Reaffirming My Own Existence

This site is under construction so don't judge me! Actually judge me all you want because a good site is always under construction. This site will contain many of my ramblings like pointing out chiasmus and if I put a decent amount of work into it, it might just have a small effect on someone's life!

"Small Perturbation" was one of the names I thought up when I decided that the name of this site would not be a reference to someone else's copyrighted work. When I first started using this wonderful server, I planned to give it a name that had something to do with Transformers or Star Wars or Inception or The Matrix. I am perfectly comfortable with the notion that I will never write something as epic as these works and I am perfectly confident that I will still love them in ten years, but enough is enough. The best names are not fan references. To me, they are things like "Small Perturbation", "Higher Order Terms" and "Highly Non-linear". Maybe the second and third will come up if I decide to make sister sites.

Choosing a name was difficult, but deciding on the "feel" of the website was much harder. Before I had the start of something that I liked, I was spoiled for choice and the fear of getting things off to a bad start kept me from starting a blog for a long time. The biggest source of encouragement was probably Justin Hayes, my friend, admin and benevolent dictator. He was initially pissed off when I said I wanted to upload the occasional video to his server and I tried to make him cautiously optimistic that I wouldn't abuse it. Either that or I just threw a fit about how using YouTube cheapens the site! When it comes to LAMP, Justin is the most knowledgeable person I talk to on a regular basis. Even if I knew what I was doing, managing my own server would be impractical. My student life has me living in a different place every few years and I would go insane if I had to sleep in the same room as a running server. My parents' house is big enough to make this a non-issue but the Internet connection there is slow.

Perhaps I am making excuses and rationalizations but one thing I can defend much more easily is Drupal - the content management system used by some of the most influential figures on the web. It is a perfect example of a piece of software that has the power to convince a lay person that the web has been upgraded to a new version. I have not explored all of its possibilities yet. One thing I plan to do is find some use for that damn navigation bar on the side. I have told myself before that my posts are what they are and that any attempt to tag them would be in vain. However, I should reconsider this because a tag cloud would be a great way to fill the void.

Going into random details is something best saved for other posts. So the point of all this is: welcome to the site!