NearToTheSky's ramblings

Welcome

I've never thought of myself as being very good at this kind of post. Being rather the geek type with lacking social skills, introductions have always caused me some difficulties. However, I feel that this place requires at least some sort of introduction and some explanation about what it's meant to be.

To begin with, I'll introduce myself briefly. The pseudonym NearToTheSky is one I've used for a long time and you can find plenty of information about me on google. What one can learn easily about me is that I believe myself to be a dragon "in some way" and I am a little active on some dragonkin communities. I may post about this sometimes, but my spiritual views are generally not going to be the main focus of my writings.

I'm not going to elaborate much on who I am. For the purpose of this blog, it's probably useful to know that I was born in the first half of the eighties, that I live in Oslo (Norway) and that I work in some large-ish software company. I am living with Etath (That bit is also easy to find from google as well as more informations about her) and I generally don't have much to complain about in life. I spend most of my time in front of a computer and my operating systems of choice are Windows when it comes to workstations and FreeBSD when it comes to servers. I'll add to this post if I feel anything is missing. :)

Now, about this website itself: For a long time, I have not been interested by the idea of blogging. Most blogs are made by people talking about their life (or making drama) and are only relevant to a few people. I had no interest in having a blog such as that for the simple reason that it didn't feel worth the time investment for writing entries, managing comments and dealing with the inevitable drama. In the few last years, however, I've found a number of blogs that were dealing more with ideas and less with personal life. Some of those blogs atually turn out to be quite interesting and since I have interesting ideas of my own, I became tempted by the idea to write about them.

So, the plan of establishing my own blog came to be, but it still required some thinking before making it a concrete thing. Aside from the technological issues (which I will tackle in my next post) was the whole problem of the comments. There are blogs where comments are actually relevant and interesting, making them a worhty part of the content, but in all cases, there will be comments that are not very relevant or interesting or that are a direct reply to the author and have little interest for other readers (at least without a relevant answer). Then there are comments that should simply be removed. Since the idea was to keep it simple for myself, this and some technological considerations lead to the fact that no comment will be displayed until I approve of it (in other words, comments are always screened). In practice, all comments you write are sent to myself only. I will repost them (in a semi-automatic way) in the comment section of the post they refer to, if I believe they bring something to the discussion. Another important point is that You can mark your comment as private. If you do, they will never be reposted here. In fact, the "Keep private" checkbox is checked by default, for the case you would not be paying attention.

Now for some technical details that everyone should know:

• The email address you provide for commenting is never going to be used for anything else than having me reply back to you, if I feel it appropriate.
• Comments that you post cannot be exceed 65000 characters
• As a drawback of the free commenting, there is nothing to prevent someone who knows your email address to usurp your identity when sending comments. To mitigate this, there is a password field that you can fill in when posting a comment if you feel this is a concern. The passwords are not verified and sent as cleartext with the message. I'll be checking them if something doesn't seem right. Please, make sure to not use a password that you use for protecting anything else of importance. You can also ignore the password field entirely.

To end this post, there comes a few words about what kind of content you can expect to find here. Most of the posts will be about general thinking of mine, ramblings and rants about diverse things. Some of it will be geek or technological babbling and maybe existential questions. I may also post some thoughts that are related to politics. In general, I'm not promissing anything about this blog, except that I will try to keep it interesting. I will also try to write words of warnings ontop of posts that I feel call for it.

This is about all I have to say at the moment. Good reading.

Note: This post may be updated in the future, if it needs to be put back in sync with reality.