As a general rule, when someone starts a sentence with “I’m not _____ but” it’s usually safe to conclude that that person is indeed _____. Canonical examples of this phenomenon include “I’m not racist but” and “I’m not flaming but”.

And so in finest tradition I submit to you, the reader, that I’m not slow at getting things done but … it has taken me several years to get a blog online.

It hasn’t been for lack of material. There have been several occasions when a web journal of my experiences would have been tremendously appropriate.

• In 1997 I went off to study in France. I had all manner of crazy adventures and came back speaking fluent French, passable Spanish and having completely forgotten what I was supposed to be studying.
• In 1999 I (somehow) graduated and went off into the Big Wide World of professional work.
• In 2000 I went off to live in Hong Kong. Hong Kong! If that doesn’t warrant a diary, what does? In fairness I did fire off a few emails to friends for the first couple of weeks but that died down when the wildly new and different way of life began to warp into a humdrum and familiar one. I tend to be pretty good at adapting to stuff; what’s so interesting about eating raccoon that it needs to be posted up for my friends to read about? Eventually I justified my lack of memoirs by observing (probably correctly) that no one would believe them.
• In 2003 I went to live in Seoul. Well Seoul is no Hong Kong and it certainly isn’t the Tokyo it thinks it is.
• In 2004 I played my first MMORPG: Star Wars Galaxies. There’s plenty of material out there to demonstrate how ripe that subject is for blogging.
• In 2005 my old buddy David Dumenil said I should have a blog. And he was right. I told him I was too lazy.

So what is so special about 2006? The sad answer to that question is that I was trawling Google for some Mac stuff when I came across a site done in WordPress and I thought the stylesheet looked pretty cool.

And so with the sands of time swirling around and above the interesting events of the last decade, I start my journal now … with a nice stylesheet.

Don’t be surprised if the timestamp between this post and the next is several years.