Hello and thank you for taking the time to learn a bit about the author of this blog. I started this blog back in July of 2005 after a fellow Marine showed me his. I’ve dabbled in web design here and there but frustration always made me forget the whole thing.
After my friend Mikey showed me his blog, it instantly hit me that this was exactly what I have been looking for. After my epiphany, I jumped into the World of WordPress with both feet. I immediately found a host service, purchase my domain and within a few hours had my first (and only) blog up and running.
After typing http://ustommymc.net for the first time and seeing a blank blog staring at me I ran into my first problem. What the hell is the purpose of this blog and why was I doing this? Thats when I had my second epiphany. First let me tell you a little back story and let me take to you back to March of 2003, mere days before we jumped the gun and invaded Iraq.
In March of 2003, I made my first trip to the Middle East. I am a communications Marine so I have the luxury of always having some kind of connectivity back to the states whether it be phone, email or ‘Net access. Upon getting situated I promptly gave as many people as I could think of my mail and email address. For the next five months I would proceed to called and email everyone who’s contact information I had. I was fortunate enough to be able to call my wife on a daily basis and chat with her, and others, via Yahoo!.
As the months went by my contact information was being passed around and I was getting a constant flow of email from family and friends. Who needs to write letters when you can just type up an email and have it arrive at its destination a minutes later. Now this is where the purpose of this site comes in. I made sure to try and reply to each and every personal email that I got. This war was new for my family as I am the first member of my family to participate in a global war on anything. With that said I made sure to take and email as many pictures as possible while I was in the Middle East.
All this emailing eventually took its toll. I remember emailing the same pictures and having to explain or say the same thing over and over again to about a dozen or so family members and friends. This got pretty cumbersome and tiring after a while so I figured that I could use this site as a central place to tell my stories and post my pictures. Instead of me going to the people, the people could come to me. So that is one reason for this site. A central place where family and friends can keep track of what I’m doing.
The second reason is similar to the first one. Part of military life, that is a necessary evil, is moving from base to base every three to four years. I’ve been fortunate enough to be stationed in the East Coast for the most part but now that I’m in the West Coast, my trips to New York and Chicago just became a lot less if not completely finished. Now my family either has to travel and see me or they just won’t see me for a few years. I said that this is the second reason for this site but actually this is the sole purpose of this site.
Not only am I 3000 miles away from home but this War on Terror will keep me very busy for what seems for years to come. Family and friends can easily go to my site and see what I’m up to. I’m not a writer and I don’t write long, education, sophisticated posts on the latest gadgets, political agenda or current events. I just write about whatever is going on in my life interesting or not. This way my parents can have my brothers brief them on what I’m doing, if anything.
One major side affect that has come out of me having this site is my new found love of web design. Since July of 2005, I went from not being able to comprehend what a Cascading Style Sheet was to being able to code CSS and HTML without the help of a WYSIWYG editor. Unfortunately (and very sad for me) I don’t have one creative atom in my entire body. I may be able to code CSS and HTML in my sleep but I have no sense of design what so ever. It doesn’t help that that I have no one else to talk or discuss code with so I’m on my own reading as much as I can and learning through sheer trial and error. My goal is to eventually master CSS, HTML along with some PHP, Javascript, Graphic Design and Semantics.
Before I stop my babbling let me just say the irony of all this. The very people that I target with this site are the very ones that don’t visit. I can count on one a half hands how many of my family members know about this site. I get more visits from complete strangers than my own flesh and blood. Not that I’m mad or anything. I’ve met a few nice people because of this site and a few other friends have started their own blogs as well. Well my babbling ends here. If you want to know any else about me, click on the other links on the sidebar
