I've joined the blogosphere!

This is my first blog - yes, I am that last person on earth who is not yet self-published! At least not until I publish this posting.

So what am I supposed to write about? I used to fancy myself a pretty good writer - heck I won a play writing contest in 8th Grade! We even got to stage it for the whole school and they gave me a cameo part (I am definitely NOT an actor). My first major in college was journalism, until I figured out that I didn't want to be writing obituaries for the Peoria Post for 5 years. I think I would have been a good reporter - maybe a war correspondent, or, better yet, a sportswriter! (I identified with Oscar Madison on the Odd Couple!). Recently I thought I might become a religious writer when I retire from my day job - maybe write Sunday School lessons. Who knows?

When I realized there was no money in journalism I switched my major to computer science (I have always been very practical). Back then, Ohio State was one of the first colleges to offer a computer science degree in the business college. I was a hot property after graduation; I tried to start a bidding war between IBM, Hewlett-Packard and NCR. I ended up at NCR and eventually made my way to EMC. A few years back I thought I was burned out and needed a career change, so I attended some sessions of the Crossroads Career course at church; I did enough surveys and skill assessments to learn that I should be doing something that combined social activity in a technical field ... which, as a pre sales consultant for a storage vendor, was exactly what I was doing! So I decided to bitch less and focus on the positive. To a large degree, I've been successful.

So no one really cares about my background, which brings me back to my opening question - what do I write about? This isn't Twitter, so I don't want to tell you that I had cereal for breakfast (again!). This isn't Facebook, so I don't want to tell you what my status is ("Brian is trying to write a blog"). However, I am fairly new to FB, and just joined Twitter this week (I have 2 followers, even though I have yet to tweet!). This is my 'going public' phase, I guess. The cool thing about Twitter was watching the #iranelection discussion the past few nights, with all the tweets out of Iran, and the links to YouTube videos of protesters getting beaten up.

So why a blog, why now (my wife wants to know)? I've thought about this for quite awhile, but just never got around to it, never had the time, etc (still don't). This morning on NPR they were talking about the new rules for job seekers; for example one hiring manager said that if he gets a paper resume and cover letter folded neatly inside an envelope he just throws it away. If it's not electronic, it doesn't exist. They said that many contacts are made through professional networking sites like LinkedIn (I'm on there but I don't have any recommendations). Then there was the throwaway comment that if you didn't exist online and if you didn't have a blog, then you were suspect. So that was the excuse I needed to start one!

Time will tell whether this is my last blog or whether I will actually post on a periodic basis. Right now I have to decide if I'm going to post this link on Facebook or just let it sit in the ether and see if anyone actually stumbles across it (maybe the slightly crude blog title will "attract a few flies" (sorry - bad pun!).

Thanks for reading!