Welcome

Hello, and welcome to this blog. Introductory posts are always a bit awkward, so as an attempt to take the easy way out I decided to structure this one as a FAQ.

Who are you?

I’m a computer programmer living in the Seattle area.

Why did you create this blog?

For a couple of reasons:

1. I was dissatisfied with the current Google results if you search for my name.
2. I figured I would be able to post some stuff that people might find interesting.

As for reason #1, here’s a link so you can track my progress: Google results for ‘Eric Faller’. As of the date this was written (May 2006), the results include a mishmash of random things:

• The horribly out-of-date homepage for a club I used to run while in college.

• An old friend’s web site for a computer game we used to work on.

• Various other web pages dealing with old school projects.

• The web site of a French dude with the same name as mine (rapidly gaining on the #1 spot).

Fortunately none of the results contain anything too embarrassing, so I’m currently more or less OK. But, I’m fully aware that the first thing that modern people do when meeting (or dating) somebody new is Google them. So, obviously it can’t hurt to have some sort of positive influence over the results. Plus, I have found that reading the archived posts of somebody’s blog is a good way to quickly learn a lot about the person and avoid potentially dangerous conversation topics (“ooh, well when I made that comment about people from the East Coast, I meant everybody except people from New York, you see...”).

As for reason #2, it will be up to you to decide if my posts are actually interesting. I’ve read a good number of blogs so I hope I know what to do. I’ll try to avoid posting boring stuff (“Today I ate cheerios for breakfast, went to work, came home and went to bed”), cryptic stuff (“Here’s a picture of the back of Joe’s head,” (no explanation of who Joe is)), pompous stuff (“Obviously the opening brace goes on its own line – anybody who thinks otherwise is an idiot”), and lazy stuff (“Does anybody know what the website for the IRS is? Post a comment if you know”). My goal is to post more-or-less regularly on a variety of topics, while keeping the content interesting (so far I have learned that pictures = good, and spell checking = good). We’ll see how it goes. If you see a post that sucks, write a comment that says “This post sucks” and I’ll get on it (obviously, more constructive feedback helps as well).

So basically this is all about you and your ego, isn’t it?

Yep, pretty much. Isn’t that the whole idea behind blogging? 🙂

It looks like this blog is running on WordPress?

I looked at a variety of blog hosts/software packages and ultimately chose this one for a couple of reasons:

• It’s free, and there are no ads (always good).

• The provider can easily be switched - don’t have to worry about it getting bought out by some megacorp.

• It’s totally customizable: I can set the style to whatever I want, get rid of any annoying “Powered by Blah Inc” thingies, and if I wanted to it’s easy to write a little PHP widget for the sidebar that shows the weather in Turkey (for example).

You know, Real Programmers write their own blog software by hand. In frickin’ assembly.

Yeah, I know. I started out by mocking up something in ASP.NET, but as I was attempting to write an RSS library by hand, I thought to myself, “NIH syndrome!” and gave up. It probably would have taken a few weeks or months (of my spare time) to implement half the features that every other software package already has, and I realized that all that time could be better spent doing something fun. So that’s the story: basically, I’m lazy.

What's that picture at the top?

That's a picture of my desk. I couldn't think of anything better. Plus, it's a pretty hot-looking desk.

I had some other questions too, but I forgot what they were since you talk so much.

Sorry about that. If you have any questions or suggestions for posts, feel free to leave comments!

- Eric