Six Months of Blind Confidential

Well, my friends, Blind Confidential has reached six months old and, excepting the period that I spent in guide dog school, it has presented the public with an average of five new items per week.  I’ve filled the archives with articles about technology, human factors, discrimination, politics, book reviews, rants, musings, essays and fiction.  I’ve enjoyed writing almost every piece and have definitely had a lot of fun with all of the feedback I’ve received posted on the blog or sent directly to me via email.  I even enjoy the hate mail as it informs and, sometimes, amuses.

Looking back to the morning in January when I sent a small set of friends an email announcing that Blind Confidential would go online and discuss matters of technology and other things I find interesting, I never expected I would grow a number of alter egos or write as much fiction as I have.  I had expected to receive much more content from other people to include here but, except for a couple of things sent by friends, almost all of the content here has come as a stream of consciousness off the top of my head, early in the morning while drinking coffee.

The process I use to write these pieces includes thinking up a topic, typically this comes to me the night before a post, mulling it over a bit, thinking of a few choice lines and, when I wake up in the morning, after feeding and draining the dogs, I sit down, open MS Word and start at the top and write until I feel I’m done.  The only editing I do includes spell checking and fixing really broken sentences.  Everything else remains “as is” and I kind of like the raw feel the pieces often have.  I didn’t want to turn Blind Confidential into a hardcore journalistic vehicle as I really don’t want to spend a lot of time checking facts and such.  The commentary form, along with personal essay, expository, rant and fiction provides me with more fun than would more well researched items.  Of course, I know I can count on BC readers to correct any glaring factual errors as well as provide me with an “in my face” opinion if they disagree with my articles.

On or around December 1, I will kick off www.hofstader.com.  It will serve as a web site with pointers to all kinds of stuff and some content that I cannot discuss publicly at this time.  As we already own the domain, I thought I might start putting content there to fill the empty page.  It will include the date I expect it to go live but I’m not sure what else to put there.  One idea has been to put pointers to the “Best of Blind Confidential.”

I have a few items of which I am particularly fond, the “1986,” George Orwell parody, various Gonz Blinko pieces, the items about the neo-nazi group who killed the wrong guy (which I plan on merging into a single piece), “A Snowbird’s Tale,” the Sy. T. Greenbacks note to his investors and a few others.  If you have any nominations for the “best of” collection please send them along so I can put links to them on Hofstader.com.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank some of the other people who have helped BC become such a popular blog.  First, my friend in Manila, Roselle, from Code Factory, who edits the html to add links and such and provides me with daily feedback on my articles, Will Pearson for his frequent and very intelligent comments, Chairman Mal for his odd, gonzo weird, wild lefty statements and the guys at the BPP who, just by sending me emails, remind me that the radical fringe lives in the blindness community too.  I’d like to thank Joe Clark for being the nastiest man in Canada and, as a result, for generating traffic to BC that includes people who find him annoying but have become regular readers and RSS subscribers to this blog.  I’d like to thank Apple Computer for continuing to find a way to make themselves an easy target for cheap shots.  Lastly, I’d like to thank all of the people who have written to me confidentially delivering secrets from within the industry and keeping me up to date on AT gossip.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these articles as much as I have enjoyed writing them and that you will continue to come back to BC in the future.

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