So, one day I was thinking. I’ve been accused of being very opinionated, and I’ve decided that I’m hilarious, so combining those two, I said to myself, “Why not provide a more permanent forum for expressing my views beyond the ‘forum’ created when in a personal, social setting?” Of course, this “personal, social forum” is actually just fancy-talk for “me sitting around complaining,” but still doesn’t it look that much more official when displayed on a computer monitor? With all that talk of “social,” “forum,” etc. you may think I’ve devolved into some a sort of “the internet is opening all sorts of new avenues of communication, and it’s awesome!” person, but don’t worry, I’m sure that this site is just part of the on-going “blog boom” reminiscent of the personal homepage boom of the late 90’s. [In full disclosure, I had a personal homepage back then, but for some reason the Internet Archive didn’t consider it worth inclusion.] [In fuller disclosure, the comparison between the popularity of blogs now and homepages in the late 90’s was made by someone else in some print or internet article, but I can’t track it down, and the closest I (well, that Google…) can find is someone copying that section of the article in the comments of a semi-academic discussion on the state of blogs.

Keeping in mind the “boom” aspects mentioned above, this little endeavor has a decent chance of petering out before too long, but there’s nothing wrong with trying for a little while.

The look of this page will probably be changing in the very near future as we figure out a better template (though this default one is nice, if not overused) for our purposes.

There are a few technical hurdles to be overcome for this project, but I won’t leave those here. Josh Shafer [how do you spell your last name?], Brian Newhard, MJ, Kurt, Andy, and Justin [the last three of you of the Northwestern Variety], I’m looking in your direction.

More to come, including reviews of: people who value their opinions too much, electricity, Columbus Day, sandwiches, Adam’s Smug Sense of Self-Worth (ok, that’s more of a Family Guy joke than a topic for a review), Arby’s, the Dell 2005FPW monitor, scissors, Verizon Online DSL, The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come for Free and many, many more*.

*note, the promise of “many more” is very conditional, based on whether not the whole thing “gets old” and whether it keeps our attention.

Dan