{"id":35,"date":"2008-08-02T12:13:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-02T12:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sullybeck.com\/index.php\/2008\/08\/02\/why\/"},"modified":"2008-08-02T12:13:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-02T12:13:00","slug":"why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.sullybeck.com\/index.php\/2008\/08\/02\/why\/","title":{"rendered":"Why?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I usually do things for a reason, but in the case of this blog, I&#8217;m not sure why I&#8217;m doing it. I&#8217;m kind of excited about it&#8230; I get to talk about anything I want. Sometimes it&#8217;ll be stream of consciousness type writing. Other times I&#8217;ll write essays. I always enjoyed writing essays. But it doesn&#8217;t really explain why I&#8217;m looking forward to writing. Probably just because it will allow me to talk about things that are important to me. Or maybe it&#8217;s something else that I&#8217;ll figure out as I go.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the most important things in my life are: my wife and daughter (I&#8217;ll write a lot about both of them), my church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; aka Mormon), my political beliefs (staunch libertarian), building things (I love to build), my job (computer programmer and systems administrator), etc.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll see where it goes.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe I&#8217;ll start by saying where the title of my blog comes from. I&#8217;ve been called &#8220;The Date Man&#8221; on a couple of occasions, and I kind of liked it. It doesn&#8217;t refer to the number of girls I&#8217;ve gone out with. It refers to a program I wrote (and continue to modify) called Date::Manip. It&#8217;s a perl module&#8230; and unless you are a perl programmer, this probably means nothing to you, and is not very interesting.<\/p>\n<p>One of the fundamental things about me is that I am an engineer. I like to build things. I &#8220;build&#8221; computer programs. I &#8220;build&#8221; meals (I like to cook). I enjoy carpentry and metal working and have gotten to build a number of things. Some might think that writing a computer program, cooking a meal, and building a shelf are three completely different things, but I get almost the exact same enjoyment out of them.<\/p>\n<p>In each type of building, I look forward to building something &#8220;grand&#8221; or especially meaningful. Although I&#8217;ve written a number of computer programs, Date::Manip stands out as one of my most important. So when I was called &#8220;The Date Man&#8221;, it was definitely a compliment. Anyway, it came to mind when I was starting this blog, and it stuck.<\/p>\n<p>But don&#8217;t worry&#8230; I&#8217;m not going to go into any details about writing computer programs (at least, I don&#8217;t think I will). I can just see it. An essay entitled &#8220;The inner workings of a computer programmer&#8217;s mind&#8221;. I realize that it would be thrilling, but you&#8217;ll probably just have to do without.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, more later&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I usually do things for a reason, but in the case of this blog, I&#8217;m not sure why I&#8217;m doing it. I&#8217;m kind of excited about it&#8230; I get to&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sullybeck.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sullybeck.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sullybeck.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sullybeck.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sullybeck.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sullybeck.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sullybeck.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sullybeck.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sullybeck.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}