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Chances are good that if you are reading this post right now, you are noticing one or more of three things:

1. This is the first post on my blog in nearly a year of inactivity.

2. A couple changes like the deletion of categories and the relabeling of tags have been made, and all the old posts have been archived.

3. This is probably my third apology for not posting more.

I’ll begin with an update on the last year. I’ve graduated high school and I am now a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, majoring in Computer Science. I just moved in, and as the post schedule dictates (new post every Monday at 9:00 AM), anyone who jumped on the ball and noticed the new post will be reading this right as I start my first class.

Of course, there aren’t any regular readers of the blog because there aren’t any regular updates (two things that are about to change, and I promise this time). Anyone reading this is probably just someone who follows me on Twitter or a friend on Facebook—assuming I got those updates to work as well.

Even though I’ve just moved into college, I realized something—there is not, ever, a fresh start in life. That’s not to say we can’t make changes, but simply having everything we once had go away would destroy who we are as a person. College offers the opportunities that look like a fresh start: a brand new life on your own, complete freedom, etc. The catch is that there is a lot more to it than simply telling yourself you are going to start over. Just repeating it and letting old habits set in again is the reason people often give up on New Year’s resolutions, the reason people have trouble quitting an addictive habit like smoking or drinking, and the reason that so many attempts to do something new go by the wayside.

Of course, we forget that a fresh start isn’t actually what we are looking for anyway. Our past experienced—positive or negative—define us in many ways. What college does provide is a chance to reboot—to change things and refresh ideas and habits while still keeping the underlying personality. As a result, I’m rebooting this blog. The old posts aren’t gone—you can still find them—but there is no need to read them if you don’t want to. The blog’s theme remains the same: exploring technology and the hacker subculture (and the definition of the word hacker remains the same—people asking how to break in to systems aren’t listening and should read the about page).

However, in making these changes I realized something else: it is impossible to hierarchically organize most things. After all, life is complicated and messy. It isn’t impossible to organize, but the ways we are used to doing it are constantly changing. Not everything fits perfectly into one little box on a form. We live in an age where we can rethink how we organize—an age of using labels on your Gmail conversations instead of sorting single messages into Eudora folders. As a result, I’m forgoing the categories system and the old tag system I used in favor of a tag system that explains what a post is about (not what it mentions). This post is tagged “introduction,” but it’s not tagged “college” or “hacking” even though I mention those things because it’s not about those things (and it’s not tagged “post” because that would be way too general). All of the old posts that are archived now are gone from the tag system. Like I said, I’m not deleting the posts—they remain for anyone to read. They just aren’t the main part of this blog anymore, and as such, I’ve archived them and won’t be re-organizing them.

So welcome to the new Hacker Hideout. There will be a new post every Monday at 9:00 AM, and if that works out, maybe more often. I look forward to sharing my technological experiences and hope that you will stick around to listen—it’s going to be a fun trip.

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