Why am I doing this?
I am already incredibly busy and sometimes overwhelmed by my obligations, so this seems a perfect opportunity to make things even worse. I do this sort of thing all the time — I keep coming up with new ideas and want to implement them straight away, which just pushes everything else a little further back into the mire. But this is my nature; I don’t want to change it, but I would like to control it.
So this blog is an attempt by me to control myself. Maybe if I put things in writing, it will give me an opportunity to look before I leap.
I also enjoy writing, but I am not happy with the way I organize my thoughts, or the way that I write, so this blog will be a place to practice my writing.
My memory is quite bad. I seem to remember that it always has been, and because I have always been too lazy or preoccupied to write notes, whole swathes of my life are a blur. The blog will provide a means to save some of this stuff that happens to me, or around me, or that I do to myself.
I will post reviews of books I read, films I see, music I listen to, food I eat, gadgets I play with…
I am an unapologetic skinflint. If I want something, I will get it, but only after I am absolutely sure that it is what I want and that it is the best value available. So I do quite a lot of research. I will attempt to put some of that research into the form of articles or long blogs for the benefit of anyone who is similarly afflicted with the need for certainty.
I will post hints, tips and how to’s for the various software products that I use in my day-to-day work and play. This will mainly be because after I have spent a few hours trying to do something ultimately quite simple, I don’t want to have to go through it again, and if I put everything here, I’ll know where to find it next time (see Memory above…).
I can be quite arrogant and opinionated at times, and there is no doubt that I will use this blog to air my views, and generally rant and rave about anything that I feel would benefit from my attention. See, I told you I was arrogant.
I believe I have loads of new and brilliant ideas and thoughts, and that it is impossible to do them all because there are so many. But maybe, because my memory is so bad, I actually only have one or two ideas that are always the same, but they seem new. In that case this blog will either not last long or will be very repetitive. Maybe I’m a goldfish.
I hope that people will find some of what I write helpful, but I am primarily writing this for me, to help me out of my confusion. I know that writing a journal has helped me through specific problems in the past, and I guess this will be similar, except that it is public (even if no-one else reads it, it is still “out there” to be read by someone other than me).
Why the million monkeys reference?
I am often overwhelmed, overworked, and over hairy, and I often feel like a million monkeys — bashing away with very little hope of getting where I want to go, mainly because I don’t know where I want to go. It seemed apt.