Sun in the sky…you know how I feel
And so, having dispensed with the need to create a ‘first post’, and also having attended to me urgent alimentary needs with a nice bowl of soup and some Christmas cake, I can get down to the real business of ‘saying stuff what people might want to read’.
Today heralds the psychological cleansing of a new month, year and decade. And what a decade it’s been. The change over a period of 10 years is always astonishing when you take the time to look back. I got my first mobile phone - a Nokia 3210 - in December 1999. You could make calls, text and guide a snake sprite around the screen eating egg sprites…and that was pretty much all. In December 2008 I succumbed to the iPhone and so it was with a small computer in my pocket, only limited by the imagination of developers, that I saw in this decade.
Now, the tools that we use to manage our lives - smartphones, facebook, twitter et al - are so ingrained that it’s difficult to imagine that just ten years ago such things had not even been thought about. Blogging was in its very early infancy (the term ‘blog’ comes from 1999) and yet nowadays people blog without really knowing they’re doing so. We have journals, mini-blogs, micro-blogs and every kind of blog you could need. Blogs are referred to on mainstream news networks and are now one of the best sources of breaking news. The blogging revolution has almost certainly done more to give people a voice than any single other medium. The letters page of a newspaper can carry only so much - the internet and its blogosphere are infinite, accessible and mostly free.
I could go on, but this is not an exhaustive list of everything that’s happened over the past 10 years. All in all it’s been an interesting time. As we embark upon this brave new decade we can’t imagine how life will be 10 years hence. Evolutionary change, of which there will be plenty, doesn’t come about in a predictable way and it can’t be forced. Often it’s the simplest ideas which somehow snowball into something unimagined at conception. Whatever happens we, the geeks, are ready to do what we always do - embrace ideas, play about with them and see where they take us and see where we can take them.
It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day it’s a new life. And I’m feeling good.
