First things first

This is an admittedly late starting blog. Most of my contemporaries have already committed themselves to the 'blogosphere'.

But better late than never.

Many folk have been long asking me why I have not published, in either this or any other media, my experiences in the past ten years of operating a website for fun and profit. Maybe it has been because I have yet to honestly believe there is much I can add to the plethora of verbiage that has been written about the web, in all its glory.

Suffice to say that time never stands still and so I begin.

For those (and there are many) who have never heard of me, my name is Ian Miller, and I am/was a journalist in Auckland, New Zealand. But, unlike those true spirits who honor their calling and stay shackled to the yoke of a paycheck till they are done, I have had many different roles to date.

Originally trained as a fitter and turner, then a lift mechanic both in Auckland and in Sydney...and then a major shift into away from the tools and into the more ethereal existance of the scribe and hack. Many thanks for those who put up with me and to those who saw potential in this man who may have been originally miscast...I became a radio journalist and fledgling newsreader for both private and public radio. This was in the late 1970's, when life was, so I believe, far less encumbered by rules and regulations than is the case today. Those were the days of radio pirates and radio newsroom and Kiwi journalism that rivalled the best, anyplace in the world.

I was indeed fortunate to be trained 'on the job' by some of the best journo's of the day. And in the course of doing so I learnt that there truly is nothing that cannot be achieved if you set your mind to it. As I did.

In a nutshell, if I may, my passage down into the world of the cynic, for that is what most journalists eventually descend to become IMHO, was tempered by extremes of both joy and terror; joy through the immense satisfaction that comes with the accomplishment of an extremely public role done well, and terror when it all screwed up and went totally pear shaped and fell apart in that most public or arena, live radio performance. It may well be that at some future date I will expand on both of these with real world examples drawn from my own experiences, but for now let's just assume there were times I was brilliant, and others when I was way less than adequate. And leave it at that. For now.

Without a doubt the past ten years have been a steeper learning curve than that of a fledgling journo; after radio I became entranced with the mysteries of computers and computing development (I have been again fortunate to count among my friends some of the best and most analytical brains who were then engaged 'at the cutting edge' of computing). And within their company and with this sense of wonder I embarked on a career in technical journalism which led to the decision to finally 'take a punt' and wave those baubles farewell to create a website and explore the emerging world of cyberspace, web trading and the Internet in all its fledgling glory. The rationale being that to understand something new you have to immerse yourself in it - and the 'net was certainly something new back then.

Sheesh...looking back at what I have just written makes my aware that the years between 1975 and 2008 have been filled with a rich tapestry of experiences and endeavor. Let's see if we can chronologically expand them and eventually make some sense of it all.

For now, this is my first real post in this blog; let's hope it's not my last and that I can indeed make sense of it all - the good, the bad, the amazing and the bloody unfortunate.

Stay tuned. There really is a whole lot more. The hassle will not be deciding what to include, but what to leave out in the interests of fairness and accuracy.

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