Hello everybody, and welcome to my blog, Loresayer.com. This blog is born as we are all entering a promising new year, 2012, our eyes looking forward full of hopes and dreams.
Christening a New Blog
Sometime ago I was challenged by the WordPress installation prompt to give a name to associate with my blog, and I was profoundly at a loss. People will have the names of their children picked out well in advance, but when you put them on-the-spot to name the virtual spigot of their mind they suddenly go mute. I’ve had ideas for blogs in the past, for instance when I worked at Infragistics I had called my blog, “Changing the world, one pattern at a time.” Nonetheless, I was at a momentary loss of words when it came to defining what I wanted this blog to say about me.
A Favorite Piece of Literature
In the soul searching that ensued, I turned to one of my favorite works of French literature that I have enjoyed since high school, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. This is a great book in which the hero, Edmund Dantes, is wrongly incarcerated and loses the love of his life, but later comes upon a tremendous fortune and attains a meticulously orchestrated revenge against each of the dastardly men who had destroyed his dreams.
While my brief synopsis in no way does justice to the breadth and depth of the story, it probably leaves an unjustifiably dark tinge on its moral. The Count ultimately faces a price to be paid for his vengeance. He is, however, not completely consumed by this hunger for revenge. Many times the reader is exposed to the strength of his faith in God.
In one such instance, his melancholy traveling companion laments a broken heart at having to leave the woman he loved behind in Paris. The Count counsels him that even those that are not in our arms can still be held in our hearts, and do us great benefit. He explains.that, “The soul makes its own horizons.” Of course, with the man’s present disposition he could only see a dark and unpromising future ahead for himself. The Count’s advice encourages him to be optimistic and hopeful at was is to come.
A Positive New Year Full of Progress
I’ve seized on this statement to represent my blog on advances in science and technology, as well as my personal ramblings. (My friends know I rarely take the time to read fiction; there is much too much factual information to learn!) I’d like to develop a broad readership, but only time will tell how well I achieve that goal. The most startling problem I see is that most people are totally unaware of some of the amazing breakthroughs that are being made today. How can everyone make informed decisions when they aren’t aware of what is going on?
Progress is often a double-edged sword: the nuclear fission that gives France much of its domestically-generated, fossil fuel-free electricity can also result in dangerous radioactivity like the Fukushima disaster or worse. We have been handed fire by Prometheus, it is in our hands how we use it.
A Dual Focus
While on this blog I will be talking about all things other than software, my sister blog loresayer.net will cover Microsoft .NET programming and software engineering. Occasionally there may be some cross-over (as when I discuss computer science subject matter like search and optimization, or computational chemistry to model the properties of materials) between the two blogs, but each will maintain its own focus.
Once again, welcome to my blog and happy new year!