Rubenerd

There's a surprising lack of mobile phone reception in the middle of nowhere

Well here we are ladies, gentleman and everyone else; I never thought I would ever be writing a post to denote the celebration of this particular event, because to be honest I never thought I would get this far. My humble little weblog/blog/internet log/Chuck Peddle has reached 1,000 posts!

What I find hilarious about this is how disjointed all the material on this site really is. Every blogging expert will tell you that the secret to success is to find your niche topic that you're fascinated with and stick with it. They claim posts that have little to nothing to do with your core subject will just distract people and you'll lose readers. I've constantly flown right in the face of this inspired wisdom though, and aside from a few bouts of self doubt now and then, it hasn't bothered me.

RapidWeaver version from 2005

This blog for example was originally designed to be a hard hitting, gritty, unapologetic critique of high school life in Singapore which didn't really get anywhere before I started to focus mostly on computer software and the intertubes. Even then though I'd be pretty confident in saying that more than half of my posts have had nothing to do with software and the internet; for every practical and useful post on Mac and FreeBSD there's a post on aviation, or a silly quote, or politics, or music, or me coming to terms with my atheism, or amateur philosophy!

I guess it all comes down to what your motivation for blogging is in the first place. Since 2005 my motivation first and foremost has been to have some fun by talking about topics I'm really interested in, as well as posting reviews and how-to guides that not only help me remember things but that I hope is of at least passing interest and/or help to someone else down the road. In this light, it's been an unqualified success. Blogging has been such a pleasant distraction from ongoing family troubles, work and studying.

First WordPress version from January 2006

Aside from constantly rambling as I've made a habit of doing here, I'd also like to thank everyone for your readership over the years and I've appreciated all your emails and comments. I know there are millions upon millions of blogs on the intertubes that are far more interesting, inspiring, [succinct!] and valuable that most of the nonsense I write here, so I'm humbled that you value what I've written here enough to take the time to read mine. Thank you! :-D

Looking to the future, I do have some plans which I'm hoping to finally implement over these up and coming holidays. I know that despite my own preference for dark backgrounds with light text, I know that virtually all you guys prefer white backgrounds with darker text so I'll be implementing a revised colour scheme, with the option to toggle back to dark if you prefer. My efforts to move over to my own content management system from WordPress have been thwarted more times than I can count, but it is my goal to eventually move this over to said system, and on a domain name that actually makes sense. I have some HUGE ideas I can't wait to implement!

Family and friends photo from 2005. I'm the head peeking out in the centre, my mum is second from the right.

As for dedications, as with everything I post here I dedicate this 1000th post to the memory of my beautiful late mum Debra who endured an excruciating decade-long battle with cancer just so she could be alive long enough for both my sister and I to remember her. She shaped my views on virtually every major issue from music, art, books and food (Vegemite!) to ethics, politics, comedy and philosophy. While I could never dream to surpass her in anything other than perhaps in Objective C development, I hope I am at least doing her proud now. I love you mummy, rest in peace.