Hello

I’ve been spending too much time and energy trying to think of a way to begin this blog, so this is as good a method as any.

This blog is a “head fake.” The late Randy Pausch introduces this concept in his “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” lecture. I’m sure there are other ways of encapsulating this concept, but this was the first time I remember it being explicitly laid out. Basically, a head fake is learning/doing something in order to accomplish something else. The example Pausch uses is having kids play sports. Parents don’t send their children to play football to learn to play football. They want to have values such as perseverance and teamwork instilled in their kids. Character building.

I will say as an aside that having the kid learn to play a sport just to have them play the sport is also valid, but in the wider focus of raising a child to be able to survive, learning to work with others is probably more important than being able to catch a ball.
That’s what I intend for this blog. The end is not a great blog with an array of well-written, focused entries, at least I don’t think it is. I want to use this space as a hub of a wheel, pulling together different spokes of what interests me, what I learn, what I do. Maybe I can learn from myself, maybe I can glean some inspiration and knowledge from the collective mind of cyberspace. Maybe the blog will turn out good in the end, anyway.

So brace yourselves randomness, obsessiveness, and shitty sketches.