Chapter 1

In Which We Are Introduced to Adam’s Blog, and Some Topics, and Some Opinions

After years of people saying, “you should write a blog,” I’ve finally decided to listen to those people. I plan to write about food, cooking, eating, restaurants, cooking gear, and related publications. If I run out of things to say about those topics, I may resort to writing something technical (probably about programming or software or computers). However, I doubt I’ll stoop as low as movie reviews. As I said on my main blog page, all this is free, and worth what you paid for it. Sorry, no refunds.

I should probably make my biases clear: I’m a devout omnivore; I am equally satisfied and comfortable eating a meal of steak and eggs (with a side of bacon, of course) as I am eating curried garbanzos and brown rice. I can’t eat milk or cream or some cheeses, and I like my food spicy. I have no interest in vegatarianism, veganism, locavorism, or any other “-ism.” The only “diet” I believe in is eating an appropriate number of calories for your body size and level of physical activity. There may be reasons to prefer certain kinds of food or to avoid others, but there are just too many conflicting (and well-supported) claims out there for me to believe that we actually understand what we’re talking about.

You’re more than welcome to disagree with me about any of this; in fact, I encourage you to disagree, because I think we all need to examing these things for ourselves. However, if you want to publish your disagreements, you’ll have to do it in your own blog.

Concerning reviews: I plan to write reviews of restaurants, books, magazines, articles, recipes, and cooking equipment. In all cases, I will have paid for everything out of my own pocket. If it’s a restaurant, I will have paid for the meal myself; it it’s a bit of cooking gear, I will have purchased it with my own funds. I have no intention of ever accepting good or services for review; heck, I don’t even plan to tell the providers of these goods and services that I’m writing a blog, let alone that my blog is about their wares.

I chose not to use any of the popular blogging software because I just don’t like how they work. They either do too much for me, or they’re too hard to install on my server, or they don’t let me easily use my favorite editor (Keith Bostic’s nvi), or they put entries in the wrong order, or all of the above. I’ve been writing web pages by hand since just after Sir Tim started this whole thing and at least for me, I haven’t found a good reason to change how I do things. Obviously your mileage will vary.

If you want to see my blog entries in reverse chronological order, well, that’s what an RSS reader (“feed reader,” “aggregator”) is for. There are plenty of them out there, and there should be a link in the column on the left-hand side of this page that you can use to subscribe to my blog. For everyone else, I intend to keep the list in “natural&rdquo order; that is, from oldest (at the top) to newest (at the bottom).

I create my RSS “feed” using a fairly simple bit of Perl I wrote. As soon as I can finish a few features and write some documentation, I’ll post it along with all my other software.

[Friday, 22 January 2010]



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