First post

This is the very first post on my brand-spanking new blog. Even though I consider blogs to be, for the most part, a disease that eats away at the already relatively small factual content of the Internet and fills it with opinions, I have hesitantly joined the blogging community.

Not that I couldn't do all this with my website Laaja.org, which is rather blog-like (at least for the "news" section). But manually writing and maintaining the visual layout (ie. HMTL & CSS) can be time consuming, even with a plain looking site. And that's time away from writing actual content. Or maybe I've grown lazy at making sure all the archived pages and their links work (they do). Or perhaps I've always liked the appearance of some of the rather simple, default blog layouts. I guess I'm a minimalist and pleased with simple, efficient visual solutions, as far as webpages are concerned.

Probably the biggest reason for this blog is that currently I'm too lazy to add an english translation/section to my otherwise finnish website, but I'd also like to mention and comment on some developments in english. Partly to share my thoughts and views with folks and friends who don't understand finnish.

Some of the things that might be discussed include politics (mostly US and international, finnish politics probably don't interest many non-finnish speakers), religions (I'm an atheist, so you pretty much know what sort of take or point of view I will have on them, although technically I'm what can be called a "weak" atheist) science and technology, space and astronomy, with a special focus on Mars (relating to which, I host a finnish Mars news site Mars-uutiset.com), science fiction, movies, hi-fi, and a what ever seems to be interesting at any given moment.

This blog will probably be updated rather infrequently, just like my other sites. While I do like to maintain webpages, I don't like to be married to them. And a steady, frequent updating pace is not my strongest suite. At times I might update a lot and often and then not do any updates for quite a while. After all, this should be fun, not a chore.

And finally, as I mentioned in the second sentence I wrote, I don't much care for blogs. The reason was also stated: Too many opinions, too little factual information. It's like the pundits and talking heads on most of the US media outlets. A lot of noise and partisan hype/bashing, that an independent, intellectual and well informed viewer quickly tunes out or gets annoyed with.

"Opinions are like assholes. Everyone's got one and they all stink". That should just about sum it up. Even though I have great respect for _informed_ opinion, one based on facts, experience and knowledge. This kind, however, seems to be in rather short supply these days. Although I'm not sure if it has ever been in particularly ample supply. Reading history just seems to reinforce that impression. Oh well, that's all for now folks.