About
This is a blog. If you hadn’t figured that part out yet, I’ve no time for you.
I’ve been blogging in one form or another under the name The Cynic Gazette for the better part of a decade. In 2001, I first registered Cynicgazette.com as a home of “issues” of a mass e-mail [link courtesy of the way-back machine] I was sending a list of about 40 friends, relatives, and some jerks who happened upon me. I would send out an e-mail and them upload the HTML file to my web server which was set to detect and list anything I send up in the proper format. The original iteration housed 38 issues, from December, 2001, to July, 2003.And it was SUPER. It was the blog before blogs were blogs. I didn’t even call it a blog because nobody used that word.
Time passed, and I stopped writing for a while. Trust me, it was for the best.
And then MySpace happened. A bunch of friends of mine and I fell for a posting that Friendster.com was going to start charging us for membership, and there was this wonderful new alternative called MySpace. Goody gumdrops. On October 3, 2003, I signed my life away to a world of reading bulletins promoting urban legends and seeing women’s profile adorned with comments from guys who don’t know them saying “ur hot, hit me on IM.” This really bugged me because they didn’t even specify their IM name, and this was before MySpace’s proprietary IM client.
But they did, in fact, have a blog you could add to your profile.
So, the Cynic Gazette moved to MySpace. The MySpace version of the Cynic Gazette has 152 (as of this writing) posts spanning from September, 2004, to January, 2009. There’s a lot of meaningful parts of my life in there: the losses of both of my parents, my relationship and engagement to Meg, some funny videos, and a LOT of complaining. The domain name Cynicgazette.com just sat there, bouncing people over to the MySpace blog and I just felt like… it wasn’t what I wanted.
So I looked around. Blogger. Wordpress. Dotnetnuke. Livejournal. And a bunch of unknowns that I can’t even remember. At the end of the day, Wordpress just felt right. Of course, there was the little hitch that it’s in PHP and uses MySQL, and I’m a Windows guy, but not knowing what I’m doing never stopped me before.
So here we sit, 8 years after I decided I needed something more than a loaded-up BCC field. the Cynic Gazette is powered by the Wordpress blogging platform, and hosted by hostmonster.com. It’s taken me almost a year to put something meaningful on this About page, but I’m sure you’ll agree it was worth the wait. And if you don’t, to hell with you, I’ll shut off the comments on this page.
I plan on eventually porting over my old MySpace and old old Cynicgazette-circa-2001 blog entries here, since I like having some history available, and because unlike MySpace, wordpress actually allows you to export your blog, because they’re not a bunch of dicks.
So there you go. That’s a good bit about the Cynic Gazette. It’s the home for my rants about nothing, it’s an outlet for my photography nerdiness, it’s a soapbox for my skeptical community activism, it’s a spot for my thoughts on web design and development, and mostly it’s an ear for when I have something to say but I want to tell everyone at once. It’s the place I can feel like an expert on everything, because if you know me, that’s pretty much how I portray myself anyway.