I sent my first email in 1986. That's a quarter of a century ago. I'd spent an haphazard gap year in the UK, the Bay of Biscay, Israel and Greece, then started university back in Canada.
Graham was the brightest guy in my high school. When I got back he was battering his way through the second year of a Physics BSc. One day he mentioned this email thing to me. We went down to computer labs: a basement bathed in terminal green. I figured out how to log in and he helped me gopher for a list of students in Haifa. I found the address of a girl I'd met in Tel Aviv the year before and sent her an email.
I never heard back.
Five years later the web was invented. I installed the Mosaic browser on my Mac Plus and gave it a go. What a thing. What a world-changing thing. For a while I became an evangelist, packing floppies full of command line tools round any friends and businesses with a 14-4 modem and hooking them in to the new religion.
Back then the last thing I wanted to do was work in IT. Computers were a tool. Fun, but a tool. Now I'm a programmer. Not so fun.
Over the years I've built static websites, dynamic web sites, porn sites, online reservation systems, online procurement systems, web servers, web services, web-enabled seagull droppings. I had a writing job editing the froth of the dot com bubble and lost it when the damn thing popped. I've lived off the avails of large German car manufacturers' pension funds, siphoned illicitly into hopeless startups on trashy Atlantic islands. I've flogged the Cloud.
But I've never felt the urge to put myself on the web.
So, I have to ask, why now?
It's Saturday. I've worked all day and half the night swearing at crappy SOAP implementations that just won't do what I want. Some German guy was expecting it yesterday. Monday I brief an Indian outsourcing team about a project I know nothing about. My boat down in Exeter is still a tool-strewn shell. I won't get to working on her for another two weeks. I blame it all on computers.
So, again, why now? Maybe because I think this blogging thing has had it's day: there are far too many of us already; no one cares. I'm a late adopter: I feel a dusty affection for the outmoded. And the format - rant, no response - suites me.
I'm not on Facebook. I reply with sweary admonishments if ever invited to be someone's 'friend'. I would hate myself if I ever tweeted. But somewhere under my fundamental reticence must lurk a lamb just wanting to bleat out at the world. And so, at this unseemly age, in this crabbed time, I will.
Small boats undergoing surgery. A few of the pubs I use, and the characters therein. A truthful record of every tooth I lose. My dreams of getting from Halifax to Vancouver via the North West Passage: solo, non-stop, and under sail. Explications of the cult of honey. And, if I can't help myself, grumblings about code.
It's all coming. I promise. Continuously and to everyone.
And if, in 1985, you sat aboard a 30-foot sailboat in Tel Aviv marina, flicking your gorgeous black locks at a broke, buck-toothed Canadian, REPLY TO YOUR DAMN EMAILS!