In my head, I am the world’s greatest blogger.

I have strong opinions about a lot of things, and I’m not hesitant to share them with anyone who will listen. I’m a pretty good story teller, and I’ve thought pretty deeply about certain issues in IT. I can rant about the IT problems of the world (or at least the US Defense Department), and provide a fair value of education and entertainment at the same time.

The problem, of course, is that I typically do this as verbal tirades to a small audience of sounding boards. These rants are good, I’m tellin’ ya: They’re rehearsed. Polished. Impassioned. Alas, the total impact of this passion and thinking is vanishingly small.

Sorta like shouting down a well, really.

If I want my soi-disant “deep thoughts” to have any effect on the world around me, it seems obvious that I need a bigger audience than my co-workers.  If only I could write down these amusing and informative rants and publish them somewhere so that they could be read by the whole world…  where people could comment and exchange in meaningful, thought provoking dialog… !

I need a blog.

I have a blog already, as it happens – but it’s on Intelink-U, which limits the audience to people who read blogs on Intelink-U and both of them have already assured me that they don’t care.  Over two years, I’ve posted 8 times.  The motivation to post is pretty small when no-one reads it, and no one reads a blog that averages one post per quarter.

I intend to cross-post everything I can between the two blogs, so that my inside-the-wire colleagues can read and comment in the safety of obscurity, and yet still find that great post with the convenience of Google.   And I can post pictures of my kids and dog without using government resources.   If there’s something too sensitive to put on the Interwebs, it can go on Intelink only, I suppose.

To be great at something you gotta do 10,000 hours of practice.  Every journey starts with a single step.  Yadda, yadda, yadda.  Here we go.