When blogs first began to gain momentum, I kept one for a while. I wasn't very diligent about it and I didn't keep it long, but I did learn something important about myself: I hate me.

I'm not a nice person at all. I'm petty and spiteful, self-absorbed, boring and inclined to be a little too pleased with myself. I laugh at my own jokes and love the sound of my own voice. This is, of course, so profoundly not unique to me that just bringing it to your attention is a little slice of narcissus.

Except that there's something extra special lame about being so shallow and vain on the internet. In your own protected corner of webspace. It's the difference between getting undressed for bed, and lifting your shirt and pressing your naked breasts against the window of the car while stuck in traffic. The former is an ordinary household chore, the latter marks a dangerous exhibitionist crazywoman who needs a net thrown over her.

The 'daily diary' format of personal blogs seems to bring out the inner bore in so many people. I keep a bookmark list of especially awful vanity sites that I browse occasionally, for my sins.

Or theirs. I figure if those people haven't the sense to be ashamed of themselves, I'm doing a service by being ashamed in their place. It's like taking on one of somebody's karmic cockroach-lives for them. (Oh, who'm I kidding? I'm there to laugh and feel superior).

Like so many of my fellow netizens, I cannot seem to shut the hell up or keep it to myself. But I can quarantine the worst of it. So if something I do makes me think, "Oh, who gives a shit?" I'll drop it in here. And scoop some litter over it.

You might observe (were you a rude, boorish sort of person) that my whole site is like that, but I do try. I double-check my recipes, I confirm my facts, I design experiments to test my hypotheses, I take photos and make drawings, I display l33t Photoshopping skilz and madly gay codesmithery. I make a living doing this sort of thing, so it has a measurable professional value (at least when I do it for somebody else). I try to maintain the highest standard of pointless online blather. Which, since you don't pay anything to read this you heartless sack of crap, is pretty decent of me.

Not this part. Here be cute pet stories. Greeting card platitudes. True, but deadly dull, confessions. Bumpersticker bromides. "Have you ever noticed...?" senile Andy Rooneyisms. Brain Spam. To whom it may concern. An open letter to. The oil filter of the mind. The bottom of the birdcage. The sweepings of the abbatoir floor. Junk. Stuff. Shit.

You can't say you haven't been warned.