The Project: The Recipe
So, take an intention to write something about The North. Add a healthy dose of (possibly not quite insatiable) curiosity, a disinclination to do things by halves and forty years' playing around with various aspects of computer technology, and you have this website.
There is — or so I have been led to believe by people who may be seen as reliable informants — a concept called moderation, although I don't think it has ever really been a part of my mental universe. While I'm aware that there are times when obligation trumps value, by and large, if something's worth doing, it's worth doing well comes with an implied rider: If it's not worth doing well, is it worth doing at all?
From time to time, something piques my interest. Forty-something years ago, the back page of The Weekend Australian was devoted to personal computer technology. It usually included a snippet of BASIC — something to chart your biorhythms, for example — to type into your command-line Commodore 64, Apple II or whatever. That, and a colleague's remark that these personal computers would find their way into the classroom, so it might be worth starting to learn about them now, pushed me over the edge.
Ten years later, it looked like Apple's HyperCard software might deliver an avenue out of the classroom. I was in the middle of developing material to support the Queensland Social Studies curriculum when the Internet — something that equated to HyperCard on a global scale — arrived and pushed my notion of a collection of floppy disks containing tailored content into a receptacle labelled Yesterday's Technology.
Fast forward another dozen years, and although I was out of the workforce, I kept myself mentally active by blogging and building personal websites. Whatever I ended up writing About The North would, in a sense, be more of the same. While it might share some content with The Little House of Concrete, it would be a standalone website, rather than an extension of an existing one.
Still, the big question remained. What was I going to write?
