evolved, I have become more and more prolific in my blogging, covering an ever expanding range of topics, and I can see myself being interested in far too many subjects to cover them all well.
While I was employed at Blizzard Entertainment and Castaway Entertainment, I had to keep my blogging of games to a minimum -- particularly due to non-disclosure agreements, but also due to my not wanting to burn any bridges with game companies that I might someday find myself in employ with. I've found through the years though that my opinions on games isn't really any different than what the game companies already know: that great is great, and crap is crap. I also had to maintain a low profile because I didn't want my blog to become grounds for termination. At the same time, I realize that my presence on the web is good resource for others.
I want to concentrate my blogging first on a couple of core areas, being what I enjoy discussing the most. There will likely be a reduction in the number of daily entries until I get used to focusing my writing.
- Games: While this will cover mostly academic research, it'll also cover more mainstream issues in the games industry, including game development and design.
- Reviews: This will be mainly books, dvds and other products.
- Photography: While I'll be setting up the digital photography blog, there's bound to be a little cross-posting (particularly as I write original articles).
I'll continue to blog occassionally about my life, as well as posting bookmarks, and organizing my old entries into categories. I'm also going to try and update the design and look of this website.
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