So I finally have a blog. Just like most pseudo-losers, I’ve decided to join all the cool people and jump on the bandwagon, adding my voice to the cacophony that is the blogosphere. It would be an interesting experience maintaining a blog as I never really had a journal or a diary nor even written a regular column in any periodical. The closest I have to writing regularly was back in Grade 5 when we had to write a journal as part of our requirements. (Which reminds me to go searching for that—I probably need to laugh at myself. Hehehe.)

This blog is not theme- nor subject-oriented. It will simply be a venue for me to express my feelings, opinions, and ideas, as well as a way for me to hone my pitiful writing skills. Long will be the day when I can finally write as wittily as Jessica Zafra. But before that day comes, I’ll regale you with stories from my everyday life; personal commentary on burning issues; thoughts and ideas on web development, programming, and graphics design; and links to interesting places you can visit on the Web. Some of the bloggers out there that provided the inspiration include Mark Pilgrim, Jason Kottke, Tim Bray, Simon Willison, Dave Shea, Douglas Bowman, and the famous Jeffrey Zeldman.

For the geeks out there, I initially planned to use MoveableType as my CMS (Content Management System) because it’s popular, powerful, and written in Perl. I also considered the elegant Textpattern system. However, just like all renegade programmers, I decided to build my own software. After all, how hard is it to write your own blogging system? (May I not see the day when I will regret those words.)

The original name of this blog was Low-Pass Filter. Unfortunately, somebody’s photoblog already uses that name, so I settled on my backup name vaes9. Why “Low-Pass Filter”? That was the the code name given to me by my org back in college. (I was one of the few guys who had a really deep voice—go figure.) And why “vaes9”? The word “vaes” is just the reverse of “seav” which has been my online handle ever since. “Seav” is just an anagram of my initials. What’s the “9” for? You know the puzzle connected with the phrase “think outside the box”? Well it has nine dots. My motto is that: to “think outside the box”.

Actually, I’m just kidding. Like most pseudo-losers, I wanted to have a number in the name just like all the cool groups in the net such as sixapart and 37signals. Nine seems a nice enough number, right?

Welcome to vaes9!