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Grom's first gromble

When you reach 55, you realise most of your life, by any stretch of the imagination or medical marvel, is more than half gone. Now that's something to be pissed off about immediately. Bugger - what's ahead of me is less than what I've just done, and that doesn't seem like a fat lot. So my blogs are not going to be about what I had for breakfast or what I think about England's footballers (twats), they're going to be rants about things that piss me off and that need to change QUICK before I shuffle off this mortal coil... or worse, drool.

Grombler? Surely a mishtake. My kids (ungrateful buggers) call me the Grom (Grumpy Old Man). No matter that pedantically I should be a GOM not a GROM, I kind of like it. It sounds pissed off. So a grom, grombles about things. Actually I think I'm a jolly positive sort of chap. I like funny stuff (although most stuff that purports to be funny, ain't). I laugh at most things (pisses off Americans mainly - good sport!), and I love science, logic, deduction, reason, method, calculation, sense. What I loathe (and now the Grombling starts) are lies, stupidity, irrationality, blind-faith, fanaticism about bollocks (yes, that includes god), and people who pursue their own agendas at the expense of others.

So why am I going to start a blog? Haven't I always dismissed bloggers as sad nerds or billy no-mates. Why on earth would anyone want to spend their time reading inane bollocks written by ordinary people who have ordinary lives. Well the truth is, I now get it. A blog is for no-one else except me. I am getting something off my chest that I want the world to know, without me becoming pretentious in believing that anyone would have the slightest interest in reading it... but just in case they do, it's published. It's on the web. Out there, not in my grombling pissed off head. I don't need to grumble to my family and friends. I'm grombling to you, my PC and the world.

I regard myself as one of the fathers of the web. Pretentious git you're thinking (oh and by the way, first real grumble - why can't I change the name of this blog. I must have set this up several years ago in one of my less than enthusiastic moments - hence 'Sad Git'. I suppose it'll confuse some Americans, so it can't be all bad. But I thought when I edited my profile that my 'name' could be changed from Sad Git to Grombler. If any other sad git ever gets this far, and knows the answer, a clue as to how I can change the name would be appreciated). Back to why I'm a pretentious Father of the Web. Back in 1986, together with a bunch of wide-eyed academics and entrepreneurial hopefuls, we set about creating the world's first search engine! Eat your heart out Google. It was launched by the name Tome Searcher. Google it. Sadly you can't Tome Searcher it since we managed to last 4 years before we ran out of money - but we did build and market a truly cunning search engine which I contend is still years ahead of Google since it used artificial intelligence to enable natural language queries to be processed with the use of thesaural semantic relationships to create far better search strategies than Googles simple keyword searches. In other words, it understood what you wanted to search for and cleverly worked out ways of finding more relevant information, in manageable quantities rather than the billions of hits good ol' Google delivers for you to sift through. Use the wrong words to describe what your searching for, and you may never find the best answers to your questions. Use semantic networks in an intelligent way, and you stand a far better chance of finding good stuff. We had created the world's first Search Agents. watch out, they'll become popular one day.... next gromble: But when I'm too old to claim (or care) that they were our idea first a quarter of a century ago, long before the worldwide web was a gleam in the Burners Lee eye.

I'm looking forward to grombling here. There's a helluva a lot to gromble about these days, and I don't have too many of them left to do it in.
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