A Weblog
Walking West is a weblog, one of tens of thousands currently swarming across the web like locusts and picking it clean of links. If you're not familiar with weblogs (or logs, or blogs), think of them as a hybrid of newspaper column, journal, letter to friends, links page, and mental bulletin board.
You can read more about them here and here. Or you can just immerse yourself and pick it up by osmosis like the rest of us.
By Rory Ewins
I'm Australian, early 30s, married, no kids, and currently of no fixed abode. Last May my wife and I decided to leave Canberra, where we had lived for several years, to travel and find work overseas. Since then we've been to Madagascar and Thailand and I've been to the US. All of those travels have been covered in this log, either at the time or in hindsight, as you can see by exploring the archives below. We're currently based in Melbourne, with plans to shift to the UK before long. (For a brief overview of my life up to mid-2000, take a look at Half-Life.)
About a Lot of Things
I have an eclectic, if not schizophrenic, range of interests, which is reflected in this log, although I try to keep it reasonably focussed. Until a couple of years ago my main field was political science: I had studied and taught it for over a decade, and published a book on my major area of the Pacific; I also have interests in political theory, development politics and Australian politics. They're still there, but I tend not to talk about them much here; my mind has been elsewhere lately.
These days I work in the web. I was a teenage hacker (in the old sense) way back, and even have a computer science degree, but left IT for a while until the web drew me back. In the past few years I've been a computer-support guy, a web designer and webmaster, and an IT policy adviser for the Australian university sector. So, you can expect some technical and big-picture IT commentary here too. Less than there might be though, because others do it so well, and because I haven't wanted to overwhelm the non-tech stuff with too much tech stuff.
I'm also a cartoonist and a writer, and that shows here at times. Right now I'm writing about Madagascar. Then there are the usual things—movies, music, day-to-day life—that make up much of any weblog. They're here too.
But mostly, Walking West is about a journey—hence the name. It's about this transitional time in my life.
In Several Parts
This is actually my third weblog—or part three of a continuing log, depending which way you look at it. Part One was Seven Weeks to Madagascar, about the lead-up to leaving Canberra. Part Two was Walking West 1, covering my search for work and a visa in San Francisco. This part is Walking West 2, and has mostly been about our trips to Madagascar and Thailand.
For the Enjoyment of All
I write this with various people in mind: a few who I know read it regularly; miscellaneous friends who read it now and then; and an amorphous mass of complete strangers who read it whenever. There's stuff behind the scenes that I'll tend not to talk about here; and, at times, there'll be name-dropping mentions of other webloggers. Don't let it faze you; I'm just acknowledging those who are taking an interest in what I'm doing. If you're taking an interest, drop me a line.
Part of Speedysnail
Speedysnail is my personal site, launched in July 1999 (although some pages date to late 1998, and some of the content goes way back). There's plenty to explore there once Walking West has whetted your appetite.
16 January 2001
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