Drive By Chicken

Dear readers,

Though very few, if any, of you will be aware of Drivebychicken’s previous incarnations, (it wasn’t exactly rife with regular readers) I am very pleased to write this first blog entry on the new and hopefully final purpose of this website. But before I go into what that is, I will briefly explain the history.

The domain name itself, drivebychicken.com, was the result of a drunken conversation with a friend and the painfully increasing ease of purchasing domain names on the internet these days. Realising that the intended purpose of that drunken idea was not only beyond my technical capability, but also somewhat idiotic, I decided to look for something else to do with the domain. I hadn’t had my own blog for some time and when I did have a blog it was under-utilized as a means to vent or communicate opinions. So I went with that.

At this time I was attempting to start up my own web design company (something which had little success and any hope was shot down with the economic end of the world) and so my blog posts tended to be mostly about web design and tech. After a while I thought “why keep this blog so informal if I only end up posting tech related stuff” so I redesigned the site to look a little more professional, gave it a set purpose of talking about tech news and events, and set myself the schedule of at least one weekly roundup of tech news called Take on Tech.

This went well for a while. Unfortunately giving my hobby strict operational parameters and defining a schedule made things less enjoyable. Around the second or third month I started to see writing my weekly ToT as more of a chore than something I looked forward to and writing about tech, to take a line from Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, was like writing a message in a bottle and throwing it into a sea full of bottled messages. The result of this being that no one was particularly interested in reading my tech blog.

So, the site fell into disuse for a few months until now. I should point out that I have been an avid listener of a number of podcasts ever since I purchased an iPod Classic at the beginning of 2008, but only recently I started listening to Stephen Fry’s Podgrams.

Now all the podcasts I had experienced by this point were aimed at something specific: Buzz Out Loud and TWiT for tech news, Sarcastic Gamer and 1UP Yours for gaming news, The Best of Chris Moyles and Paul Boag’s blog eventually morphed into a podcast (a very successful one at that) but it has a very specific subject (web design) whereas Stephen Fry talks about what he feels like. Sometimes that might be a discourse on the history, meaning and usage of language, other times it might a rant about dancing.

I have no delusions of grandeur or belief that my life or experiences might be as entertaining or interesting as the great Stephen Fry, but that doesn’t matter, this is a self serving venture more than anything.

It is somewhere to vent, to put my opinions out there, to talk about what I feel like talking about, if people find it interesting enough to want to read, great. The subject of each entry to this online journal blog… thing will be whatever takes my fancy, and they will be irregular, though I aim to not have larger gaps between entries than a month or so. The entries will be in blog and hopefully podcast form… though the podcast part will depend on how the first attempt turns out.

With that I’ll end this introduction. I look forward to the first entry on the new Drivebychicken, see you then.