Blogging a New Beginning
I have moved my web hosting to dreamhost.com. I made the decision to do so because my previous web host, GoDaddy.com, supported a proposed bill that would fundamentally change the internet, and not in a good way. This bill, called SOPA or Stop Online Piracy Act, is an affront to free speech and a free internet. While the name suggests it would be used to stop piracy, it would do much more. There is a lot out there on the interwebs about this bill, so I will not go into it. I just want to officially declare that I do not support it. My domain name, bobonthenet.com, and several other domains that I own are registered through GoDaddy still. Bobonthenet.com is prepaid up until 2019, and it is unlikely that I would receive a refund. Because of this, these domains will remain registered until they expire, then I will use a different registrar. A majority of these domains expire in 2012. Even though I will not be migrating my domains, GoDaddy will not receive another cent from me.
Now that that bit of nastiness is out of the way, I would like to talk about my plans for the next year. The migration of my web hosting has inspired me to do some blogging today, hopefully I can manage to continue with this on a regular basis from now on. I believe it is more important than ever that I am keeping this record of my life, my so called wisdom and sharing my ideas with the world. Why? Because I am about to become a father. The information I am putting on this blog is firstly for my future self. It is a reminder of who I was and what I plan to be, for myself and for my son or daughter. It is also for that future child. This other living, breathing, thinking human being created in love and in the likeness of both my incredible wife and myself. In bringing this child into this world I also take on the responsibility of providing for, teaching, loving and for a while at least, being one half of this child's entire world along with my wife. So, to my future child, whoever you may be, this record is for you too. I hope it may help you somewhere along the way if you should choose to read it. Lastly, this blog is public, it is on the internet, it is for everyone that should happen to stumble upon it. Much of this will likely be meaningless to you. My personal anecdotes, projects, photos and videos of my kid, dog, wife or whatever will hopefully provide you with some humor or other form of entertainment, or perhaps you will learn something from me. That is what I believe the internet is all about after all – sharing of information. Through this medium we will be able to communicate, teaching each other as you comment on and critique my writings. Hopefully we will both be all the better for having done so.
The next year should be full of excitement for both myself and my immediate family. As previously mentioned, my wife and I are expecting, more on that in future blog posts. Secondly, we are also focusing on re-educating ourselves to change the direction of our careers for the better. I have managed to weasel myself into the wonderful world of IT and am now working fiercely towards uplifting myself in that area through furthering my education with another degree and lots of personal study at home. Even as I am between semesters at the moment, I have been studying SQL, which is the primary language I would be using as a developer at my job. I think I'm pretty good with SQL now, but one can always be better. I currently have zero professional experience with coding. Next year I hope to change that. My wife is also following a very similar path. She is not currently working in IT development, but is educating herself to be able to make that transition. This on top of having a child will be extremely stressful. However, doing so will make for a vast improvement in our combined income, job satisfaction and ability to provide for our child.
I also plan to continue with my robotics. It is an expensive hobby but it is important to me, and I can make small incremental upgrades to my robot to spread out the cost. This is something that I hope to get good at and be able to share with my child. My wife and I have also discussed trying to put together an indy game together. Since we will both be programmers, we thought that would be a fun side project to be able to do together. I'm not looking to make money from making games and they probably won't be super popular since it would be just the two of us making them. I think it would be fun, though, and would help us get even better at our day jobs.
So that is it, that is my plan for now, and as always, it will be subject to change. I expect the unexpected to happen often. I hope you enjoy reading about it and sharing the experience with me.