Hello World

Fellow technologists will recognize the title of this blog entry as the quintessential first attempt at anything related to learning a tool or medium. Already from the perspective of the second sentence, I can see I will have to learn four things. First, there is this tool, which is not much different than most simple text editors I have used over the years. But discovering its features will be part of this new experience. I can change the size of the font or its type. I can express myself boldly, softly, or colorfully. (Experimenting, of course, is part and parcel of the Hello World ritual.) This learning curve should be short and shallow, depending on how many widgets and wonderknobs will interest me enough to use.
Second, when I write for pleasure (poetry, punditry and personal correspondence) or work (specifications and guides), I prefer paper. The physical act of writing with either pencil or pen is part of the experience of expression, and, I think, affects what I have to say. Using my digits independent of one another (though still connected to a single thought through the central nervous systems) upon a keyboard offers different tactile feedback than a single hand cradling a writing stick and moving across the lines of a page. Even visual feedback morphs from wriggly loops and lines that comprise my handwriting on flat, plain scrip to a fonted characters marching across a screen cluttered with color graphics, links to far-off places and other words not my own.
On another level, I am learning the medium of the ersatz blogosphere. Is it really a sphere? Or is it a wormhole than takes you into another dimension of reality, applying unnerving pressures, distorting what it conducts? Is it a mobius strip that only turns upon itself, never consumed, never ending, and never going anywhere? If the medium is the message, the topology will communicate more than the words I write. I expect this to take a little longer to learn well.
Finally, I am exploring communications with an audience that is faceless, voiceless, and transient. A dumb, deaf and blind barker who talks by text to an ephemeral crowd (that may not ever exist) and awaits response like a hopeful cosmologist searching for intelligible (if not intelligent) life. This may be the most challenging to master. The question will be whether I have the patience to become an effective and entertaining writer for this kind of audience.
And the name? Well, it's a tip of the hat to one of my favorite musical passages - the second movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony.
Enough for now. More later.