(Almost) First Post and Introduction

This is my second post to this blog which I started in June 2007. It is, I suppose, a late introduction to a late adopter of blogging. This is where I self-indulgently introduce myself, my hopes and my intentions with this blog. I've never been known for my brevity, particularly when trying to explain my motivations and intentions. But I'll try to be brief. First of all, I want the actual content of what I post to act as a better introduction and explanation of what I am up to than any self statement. That is one of the reasons why I've left this introductory post to be my second post, making my first blog entry one of content. Although I am new to actually using the blog technology, I've been posting my thoughts and comments on a wide range of issues (many of which I know little about) to the Internet for literally decades. My earliest Usenet posting archived by Google Groups is from 1986, though there clear were earlier ones that weren't archived. I've also been active on number of email discussion lists, where I've occasionally presented arguments that I would have liked to refer to later. When I finally got around to getting my own domain name, goldmark.org, and corresponding website I sometimes would get it together enough to write up some technical rants and political rants to host there. And of course, I've posted a number of comments, a few of them worth keeping, to other people's blogs or other message boards such as slashdot. Those who know me, or those who have read my promises follow up my writings with further details, will know that I can be extremely slow to follow through with something I've started in the best case, and never get started in the worst case. So it took me years to actually start using blogging technology. The event that finally tipped the balance was an attempt to post a text response to The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See on YouTube. Its author asks anyone who can spot a fault with the logic to let him know. There is a whopping great logical flaw, which I tried to outline in a text response to the video. Only after putting some effort into composing my response and hitting the "post reply" button did I learn that text responses were limited to 500 characters. That experience appears to have been the tipping point. Finally, there is the question of why someone like me, who's had a web presence since late 1994 and hosts his own web server, is using Blogspot instead of hosting my own blog on my own site with a tool like Wordpress. The answer is simply laziness in not wanting to have to deal directly with handling user registration. I hope that this gives some answers to some mundane questions about why I am doing this. I could elaborate on every single point here but won't. With luck, this "almost first post" will be the most boring of all I will post here. If not, than please read when suffering insomnia.