FatBusinessman.com

Three Questions

Chances are you will have three questions on visiting this site: who am I, what am I writing a blog for, and why should you care?

I’ll attempt to answer them, in rough order of difficulty.

First off, my name’s David Thompson (the origins of the name ‘Fat Businessman’ have been somewhat lost in the mists of time), and I’m one of these student types studying Computer Science (pretty much the geekiest of subjects) at Cambridge (pretty much the geekiest of universities). I do a bit of programming here, a bit of web development there. And, just to reassure you, I do have something approximating to a life – I just probably won’t talk about it too much here.

Which brings us on to the second question – why am I writing a blog? The answer to that seems to stem back to my habit of devising little ‘projects’ to keep myself occupied over the summer. My project at the end of secondary school was to write a website, complete with framed navigation, Javascript-powered databases, and all those kinds of things I would now not touch with a ten-foot barge pole (even if I had a tend-foot barge pole handy, which I don’t). My project at the end of sixth-form was more based around the need for money, as it involved getting a job. This ended up being with a company originally called Virata, then called GlobespanVirata when Globespan bought them out, and which is now called Conexant.

But I digress – I’m not planning on getting a job this summer, as I’m essentially too damn lazy. So I thought, as so many geeks I know are writing these blog things (most notably my sister) I thought a good project would be to maintain my own blog, complete with an all-singing, all-dancing, all-pingbacking custom-build weblog engine.

Then I realised this would actually be difficult, chickened out and am currently using WordPress. I haven’t given up entirely on rolling my own though, so expect a couple of blog posts about writing a blog engine.

And now onto the trickiest question: why should you, the reader, care?

Well, as you’re reading this, you either know me personally, know me through some other good-natured blogger who’s linked to me, or you were Googling for “fat businessman” (which brings up a number of singularly disturbing results, such as this one). If you know me, there’s a good chance you’re either a geek or have a little inner geek sitting around somewhere urging you to go into tech shops, so you might find at least some of my prattlings interesting. If you know me through another blogger, a similar argument applies. The rest of you, I’m afraid you’ll have to make up your own minds.

One Response to “Three Questions”

  1. Hello David, thanks for listing me on your Blogroll. No guesses how I found you 😉 Happy blogging!