What, why, where

I'm aware of the conflict about having a journal of any kind - you want someone to read it/you want it to stay private, you want to be interesting to others/you don't want to be judged, you want to express yourself freely/you're afraid of what people might think, you pray for anonymity/you secretly hope for a publishing deal. I'm afraid of what people might think - I'm not good at being criticised - I tend to curl up into a ball in pain and then do nothing for ages... not the best reaction, I think, so in some ways this will be like aversion therapy. If enough people tell me I'm talking rubbish I might get used to the criticism! Whether it will stop me from talking rubbish is another matter entirely.

Having a blog can be a very self-serving thing. Ooh, wow, look at me and my wonderful taste, my perfect aesthetic vision, my canny critical eye when I review other people's work, my incisive mind! I must be really fascinating! Even better, look at all the fancy HTML in my code! Actually that's not why I'm doing this, although I daresay I will be very proud of achieving anything at all in the way of tailoring the blog template I've used. The main reason I've set this up is because I need to conquer some of the lonesomeness of doing a PhD, especially as I shall be spending a lot of time half-way around the world from my usual support network and my university...

So this blog is likely to be a combination of all sorts of things: rants, complaints, moaning, excitement, research, discovery, lists of things, text from assignments, pictures of my work, comments about what I'm doing, links to interesting things... a cross between a scrapbook, a journal, a photo album and a sketch book I guess.