I've now been writing this log for over eight months.

To many, that's not a really long time and to some it's awfully long. Personally, I'm quite amazed that I've been writing consistently for that long. Amazing that I can find something to write about every single day. Maybe that can account for the entries you've read that seem to lack in substance. (I'm not going to do my usual self-deprication act here, since I assume you wouldn't be coming here unless you enjoyed my writings on some level and if you're a first time reader, well tough crap if you don't like what you see.)

I've also often thought about why I write. I went through many phases and mood changes, especially in the beginning. I started with blogger, so I anxiously awaited for my page to show up in their directory and then I kept checking my hits everyday. I asked my friend Adam, who's hosting my site, to setup my referrer logs so I could check who was coming from where. I discovered weblog rings and joined a few so I could get more hits. I needed the hits!
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Reading the latest long discussion threads in MetaFilter and then reading this and this made me think, so I decided to share my two cents.

I agree with Stewart that, for the most part, today's problems are less severe than the past's. Reading it made me thing of the wheel-thing in Disneyworld where as it moves from the 60s to the 70s and so on, everyone sings about how they're living in the best of times. (For those of you who've never seen this, I will try to find a link.) While there are still a lot of issues to resolve, there are many improvements that have already been made and the past is and has been far from perfect.

I also sympathize with Matt's frustration but have a slightly different perspective on the issue. I've been lucky enough to come from a well-to-do background. My parents could afford to offer me many luxuries that others didn't have. I managed to come to the United States cause they could afford to send me to college without a scholarship, which is truly difficult to get as a foreigner with my kind of background. I tried hard not to take advantage of the situation and worked hard during college to receive both my Bachelors and Masters simultaneously to make sure their sacrifices weren't for nothing.
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As a kid I asked questions incessantly.

My mom tells me that her friends used to tell her to stop constantly answering my inquiries. But she didn't. She'd take the time to answer no matter what or how much I asked.

Kids tend to ask all sorts of questions. Why is the sky blue? Why does it get dark? They question everything. Even the most fundamental concepts have to be proven from scratch to satisfy a child's curiosity.

Children also don't know what's right and what's wrong. Through the help of their parents and the society in which they live, they learn not to say certain things, not to act certain ways. They learn the obstacles that others place in our world, and soon enough they learn to create their very own.

As we grow up, we somehow stop asking questions. I'm not entirely sure if it's because our curiosity is quenched or because we are taught that it's bad form to ask too much.
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Okay, I apologize ahead of time and give you fair warning that what you're about to read is something I feel very strongly about and since I'm extremely emotional, this might be painful to read. It might take me some time to get to my point. It also will probably repeat some issues I mentioned in previous posts.

You've been warned.

I've never considered myself a web person. I've been familiar with the web for a very long time and had a web page back when Mosaic was the cool browser. I even did an art project in college about intermingling art and web technology. But until recently, I used the web mostly as a tool to get information. I read newspapers, I looked up movie locations and reviews, I researched stuff, and that was about it.

I can't remember the first weblog I read. I can't remember how I discovered most of the sites that are now part of my daily routine. But, somehow, I found a site and started following the links until I discovered a whole new world.
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