President Clinton was giving his last State of the Union address, talking about spending more money on mass transportation, energy efficiency and the environment, a missile defense program, science and technology research, etc. Then some republicans came on afterward and said stuff like they wanted to cut taxes, keep Social Security running good, and really try to reduce the 3.6 trillion dollar national debt. Wow. If only those things were what they seemed.

It wasn't until the end of News Radio and the beginning of the second wave of late night TV that I was able to concentrate on what I was doing. Actually, what I really needed was a first sentence. I couldn't just say "Thanks for visiting my web site. I'm Scott. My interests are...." (I do want to say something about my interests and who I am, but I haven't gotten there yet.) Instead, I started writing about what this whole web page thing is supposed to mean.

My web site basically has what I would imagine to be three audiences.

1. My friends and family. You guys might read this, eventually. I want to give you a nice "multimedia photo album" of things I've done and things I've made. Someplace you can go when you're thinking of me. Now, I know what it's like to hear a friend say, "Hey, I just added some really cool new stuff to my web page last night! Check it out right now!" and suddenly you get really lazy and don't end up really reading through your friend's site until a year or two later, when it's all hopelessly out of date. Well, maybe it's just me that does that. That's fine, though. Even though it only took me a couple hours to write all this one night, these exact same words will probably be here on the net, indexed by every search engine, for many years. So really, nobody should feel obligated to read everything all at once. Wait until you've got some time and really feel like checking out my site. Some Sunday afternoon in the middle of winter. Then let me know what you think, especially if I haven't heard from you in a while.

2. My future co-workers and bosses. Maybe they just might glance things over real quick to see who I am, on the way to the Resume link or something. I want to have something that looks professional and is informative, but is still fun.

3. The casual internet surfer. This is where I hope things get interesting, and you meet new people and trade thoughts and perspectives, but it never really works out that way. A web page is mostly one-way, mostly passive. Years later, I'm now receiving a couple e-mails a month, half from people who have found my essays and programming source code useful. Many of them have really nice things to say about my photo collection, and a few times their comments have turned into nice discussions.

Anyway, I thought it'd be neat to get this web page out there and see if I really affect or am affected by the random people who run into it. Conceivably, this little site over time can affect a large number of people, albeit indirectly and to a very small degree. Kinda neat.

(Whew! There's a lot more space I could've used to bore people with.)


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