It’s been quite some time now since Scott W. first introduced .NETWeblogs, and yet here I am just now making my first official Blog entry. You have to understand me a little better to understand why it has taken me so long to participate in the blogging phenomenon. I have this thing (ok, it’s called a personality fault) where I rebel against new, trendy ideas. For example, I refused to initially go see the movie The Matrix (can’t believe I even admit that publicly!) because everyone was saying how good it was and I thought the trailer looked too fake. Of course, that’s before I wised up, watched it and realized it was set in a fake world and is the greatest Sci-Fi flick since Star Wars. I don’t know why I’m like this – I figure I just don’t like new things that everyone thinks is “all the rage” being pushed down my throat. I guess the same thing happened with the Blog Craze – everyone was doing it and I wasn’t going to be one of those “people”. Well, I started reading all my friends Blogs and recognized that I was being pigheaded again.
After deciding to make the leap into blogging I decided that it could be much more than something to pass the time for me. I see my blog as many things: A way to help out the community, an easy way to step into technical writing (a goal of mine) and improve my overall writing skills, keep my skills sharp and on the cutting edge, and (hopefully) provide some good laughs.
The last thing I had to do was come up with a title and description for my blog and make my first entry. I was a little intimidated with the title/description as there are so many good ones out there. No need giving examples – you know which one’s I’m talking about. The cleverest thing I could come up with was “Texas Yankee”. However, I was not as inspired when it came to my description – I’ll have to live with “Stephen Swienton’s Weblog” until I can think of something snazzier.
Which finally (did I mention I’m long-winded?) brings us to “What the heck is a ‘Texas Yankee’ anyways?” I was born in Chicago, Illinois and lived there for the first 9 years of my life. I then moved to Houston, Texas for 3 years before moving overseas to Waterloo, Belgium for 7 years. After Belgium, I attended college at Baylor University in Waco, Texas where I also lived and worked for a couple of years after I graduated. I moved to Fort Worth after Waco and have lived here ever since. Part of me will always be a “Yankee” Chicagoan at heart – I’ll always love the Chicago Sports teams: the Bulls, White Sox, Bears, and Blackhawks; while hating the Dallas Mavericks, Dallas Cowboys, and Chicago Cubs too (I have grown somewhat fond of the Texas Rangers and Dallas Stars), but I have spent more time in Texas than anywhere else (lived in Texas for 12 years – I’m amost 29 if you don’t want to do the math). I now consider Texas my official home and plan on living and raising my children here. And that is how one becomes a “Texas Yankee”!
So, here I am finally joining the ranks. I’m itching to write my first .NET entries and I hope you find my upcoming articles informative, interesting, and humorous too. Feel free to ping me with any questions or comments.